An additional 19 percent said that their organization allows the use of social networking sites for business purposes only, while some 26 percent said their workers could use such sites for personal use while on the job.
“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a press release about the study. “For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes.”
Here’s my take: Doesn’t this sound a lot like the discussions and debates we used to have about employees using the Internet while at work? There was a lot of time and energy spent on policing shortsighted policies that were constructed around the notion that anyone who was on the Internet while at work must be goofing off and not doing their job.
That was a wrongheaded notion in many, many workplaces, and I can’t help but think that not allowing employees on social networking sites while they’re on the job is following along the same path.
We’ve written here at workforce.com about the perils and pluses of social networking, but a lot of that was focused on the notion of posting too much personal information online and how that might come back to bite you.
But telling workers they can’t use social networking sites while at the office seems to be a move that is both regressive and foolhardy, especially since so many workers use smart phones or other such devices to access their social networks. That’s a lot harder to police than it was back when you could simply block all Internet access on office computers.
Robert Half’s Willmer does offer one piece of solid advice along with this survey: a caution that employees should always exercise good judgment, no matter how lenient their company’s social networking policy.
“Professionals should let common sense prevail when using Facebook and similar sites—even outside of business hours,” he said. “Regrettable posts can be a career liability.”
Yes, that’s always the worst-case scenario. Workers can always post something regrettable that might damage their career, but to my way of thinking, that’s a lot more likely in a world where organizations try to keep employers away from social networking while on the job rather than coming up with a smart policy to deal with that eventuality.
Workers in this day and age are going to use social networking sites and I don’t think there’s any way to get around that. This latest survey simply tells me that all too many businesses simply haven’t faced up to that fact yet. Maybe more will use this recession as an opportunity to work on figuring that out.
As a story in The Miami Herald put it, “Inspired by the vision and words of President John F. Kennedy, the American space program catapulted from serial launch pad failures to a successful lunar landing in only eight years. The Apollo moon project cost $21 billion (the equivalent of at least $150 billion now), employed 390,000 Americans and gave the nation a common goal during a difficult time.”
The race to put someone on the moon certainly had Cold War tensions to help fuel it—we had to get there before the Soviets did—but it also was the product of President Kennedy’s grand vision and an infatuation that Americans had with space. It also took incredible managerial leadership, particularly in the science community, to focus our national effort on a complex and difficult goal.
“The Apollo program had a tremendous impact on the United States,” Space Foundation chief executive Elliot Pulham said recently in the Los Angeles Times. “It built national pride and, more importantly, it influenced a whole generation of children to study hard to become scientists, engineers and astronauts.”
But, it’s also a national effort that we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. As the Herald story soberly notes:
“Today, there’s no lack of ambition and goal-setting at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is mapping long-range plans for a lunar base and eventually a human mission to Mars. But funding falls far short of what will be needed, Congressional support is anemic, and many ask if Americans—pummeled by economic woe, burdened by profound security threats, preoccupied with their iPods and their BlackBerrys—are still capable of being rallied to a cause that once galvanized the nation.”
Yes, it’s hard to imagine that Americans could be rallied around something like the space program back in the 1960s, but that was the beauty of both the grand vision from JFK and the well-orchestrated management effort to see the vision through.
The sad thing for me as I look back on the space race today is this: Despite all the money and effort that went into it, we couldn’t send anyone to the moon again next month or next year, even if we wanted to.
Former NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin made this point in Sunday’s Washington Post when he wrote, “What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we’re celebrating. Not ‘do not choose to,’ but ‘can’t.’
“Only in human spaceflight,” Griffin added, “do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat [today] than to accomplish the first time. The United States spent eight years and $21 billion … to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed.”
That’s the lesson I take away from the race to the moon: We had the supreme vision and management know-how to get it done, but we lacked the long-term perspective to build on such a difficult and complex goal and to use it as the steppingstone to much, much more.
