At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston earlier this week, vendors and their platforms took center stage as the nascent market for social computing software continued to heat up. Technology is a key enabler – BearingPoint’s own firm-wide wiki is a good example – but keeping a close eye on the workforce issues tied up in Enterprise 2.0 is important. After all, the Gen Y crowd is part of the reason wikis, blogs, and social networking turned corporate in the first place.

How can companies engage Gen Y and take advantage of their collaborative approach to work?

Don’t Stop Doing That

Believe it or not, your firm’s under-30 employees already brought an enterprise-class set of collaboration and social networking tools with them the first time they walked through the door. Their massive social networks, seemingly effortless adaption to new technologies, and innovative, collaborative approaches to corporate life need to be encouraged and fostered. Properly structuring the role of the IT department is crucial here – asking Gen Ys to throw their choices about technology away, and return to the knowledge worker mainstays of email, documents, folders and taxonomies, will leave them alienated and disengaged.

Respecting a Gen Y’s ways of communicating and collaborating is a step forward-looking managers need to consider taking. During the conference’s Next Generation Workforce panel, this became clear; and as one panelist put it, “Companies realized that encouraging diversity of race and gender in their organizations was valuable long ago – they will come to realize respecting the different ways their staffs choose to communicate is equally valuable.” Failing to do so – through aggressively blocking social media sites, IM and discouraging blogging will leave Gen Ys feeling as if you aren’t respecting their value, and drive them to organizations they think will. This is something that’s important to consider, as corporations begin to depend on Gen Ys to take over the roles of retiring boomers.

Process This

Twitter, Facebook, and Googleish search isn’t all that the next generation of your workforce expected when they joined your company.  Gen Y engagement was central to what panelists saw as the success of future organizations – these future leaders typically join organizations believing they can change the world, and build the same “community” at work that propelled them through college. But alas – under-30 employee satisfaction is typically higher than any age group during their first month on the job, but falls through the floor after just a year, ending up lower than all other employees.

What happens? Employees realize that they’ve run face first into a wall of bureaucracy and carefully engineered process.  Their intangible assets, like their social network, their ability to be efficient processors of information and generators of insight, can’t be effectively tapped by their employers.

Companies have spent years and billions of dollars investing in IT systems that support and improve business processes. Processes are often woven into the hierarchy of the organization. But Gen Y employees value flat organizational structures, free form collaboration, and strong community as the most effective ways to further their goals, not carefully orchestrated process.

Giving Gen Ys the flexibility to innovate in at work, be creative, and bypass traditional processes is critical to making them successful in your organization (and keeping them from jumping ship). Process efficiency is not the end all and be all of your company – take advantage of the opportunity that Gen Ys bring to become more innovative and collaborative – use these intangible assets as a way to push your organization forward. An independent research firm’s recent analysis shows that companies that can successfully monetize intangible knowledge assets can drive profitability. Companies that don’t can hit a wall when further process efficiency is no longer achievable, and innovation from disengaged employees is not forthcoming.

What’s Next?

It’s possible that the entry of Gen Y into the workforce will mark the end of process-centric IT and business, and the start of Enterprise 2.0 – companies oriented around collaboration and community, and the technologies that allow for that to occur. Companies that pick up on the value that Gen Y brings to an organization will be more competitive, and innovative, in the future

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