The new divide: the workforce gap

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.

Bankervision

Great article with which I agree and on two points particularly. It is not about age but about mindset and the gap is certainly there and increasing.

In fact I was thinking the other day that that is where I see my work lying - helping to bridge that gap. This has meant that I am spending less time at the bleeding edge and going to less geek conferences but I do seem to be able to make the gap seem smaller to people and even get some of them excited about crossing it!

Comments

[Baz]

It's about fear.

The obvious fear of a loss of control ("you can't let _anyone_ post a comment - imagine what they might say").

But also, as the article hints at, a fear of being swamped in detail - as you get to hear everyone's actual opinions, as opposed to some median statistic on the employee satisfaction survey.

[Lee White]

Euan

I think I am right there with you. No way I can keep up with the bleeding edge, but I can be part of building the bridge. Ideas in the works. Let's talk soon.

Lee

[James Gardner]

Thanks for the link.

When I first started to blog in public about my work, there was caution from senior execs, who took a wait and see approach whilst crossing their fingers that I wouldn't say something stupid.

When we rolled out internal blogging for everyone, we spent most of our time making sure that there weren't too many controls so that people *could* in fact, blog.

Now that we have internal blogging, we're obviously going to be spending most of our time convincing people it is OK.

The results are almost certain to be worth the difficulty of getting the change implemented. I've called it the Pandora's box. We have opened the lid, and now it will be hard to close it again, because those who *will* use the new tools will make it harder and harder for those who won't to ignore what they are doing.

[Euan Semple]

Or as used to say if you can get things big enough and useful enough fast enough the buggers will have a job turning them off!