“That’s a lot more than our parents would have expected to have. They spent much longer in each job they had, had less of them and focused on the security necessary to have a family and a mortgage. Now people are much more mobile and that means a lot more periods of being trained into new jobs, new organisations and new ways of doing things.”
Someone who is a 20-year old digital native and has grown up in a world with smart phones and the Internet is likely to have different needs to someone in their fifties who is at a different stage of their lives. But according to O’Carroll, how companies introduce people to their new jobs is important, and the whole area of induction training needs to include not only knowledge about the company, but also how to use all their different systems.
When I look at my children and their expectations around the use of technology, they take it for granted that everything is secure and private and they’re much more aware when something isn’t. Teenagers and those in their twenties are so alert to the Internet and to security around it because they’ve grown up with it, Olivia Galvin, CPL
e-Learning
“It’s now pretty normal for large companies to use e-learning systems when a new employee joins — certainly when I’ve moved jobs, I’ve done hours’ worth of e-learning about company values, systems and policies and so on, and that’s good. But I think as a person moves around different companies, it would be beneficial to have sessions on how to use their lead booking systems or time management systems or email systems and so on,” she said.
“That also speaks to the multi-generational aspect of the workforce. We recently had some college interns doing work here, and even though they’re digital natives in our common understanding, we still had to show them how to use the printers and how to book leave and where to file things. So it’s not that the digital natives necessarily will be up and running day one in a job either. They still need to transition from their world of school or university into the workplace.”
Work function
Enabling the business to work securely and from wherever it wants to is something that the IT function has had to take on in recent years, and for a lot of companies that has meant putting in place stringent security policies and procedures.
However, the cultural aspect of security awareness is something that can be hard to regulate — as different people of different generations and backgrounds can have different attitudes to security.
“I think it’s a learning curve for everybody. I’m in my late forties and people in that age bracket and upwards are probably more cautious but less knowledgeable about technology,” said Olivia Galvin, a director with CPL Resources.
If you think about the way that people would have collaborated let’s say 10 years ago, email was king. If you wanted to be productive and collaborate with your colleagues, you sent emails but that’s really changed. What we’re seeing now is that people want to collaborate in lots of different ways… people always want to collaborate using… the Skype client for IM and presence, Kieran Dunne, Microsoft Ireland
“When I look at my children and their expectations around the use of technology, they take it for granted that everything is secure and private and they’re much more aware when something isn’t. Teenagers and those in their twenties are so alert to the Internet and to security around it because they’ve grown up with it.”
PPT mantra
From the point of view of running businesses and keeping company assets secure, Galvin suggests that best practice takes in a combination of the technology, the people and the processes.
“Having all three in place is necessary to ensure that you can develop and distribute security policies that are relevant to how we work today, but you need really good technology, you need the people on the training side to be receptive to it, and you need really strong processes,” she said.
According to Galvin, these are cornerstones of effective people management because the way in which technology is used is changing.
“It is challenging. We’re all logging on from wherever we are, any time of the day or night, and that is amongst the biggest challenges that we see. It has certainly led to the creation of a lot of new roles in the technology industry around the cyber security space,” she said.
“We’re living in an era where there are so many digital security attacks all the time. That’s what everybody has to be conscious of, from the smallest businesses right through to the largest. It’s easier on larger corporations, but it’s the smaller and medium-sized businesses that really need to be so cognisant of this. Deploying that across a multigenerational workforce is where the challenge comes in.”
Scale aware
The key to meeting this challenge is to be aware of the scale of it in the first place and then to have the kind of IT staff that are up to the job.
“You need to have really good IT professionals in the business no matter how small you are. You need access to IT professionals to ensure security safeguards, you need staff that have bought into the need for security, and you need training available to people in a form that they can access readily, that can be signed off on and that is somewhat monitored,” said Galvin.
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