The Digital Generation and the Waning Importance of Email
Last week I was having a lot of conversations around the changing habits of my generation in relation to email. One of those conversations proved fruitful with a college friend of mine who said:
I get all of my work done through facebook and myspace. I don’t even use email anymore.
Now, this friend wasn’t talking about “hanging out” online. This friend does marketing on college campuses.
The very next day, I came across this article, discussing the demise of email in generation m. My favorite quote, is the last paragraph from a Ms. Kirah up at Microsoft:
For that reason, she says bosses should go right ahead and use their e-mail — and should not feel threatened by IM.
“Like parents, they try to control their children,” she says. “But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate.”
The focus, she says, should be the outcome.
“Nine to 5 has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,’ ” Ms. Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.’ “
And, I can’t agree more. This drives down one of my earlier posts talking about the changing perception of time. Our generation grew up with the internet, using it as a knowledge tool throughout our entire lives. Instant messaging enables fast collaboration, worldwide. Social networking sites ensure you can always find collaboration partners no matter where they are. Thus, having to “know” an email address (which may change due to a wedding, new job, etc) is becoming a thing of the past.
Managing digital natives is as easy as saying: here’s your deadline, get it done. We’ll take off on a worldwide information tour gathering the best feedback for the project, quickly and effeciently. Because, due to tools like Facebook, not only do we know where to find each other, but we know what jobs everyone is doing and what skills they have aquired.
We’ll get the best answers and solutions to the problem or project. Then, see you in the presentation 
(A quick early morning follow up: JP Rangaswami did a great follow up from London last night check it out)
July 24th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Coming from my angle, it makes me wonder when tech support will embrace chat in addition to supporting customers by phone and email (I guess in some companies it already has, actually).
July 24th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Dave, thanks for the pointer. And Josh, all I can say is be patient
It will happen. Can you imagine Generation M accepting automated don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you e-mails as part of “customer service”? Or playing pass-the-parcel between automated call-centre Dalek voices yearning desperately to reach a human being?
IM “channels” are great for customer service and problem-to-repair processes. Wikis are great for sales-to-cash processes. Blogs are great for idea-to-market processes.
And voice and video are great full stop. For almost anything where immediacy is good and context is not hard to acquire. Once context-switching is important, then it’s time for IM and wikis and blogs.
Which leaves e-mail. Which is good for ….errmmmm… replacing snail-mail
July 24th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Dude, I generally agree that new communication tools are going to be essential to the new way we work, email still serves as the indexable searchable executive summary work requests from your boss to you. It also serves as the permanent record of the cover for your ass when you do things your boss asks and they forget… and it goes all the way up and down the chain of command like that.
Email gives each party a chance to think about what they’re going to say before they inflict it on the other party.
July 24th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
I definitely agree that working under deadlines is far more productive than the standard 40 hour week. Gen M. has grown up with deadlines its entire life, from research project deadlines to school presentations. Why not carry that over from academic to professional?
Also, email is a pain. You get CCed on everything and a three day hiatus returns a 100+ list of unopened emails. I wish it wasn’t that way. While the phasing out of email for alternative mediums might be happening at smaller companies, it sure hasn’t at mine yet (although we’ve started a bit with SameTime).