It was bound to happen. Nothing lasts forever. If your work involves internal communication, about a year and a half ago you officially lost your job, your title and all associated rights and privileges.
Even if it feels like nothing changed, you’ve been worm food for some time now, and no one has had the heart to tell you. So allow me…
In December 2006, Time magazine’s person of the year was You. Not you—you are the king who just died. You as in them—everyone else. This was the year that the power and control and flow of communication formally shifted. “This was the year,” proclaimed Time, “the people took control of the media.” Everyone besides you now “controls the Information Age. [They] changed the way we see ourselves, and the world we live in forever.” Long live the new king!
Oh, sure, your bosses still need communicators and message-massagers. That’s why you still have work. But you’ve lost all control of channels, messages, media and information flow. From your audience’s perspective, you are now equal to—but certainly no more important than—anyone with a BlackBerry, cell phone, video or blog.
While most discussion of this change, especially among communicators, has focused on technology, the biggest change is elsewhere.
Consider that over the next decade in the U.S.:
- More than 70 million Baby Boomers will retire or re-focus their careers.
- More that 70 million Gen Yers will enter the workforce.
Similar shifts are happening globally, and with those shifts:
- The average tenure at one job will be 18 months, according to Gartner Research, and even shorter for Gen Y. Their motto: “If I don’t like it, I’ll just quit.”
- Studies like Gartner’s 2006 Extreme Individualization study, Forrester’s 2007 The New IT Imperative: Design for People, Build for Change study and Jensen Group’s ongoing study, Search for a Simpler Way have all found that for Gen Y, user-centered training, communication and work tools will be key factors in deciding whether they stay with or leave an organization.
The real change is in our assumptions. You and your job are part of the old model, where information flow is hierarchical: meaning-making, sense-making and value are supposed to flow from the top down. Never again. Gen Y is the first generation ever to be raised on and trained for the total democratization of information. They will expect Google-like transparency and total access to anything and everything—guided by them, not you.
Communication gurus and your bosses may advise you to focus on the latest channels and technologies—blogs, webcasts, intranets, wikis, social networking—but as Time reminds us, your audiences can do these things better than you. From their perspective, what value can you possibly add?
What separates Gen Y from everyone else is their demand for the absolute highest level of user-centered design. What they value is making information more useful, easier to use, more entertaining, more meaningful, more real-time and more socially-driven—all from their perspective, not yours.
All hail the new king: Delivering the goods to Gen Y
The key to creating that kind of value will be in partnerships, not channels or messages. Here are some possible partnerships:
1. Partner with HR to create more intense sense-making experiences
Biotech firm Genentech is currently launching its most user-centered change communication program ever. To do so, the company’s HR department turned to an expert in creating live interactive events and learning board games. If you are willing to design backwards—creating information-rich experiences from the needs of the users—you could be that kind of partner to HR.
2. Partner with IT and training to create new training experiences
Most training for Gen Y will not be in video game form—but it must be extremely personalized to how each individual learns. A great example of this is UPS driver training. UPS didn’t abandon its 340 “methods,” the core of its training program for employees, it just changed how it taught them. Over a three-year period, UPS executives and professors and designers from MIT and Virginia Tech, as well as forecasters from the Institute of the Future and animators from Indian software firm Brainvisa joined forces to make those changes. For example: Gen Yers are great disbelievers—they need real-time evidence of right ways and wrong ways to do something before they will buy into an instructor’s wisdom. That immediate, data-driven, video-proof feedback was built into the revised approach to UPS training. If you are willing to organize information and use media in ways that Gen Y will respect and value, you could be an amazing partner to the IT and training departments.
3. Partner with business leaders to create user-centered change programs
Jane and Joe Workforce need someone who understands their day-to-day information needs to partner with business leaders. If you are willing to be their proxy as change programs are designed, you will create the kind of value these young workers crave.
Gen Y’s Achilles’ heel is your golden opportunity. Even with all their media savvy, according to Pew Charitable Trust, 50 percent of them will arrive without the skills they need for complex analysis, reasoning and clear communication. If you are willing to partner with others to work backwards from their strengths and their weaknesses, the possibilities are limitless.
Long live both kings: you and everyone else!
