How Millennials and Technology Impact Businesses
Millennials and technology are almost synonymous, it is almost hard to imagine one without the other. The passing time will see the eventual retirement of the early generations such as Generation X and Baby Boomers, and in due time millennials will form the largest group in the workforce. According to Gianniris (2018), millennials will form 75% of the workforce by 2030. Being the next generation, companies need to understand how these tech-savvy millennials incorporate technology to create an impact on their businesses.
The technological and information era is upon us, the shift has brought many changes from the way we live to the way we communicate. Take the media, for example, we have shifted from using traditional marketing mediums to social media marketing. Millennials spend an average of 7.5 hours per day online with their mobile phones compared to 0.75 hours per day on television (Staff, 2018). Even mobile phones have experienced an upgrade to smartphones. According to Jiang and Jiang (2018), the entirety of millennials dominated this generation with more than nine in ten of them owning a smartphone.
So how does the millennial’s technology savviness impact businesses? Growing up with technology and the Internet at their fingertips, the millennials are the most digitally comfortable and adaptable (Alton, 2018). The industry has already introduced automation to improve productivity and technology has been and will continually be injected to simplify work even further (Hussein, 2018). Millennials are the generation with the advantage when it comes to interacting with such technology, and I believe this will contribute to businesses in increasing their value work.
Despite the reputation of millennials being lazy and no work ethic, the amount of work done by millennials through tech is inconsiderably large. Technology is widely accessible via smartphones and work can be done on transport, at home or even when abroad (DesMarais, 2018). Productivity should not be measured solely by the hours spent in the office but rather the quality of the output.
The millennials are a highly underrated generation and behave in a vastly different manner compared to other generations. The value added by the millennials will be of insurmountable significance and I believe it is critical for the millennials to be understood. Millennials are the next generation, only through acceptance and understanding will businesses be able to tide through the constantly evolving technology for a brighter future.