In my personal experience with the Millennial generation—I hate the nonsensical and meaningless Generation Y tag that some use to describe them—I have found that there is no one way to characterize or manage them. The three Millennials that I am closely related to are as different as any three people you would find on a street corner. And the classroom of Millennials that I teach writing to each semester at a local university follows this same pattern.
In other words, there is no single way to manage or deal with the Millennial generation, just as there is no single way to manage any other generation that exists in today’s workplace. Any experienced executive should know this, and that’s why I am scratching my head at the huge industry that seems to be springing up around helping train managers to “deal” with Millennials.
Here’s one example, from The Washington Post: “High atop the august Tower Club in Fairfax County, overlooking the glass-and-steel edge city of Tysons Corner, business coach Anne Loehr is teaching 20 executives, mainly baby boomers, how to crack one of society’s most vexing workplace problems—how to deal with their youngest employees or clients.”
The Post story goes on to discuss how Loehr’s seminar helps managers and executives, at a cost of $25 each, to do a better job communicating with the Millennial generation. It also hints, somewhat skeptically, that this is more about making money than any real communications stumbling block that can only be solved by a paid consultant.
“The collective fretting over Generation Y—also known as the Millennials—has turned into an industry for entrepreneurs such as Loehr,” the Post story points out. “The former … hotel executive, based in Reston, VA, is a ‘leadership coach’ and generational guru, one of several who market themselves to corporations, the military, and federal and local governments as anthropologists interpreting today’s 70 million to 80 million 20-somethings or early 30-somethings.”
This makes me wonder: What is it about the Millennial generation that makes us unable to communicate with or understand them? Why do we now suddenly need paid consultants like Anne Loehr (who, as the Post points out, puts on “corporate seminars and one-on-one sessions that go for $500 to $2,500”) to figure out how to deal with younger workers? Is this something we really need and can’t figure out on our own without a pricey “leadership coach”?
You know the answer to that: It’s not, and we don’t. Good managers have ALWAYS had to figure out how to deal with a variety of different generations and personalities in the workplace.
The notion that the Millennial generation is so unique and different from generations before them is nonsense. They are different, yes, but so is every other generation, and it’s something that managers have dealt with long before pricey leadership coaches came along and decided we needed their services.
Frankly, the whole notion of a management coach is a silly concept that we could do without, but that’s another gripe for another day. Still, I think you have to question your ability as a manager if you have to spend money for a “leadership coach” to teach you how to talk to a segment of your workforce.
If you can’t figure out how to manage Millennials, you have far bigger issues than any pricey leadership coach can help you with. It’s akin to flushing the money down the toilet and just about as useful too.
Want to know just how screwed up things are right now for America’s workforce?
Here’s one telling sign: A Florida plastic surgeon is offering free cosmetic procedures to older job seekers so they can look younger and be able to better compete for a new job.
According to an amazing-but-true story in the Miami Herald, some “1,200 of South Florida’s newly jobless … recently vied for free Botox, dermal fillers, laser liposuction and other cosmetic procedures offered by Dr. Jason Shapiro … . [T]he Fort Lauderdale internist who gave away free procedures said he was moved by the applicants’ tales of being jobless, feeling unattractive and getting overlooked by employers despite their experience.”
And lest you think this is just an oddball trend that is somehow unique to South Florida, think again. The newspaper went on to note: “Nationwide, a growing number of people are turning to cosmetic procedures to put their best face forward as they look for a job—or try to hold on to the one they have. A survey of physicians by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that 75 percent of them said they had treated patients who requested facial plastic surgery to stay competitive in the workplace.”
“Youth is becoming more and more emphasized in the workplace,” Dr. Steven Pearlman, past president of the organization, told the newspaper. “The seasoned experts, once pictured in ads with lots of wrinkles, have been replaced by young go-getters with multiple degrees and the appearance of boundless energy.”
Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t you rather hire someone who really has actual energy and real experience, even if they are older and more wrinkled, then someone younger looking who only has “the appearance of boundless energy”?
