The new divide: the worforce gap

Previously, I’ve written on the topic of the gap between IT people and business people and how it's eroded, if it hasn’t disappeared altogether in most large companies.

Thus safe in the warm glow attending the fact that everyone is, finally, working closely and effectively together, I was somewhat less than overjoyed to realise (belated, compared to everyone else, I think), that there is a new divide emerging.

This new divide – which apparently widens daily – is between the old workforce and the new. I am not talking here, necessarily, about age. What I am talking about is the difficulty that a certain segment of the workforce is having grasping the rapid shifts in the way that business is done, mostly because of new collaboration and social media tools.

The cause of this reflection is a presentation I was giving yesterday to an internal audience at the bank. We’re trialling a raft of social media technologies on our Intranet, including blogs. I was explaining how, in the new world of work, it is possible for any voice to be heard, no matter how junior. I was trying to communicate that in this new world, anyone with an audience is in a powerful position to effect change. In other words, you don’t need to be a senior executive to have the chance to cause radical shifts in the way we do business.

That was a concept that I just couldn’t seem to communicate. People were comparing social media tools with employee engagement surveys. Why, they wanted to know, would change be something they could influence with a blog, when employee engagement and other internal feedback mechanisms were (perceived) to be ignored?

I’ll admit that the new communications tools we have are a radical shift compared to the mechanics of traditional feedback.

Let’s examine the traditional communication flows: A message is sent from senior leadership to employees via some mass broadcast medium such as email. Senior leadership sends out their annual engagement (or whatever it is called) survey, and gets and aggregated view of what people thought of their messages. The individual voice of each employee is not generally part of the results. Or, when there an individual level feedback mechanisms is in place, leadership gets a sanitised version via their staff.

This aggregated view provided to leadership of the internal population is very useful when what you want to know is a trend. But you can’t get to the details underlying what you are being told when all you have is trend data.

The communication flows for an organisation with social media are quite different. When the leadership sends out a message, an individual is able to use mass communication mechanisms to respond. Their thoughts are not aggregated into the trend, and the detail of their opinion is visible to all. When these opinions attract a readership, they are not only public but have the weight of a crowd behind them.

Engagement surveys do not have these characteristics.

Back to the workforce gap. My inability to communicate the concepts inherent in social media are symptomatic of the fact that there are those who are simply not ready to embrace these new ways of working. These are people who cling to the old command-and-control centric style of organisations. And they just can’t see, today, how these new baby steps into social media have the potential to change their workplace in the future.

The big concern is that those on the wrong side of the workforce gap will, over time, experience a loss of influence and be increasingly marginalised.

But these are people with valuable skills and experience. We need them to be successful. We have people in our institution with decades of experience. You can’t go out to the market and just buy that in. It takes years and years to grow it organically.

Closing the workforce gap is likely to be a significant priority for us, depending on how successful our initial trials are, and this was driven home to me as I left the room: one of the attendees remarked: “I guess we’re all too old for these new things”. I was surprised, then mortified: practically no-one in the room was all that old.

A priority indeed.

Comments

[Euan Semple]

Great post and very much reflects my own experiences with a whole range of businesses.

[James]

Good post, really spot on with the observations and exactly the sort of thing I get from my clients (and indeed my bosses) everytime I bring up anything close to these new frontiers.

Found this via Euan Semple and now happily subscribing to hear your ongoing thoughts

[Robbie Wright]

I've had some of the same observations as well. they divide is a large one, and getting the seasoned employees to use new social technology is of utmost importance for companies. They do contain a wealth of information and it is vitally important for that information to be shared. When you find the key to this, let us know James!

[Mark McSpadden]

Great article! What's amazing is that this isn't limited to large organizations with big staffs. It happens in our organization with less than 15 people!

[Marcel de Ruiter]

Hi James,

Good stuff from a fellow banker! You offer some nice notes for me to use internally to explain the benefits of internal blogging.

Still, some of the "old" command-and-control centric style guys around here need to be convinced that the benefits far outweigh the (perceived) risk of open communication. That's not a gap, but a big hurdle!

Btw: I guess Euan is giving you some pretty traffic. Well deserved!

[William Azaroff]

Hi James, it's like you took a thought out of my head and put it in a way that I can better understand it and explain it. Thanks for that.

[Dale Arseneault]

James, I as well came to this post via Euan's blog, and agree with others that is a good post. I in particular like your points on the impact of social media on communications flows, disaggregating opinions, and the growing disconnect between old management paradigms and new ways of working. In many respects, I think these issues touch on balancing the needs of the many/majority with the needs of the few / one, a perennial, unresolved struggle in government and society that appears destined for the workplace. The other factor in the increasingly democratized workplace is balancing participation and engagement with priority setting, decision making, and accountability. From a modern manager’s view point, it’s perhaps “the best of times, and the worst of times..”

[Steve Horgan]

Of course you are right James. It is always a surprise that people who work with advanced technology and whose jobs are essentially to deal with change often develop such a fixed viewpoint. Hierarchical communication keeps everyone in an insulated comfort zone, while the more sophisticated social networking model takes individuals right out of it and some people find that unsettling to say the least. There is also the challenge of developing protocols for the new forms of communication. I can remember a few train wrecks when email first came in and there will probably be similar in the new world. The bottom line is that some people may be marginalised, and the problem is that some of them may have had something useful to say.

[Susan Abbott]

Just found your blog today, and enjoyed this excellent analysis. I'm surprised at how many people have fossilized their thinking on social media, and haven't even bothered to have a look.
But you are right -- it's a mistake to think that these folks have nothing to offer, we need to help people move forward. I recall that in the early days of the web, all sorts of people told me I couldn't possibly understand the new medium because I was too old. That kind of thinking on a large scale led to nonsense like shipping petfood over large distances.
We know we have to keep people learning new tech and new ways of thinking; what we don't yet know is the best way to make this happen.
Great post!

[Harriet Wakelam]

interesting - especially in the aspect of addressing the gap. Up until now, I hadn't given much thought to what would actually be lost if we allow the gap to continue. What's interesting, is that the only effective way seemingly to involve people is to get them to play - which does not often sit well in PD driven by measurement and ROI.... Thanks for the article.

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