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Understanding the digital employee

This is perhaps the must succinct guide to working with digitally enabled employees: whether a Generation “Y”, a millenial, or a particularly adept Generation Xer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 8:27 pm and is filed under IT Issues, Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Understanding the digital employee”

  • 1
    Hadyn
    May 19th, 2008 18:02

    Oh I see, all I have to do be an employee at IBM.

    Seriously though, that seemed to be a cycle that required something to build on. Currently most govt organisations just do not have anything web2.0 or social media-ish it start with. Heck a lot of places don’t even let you access feed readers or even webmail.

  • 2
    Colin McKay
    May 19th, 2008 18:13

    Yes. Governments are behind the times. But if you are going to wait for someone to hand you the ideal conditions for innovation and experimentation, then the government isn’t the best place to be.

    Speaking of digital employees, governments are growing increasingly aware that they will need to change beahviours and environments if they are to attract this new type of interconnected knowledge worker.

    Making the jump from acknowledging the problem to addressing the organizational weaknesses may be difficult.

    There is still opportunity for an imaginative and determined civil servant to “make their mark” in social media in the government.

    Just start by dicking around with your consultation mechanisms, then expand your influence from there …

  • 3
    Dominou
    May 20th, 2008 21:13

    Thanks for including the Gen Xers! Although admittedly, I am very close to the cut off between X and Y. I was fortunate enough to have grown up with computers. The first one we had around the house was a Texas Instrument model on which we could load the game “MunchMan”, a much lamer version of Pac Man. We quickly graduated to a Mac as my parents were both into television production. The PC came into our lives when I was a teenager and in the early nineties, I was the fist among my friends to have an Internet connection at home. Then when I moved out on my own, getting my own computer and getting connected was priority 1. Though I would not consider myself the techie type, I’ve always had great interest in technology that faciliates communication. This is probably why I’ve fell in love with everything social media. I work for a provincial government that is sorely behind the times in terms of Web 2.0. and as Hadyn said anything “social media-ish”. I’d even go as far as say that internal communications, in the terms described Web 2.0 @ Work slideshow, is non-existent. It’s easy to get “stuck” in the bureaucracy and lose your drive for innovation. And looking back on the last 12 months, I have to admit that I fell into that trap. Discovering and reading “The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations” has been a source of inspiration. It will take imagination and determination but I will try!

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