There are a number of factors that are challenging workers right now: a terrible economy with massive job losses, a huge generation of older workers (baby boomers) who now can’t afford to leave the workplace, and a business environment where companies want a clear and unmistakable sign of a recovery before they are willing to invest in any new jobs.
But I wonder: For all the glib talk from so many organizations about constantly striving to win the “war for talent” and hire the best people possible, what does it say about our national hiring practices when highly experienced older workers feel they need to enhance their looks in order to get companies to seriously consider them for a job?
Keep this in mind the next time you hear some talent management “expert” prattle on about how tough it is to win the war for talent. It might not be as tough as you think, especially if you aren’t hung up on just getting young and cheap talent in the front door.
In fact, you might actually find that older workers have a few things to offer—experience, depth of knowledge and a broader worldview—that are positive qualities to add to your workforce. Bottom line is, you need the best people possible for your workforce regardless of their age or looks. Smart managers are already aware of that, of course, and no amount of Botox is ever going to EVER change it.
I’ve been in the workforce a long time, and one of my basic “rules” is that whenever I hear someone trying to make a case for a merger or deal predicated on all the wonderful “synergies” it will bring, well, that just tells me to run and get as far away from it as quickly as possible.
Sound extreme? Maybe, but in my experience, deals that are predicated on the great synergies they bring are almost always doomed to fail. That’s because the benefits of the synergies are wildly exaggerated and overstated (especially the so-called cost savings) in order to sell the deal, then grossly under-realized later after the dust from the actual merger has settled.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: the just-unwound merger between Time Warner and AOL. Not only was it terrible financially— “valued at $166 billion when the self-styled ‘deal of the century’ between America Online and Time Warner was announced on January 10, 2000, an AOL-containing Time Warner today commands a market capitalization of $28 billion … an 83 percent loss in market value,” according to TheDeal.com—but it was also a horrible cultural fit, bringing together an overhyped and overvalued new-media company with a solid and sober old-media giant.
How did it work out? Well, the overhyped new-media company tried to cram its culture and coolness down the throat of the stodgy old-media giant, and the results were predictably bad.
“Although the partnership between Time Warner and AOL was once pitched as a way to advantageously meld old media with new,” The Washington Post notes, “the deal has been regarded in recent years as one of the largest blunders in corporate history. None of the supposed synergies of the expensive union between the two ever paid off, and in recent years AOL’s flagging fortunes have increasingly cut into its parent company’s profit.”
Time Warner brought a ton of great brands to this deal—Warner Bros. Entertainment (including Warner Bros. Pictures), Turner Broadcasting (which includes CNN, TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies), HBO and magazine publisher Time Inc. (Time, People, Fortune, In Style, and Sports Illustrated magazines).
American Online brought its Internet service provider business that claimed as many as 34 million subscribers at its peak, according to PC World, “but it lacked the infrastructure and management savvy to transition from dial up to broadband, and its ISP business remained stuck in the ’90s. … While AOL remains a major Internet service provider with about 6.3 million subscribers, it has been letting that business waste away for years. … Today it’s [primary] income source is its declining online advertising generated by its eclectic mix of content sites, including the AOL.com portal, gossip site TMZ.com, and MapQuest. There’s a business model there, certainly, but AOL is small potatoes compared to competitors Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—not the Internet behemoth Time Warner wants it to be.”
In fact, the cool new-media company ended up being a gigantic albatross around the neck of Time Warner, pulling down the value of the combined company. And those great synergies that everyone touted when the merger was announced back in January 2000? Well, they ended up being as overhyped as AOL’s pre-merger stock price.
The New York Times points out: “The [Time Warner-AOL] merger was fed by heady ideas that did not quite pan out—that big online audiences would necessarily yield big profits, and that there were profound synergies to be had by owning different media.”
Synergies in business always sound great, but they should simply be regarded as a nice bonus if they actually work out and not the main reason for making the deal in the first place. In other words, the concept of synergy is more myth than anything else. In fact, if you are basing your deal on the synergies you’ll see, well, my guess is that you don’t have much of a deal to begin with. Just ask Time Warner.
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