it systems

How to prepare your companies IT Systems for millennials

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers has stated : 

By 2020millennials will form 50% of the global workforce.

How should your companies IT future prepare for this?

Modernise

41% of Millennials prefer electronic communication over face to face or even via Telephone.

Millennials have grown up being submerged in technology for a young age, whether is being multiple mobile devices, high tech gaming consoles and started facebook from the age of 13. They understand how easy it is to share and communicate and build on these platforms so they will be wanting to replicate the same in their job.

They will want to be effective at work, this could be sharing files via Dropbox, or communicating over WhatsApp or even using their student version of office to manipulate company documents without waiting on IT. This goes back to the post on Shadow IT where organizations should always look for new technology to streamline their work instead of employees doing this without their approval

Flexibility

Millennials have a strong appetite for working overseas and 71% expect and want to do an overseas assignment during their career.

Working remotely will be seen as the normal thing to do, whether it's working remotely for a company you have previously built a relationship with and would like to continue on employment or contracting remotely to an entirely new job and country.

Technology should be there for companies to be able to manage and maintain these remote workers with management tasks such as Meetings, Project Management, Timesheets. Remote Millennials will also wanted to feel included in as much of the business process as possible so multiple communication channels should be used e.g. Microsoft Teams for Group Talk and document collaboration, Yammer for Social updates and sharing and Skype for Business for conferences.

Knowledge Transfer

With a shift in thinking and work culture, companies should have the technology around to be able to transfer knowledge between staff and document it for future training. According to a study only 22% of companies feel confident they are currently able to do this.