![[Infographic] The Next Generation of Workplace Communication](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/C4D12AQHj8ukyEk9sFQ/article-cover_image-shrink_600_2000/article-cover_image-shrink_600_2000/0/1520122664826?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=oxqJ7PF-fIyn3B2YBu01GrEPfIPJEITvkeb_JUPRK6Y)
[Infographic] The Next Generation of Workplace Communication
Here's my latest infographic from the Nudge Blog. Take a read through - I'd love to hear your thoughts!
The workplace as we know it is changing. Millennials are making up a larger portion of the workforce, workplace technology is advancing, and traditional communications are becoming ineffective.
In less than 10 years, Millennials will comprise 75% of the global workforce, and while corporate email is still effective in reaching employees in some settings (those being, as the name implies, corporate settings), right now 45% of working Millennials in the United States are in retail or hospitality. Unfortunately, most frontline employees do not have access to a company email address, and rely solely on their managers to relay information to them. This is not only an ineffective way of operating, but is insufficient and limiting business success.
Our new infographic below, illustrates what is happening in the next generation of workplace communication and how to best communicate with Millennial employees. In short? The key to bridging the Millennial communication gap is to go mobile, make the experience engaging and keep the content short.
Making communications mobile enables you to reach your employees directly and quickly. With push notifications enabled, corporate messaging becomes comparable to the consumption of text messages. This brings its own benefits as 83% of Millennials open texts within 90 seconds of receiving them compared to email, which only gets opened 17% of the time. Using mobile as a channel for workplace communication can empower employees do their jobs better. In fact, 60% of employees say that mobile technology makes them more productive.
Engaging workplace communications, where employees are encouraged to interact with co-workers and managers, is also more effective for Millennials. Employees want an easy way to communicate with their managers – primarily to have a channel for sharing ideas, opinions and concerns.
Finally, keeping your communications short is ideal. The average attention span in young adults is only 8 seconds long. Millennials, on average read at a rate of 450 words per minute, and reads approximately 60 words before losing attention. That’s the equivalent of only two to three tweets of information! It is becoming increasingly important to deliver information on new sales, promotions or corporate news in manageable and digestible chunks to be most effective.
As Millennials expand their role in the workplace, developing effective communications will be critical to ongoing business success. Mobile, engaging and short communications will go a long way to ensure the new generation of frontline employees are listening and understand the messages they need to do their jobs well. Are you ready?
B2B Storytelling and Creative Content Marketer
7 年I think the reason fewer corporate emails are being read is because at any given time, 30-60% of the emails in my inbox are completely irrelevant to me. Often because someone decided to cc everyone even remotely related to the conversation, and sometimes not related at all. Why do they do this? Sometimes its to cover them if they missed something, or just to CYA, or sometimes they hope that someone else will be able to come up with a solution/input, even if they aren't directly involved. And while collaborative effort is super important, when you have companies with hundreds of staff, and several people do this several times a day, your inbox can fill up with frustratingly irrelevant-to-me content. Another frustration is being looped in on an email chain that has already been going on for 10+ emails. You know, when person A and person B are discussing something, and person A decides you might have some input, so they just cc you on the next one. No explanation, no direct question, just this mystery chain that shows up in your box. And you have to read backwards, through multiple emails to make a guess as to why you were suddenly brought in. It's frustrating, time-consuming, and frankly disrespectful. We wouldn't conduct physical conversations that way. I'm not a Millennial, but I can tell you that the reason EVERYONE responds to texts faster is because they are usually relevant. If we start shifting the communications garbage pile to text, then people of all ages will stop engaging in texts as well. The problem isn't the medium, in my opinion, it's getting back to effective communications, and treating electronic media in the same manner we would treat a face-to-face communication.