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Study says surfing Internet for fun increases productivity

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By Bryan - Posted on 03 April 2009

I'm just not sure my boss would ever be convinced in the results of this story.  I personally have a difficult time accepting that up to 20% of the time in the office is acceptable for surfing the Internet for fun.  However, I do agree that visiting non-work sites between tasks does help recharge the brain.

A study conducted in Australia found that people who engage in "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (WILB) are more productive than those who don't. Workers who "surf the Internet for fun at work--within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office--are more productive by about 9 percent," according to the study's author, Professor Brent Coker, from the University of Melbourne's Department of Management and Marketing. Complete Story

Quoting IT: Social Networking is not just for Millenials

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By Bryan - Posted on 31 January 2009

"From an IT executive’s perspective, social networking isn’t about giving the millenials a place to play, rather it’s about how to improve the flow of information throughout an organization, using collective knowledge to solve problems, respond to customer needs, or exploit new business opportunities faster than ever before."

-Irwin Lazar, The Rise and Fall of the Millenials?, Enterprise 2.0 Blog, January 29, 2009

Are there not enough girl geeks in the world?

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By Bryan - Posted on 13 April 2008

eWeek has an interesting article regarding women working in IT, or rather, women not working in IT.  The article is, Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go?

A professor says he has only one girl in a computer science major class in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2000. What happened? eWEEK gets field experts to weigh in.
While women hold 51 percent of professional jobs in the United States, they make up only 26 percent of the IT work force, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Furthermore, fewer women worked in IT in 2008 than in 2000.

The article later discusses about the need to put more effort into convincing women that working with technology can be cool.  This argument and others the article makes for how to get more women involved in IT and computer science is a problem.  I don't know a single geek, whether male or female, that had to be convinced that technology is cool.

The Generation Gap Challenges IT Managers

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By Bryan - Posted on 20 October 2007

Another Generation Y (Generation Next) in the workforce has been written.  This time the article is at Infoworld and titled, The Generation Gap Challenges IT Managers.

The gap is widening, with more workers stacked at both ends of the age spectrum. There are approximately 80 million Baby Boomers, those born roughly between the years of 1946 and 1964, and 70 million in Generation Y, born 1978 through the present, but only 60 million in the middle in Generation X, those born 1965 to 1977.

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That creates a cultural divide, as workers of different ages will generally hold different views of technology use and adoption.

To be honest, I still like my old paper on the subject, The New Workforce.

The New Workforce - Dealing with Nexters (Generation Y)

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By Bryan - Posted on 01 February 2007

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization


4. Recommendations

Organizations are beginning to take note that a new generational cohort is entering the workforce. However, even articles and publications that discuss differences in contemporary work cohorts often fail to make a distinction between Generation X and Generation Next (see Kogan, 2001 for example). As the number of Nexters continue to grow and make their presence known, organizations are likely to realize the generational changes taking place. The earlier cited strategy + business article noted that "if consulted these young employees (Nexters) can be an enormous force for positive change and success in their companies. If ignored, they will doubtless spend their brain cycles on the job plotting how to make their own work lives, not their companies better". Those businesses that respond positively to the traits of the new generation will likely succeed. Those who do not positively respond to the Nexters, but instead continue with their pre-Nexter culture may face failure.

Zemke (2000, pp. 146 - 147) offers a number of suggestions with how best to manage Generation Next. Among some of those suggestions are:

The New Workforce: Working Generations Compared

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By Bryan - Posted on 01 February 2007

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

 

2. Generation Next and Contemporary Work Cohorts

Generation Next defined.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in you Workplace, Zemke (2001, p. 19) observed four generational groups currently in the workforce. The identified generational groups (and the year of their births) are the Veterans (1922-1943), the Baby Boomers (1943-1960), Generation Xers (1960-1980), and the Generation Nexters (1980-2000). Researchers may disagree with the time periods for when each generation begins or ends, but are in general agreement that the each cohort are represented by differences in dominant work values and historical background.

Typical for every generation, the work expectations and the influences a generation has to an organization's culture is often a byproduct of their generation's unique upbringing and life experiences. The Nexters "grew up during prosperous times but find themselves entering a post-boom economy" (Robbins, 2005, p. 20). Nexters are considered to be one of the most coddled, well informed, open-minded to diversity, and technically enriched generation America has ever produced (Zemke et al., 2001, pp. 127-134). Dominant core values of Generation Next have been observed to by various authors as including confidence, achievement, optimism, civic duty, sociability and diversity.

Nexters, given their size in numbers, are expected to have a significant influence on U.S. culture. The cultural influence will be greater than the Xers and possibly even the Boomers.