PDA-Phobes vs. CrackBerry Addicts
By Elizabeth Cavendish
New Survey Shows How Legal Boomers, X’ers and Y’ers Are Bridging—and Sometimes Broadening—the Office Technology Gap
Have you ever cringed during a meeting when someone stops writing his blog about how boring the meeting is to send an e-mail to a colleague sitting six feet away … and then he changes his Facebook® status? You shoot him a look that says “Were you raised in a barn (albeit a high-tech barn)?” But you get a blank stare in response, like he just can’t comprehend what’s bothering you.
There is a very good chance that this disconnect does not come from where the offender was raised but from the age groups you both represent.
Earlier this year, LexisNexis commissioned a national survey of 250 legal and 450 other white collar professionals and found that, although they have all embraced technology, there are still significant gaps in how different generations use and apply this technology in the workplace.
The generations in this survey are represented by:
- 100 legal and 175 white collar Boomers (ages 44 – 60),
- 100 legal and 175 white collar Generation X (ages 29 – 43) members, and
- 50 legal and 100 white collar Generation Y (ages 28 and younger) members.
The survey explores how technology has blurred the boundaries between home and work, how it has impacted office etiquette, and how the different generations are dealing with technology overload.
Findings demonstrate that new technology and software applications have been embraced by all professional generations in both the white collar and legal fields. Also there is strong agreement among all legal professionals that many tasks, such as performing research and obtaining up-to-the-minute information, have been made easier with these advances. In a profession that skews older, surprisingly, the strongest support for the proposition that the legal profession is maximizing the utilization of the available technologies is Generation Y with 87 percent agreement. Only 65 percent of Boomers and 70 percent of Generation X feel the same.
But it is the youngest professionals, however, who are most concerned about their own productivity if applications usage is left unregulated by their employers. For example, only 29 percent of Boomers feel that the Internet decreases their productivity, but 56 percent and 59 percent respectfully of Generation X and Y perceive such a negative effect.
This decrease in productivity is reflected by the types of applications and software that they access from work. The younger professionals admit to using more software that blurs the line between professional and personal, such as video games and photo editing programs.
While these younger legal professionals are accessing more diverse programs than their older peers, they are also multi-tasking at a much higher rate. According to the survey:
- A Boomer professional averages 10.28 hours a day using e-mail programs, Internet browsers, instant messaging programs and Microsoft® Office programs.
- A Generation X professional claims to spend 14.36 work hours using these same programs while
- A Generation Y professional’s use doubles that of a Boomer at 22.1 hours.
It appears that older professionals calculate usage of only the program they are actively working on whereas younger professionals count all applications that are open and available to use as they toggle from one to another. (This is a much more preferable explanation than the 110.5-hour work week.)
This technology-use gap may separate the generations’ effectiveness to communicate with each other even more than age and pop culture. And these differences can raise unforeseen tensions at work. The previous example about the two meeting participants shows that “what’s appropriate” is regarded very differently depending upon the professional’s age. For example:
- Twice as many Generation Y legal professionals as Boomers think that using a laptop or PDA during a meeting is efficient whereas two-thirds of Boomers find such usage impolite or distracting.
- 43 percent of Generation Y also thinks that blogging about work is acceptable behavior for a professional and another 47 percent would befriend a client through a social networking site. Only 28 percent and 24 percent of Boomers find these respective online activities acceptable professional behavior.
Management must create policies that acknowledge that this technological gap among the generations exists and find solutions to increase productivity without stifling access to necessary technology. These policies must be flexible enough to take into account available technologies and how they can be used effectively by professionals with different experiences and expectations.
Review additional findings from the national survey of legal professionals commissioned by LexisNexis at www.lexisnexis.com/media/pdfs/LexisNexis-Technology-Gap-Survey-4-09.pdf. Read more … and blog your thoughts to colleagues … or tweet about it … or Digg It … or ….
