Communicating Through Instant Messaging

Interesting post at Recruiting.com regarding how differently today’s youth communicates versus how their parents communicate. See Recruiting.com: College Students Today, Employees Tomorrow: Are You Ready?.
One of the key points of the discussion is that today’s college students are far more likely to participate in a discussion if it is held using instant messaging or other such technology. I’ve been seeing this trend for years so pushed to facilitate such communications between our customer service people and our users. Until about a year ago, candidates could contact us by phone, email, fax, snail mail, etc. All the normal methods. But all of those methods are deemed by college students to be too slow, even email. They’re used to carrying on discussions with a dozen friends via IM simultaneously, so why would they want to wait even hours for our people to get back to them? Once we implemented the change, they were able to get answers immediately.

While making a change like that is fine for a job board that is primarily used by college students and recent graduates, such changes will be more difficult to make and perhaps not even advisable for employers. Already, the workplace has been transformed by email and voice mail. Remember when fax machines were revolutionary? Now they gather dust. Will conference rooms be next as more and more become comfortable meeting virtually?
People need to interact to work together. But do we need to interact as we’ve become used to simply because that has worked for those who have been in the workplace for five, 10 or 20 years? I sometimes hear people lament the fact that no one writes letters anymore, but hasn’t the use of email made us more responsive to the needs of our customers and more productive at the same time? Instant messaging is somewhat like email on steroids. If email has helped us do more work better and faster, then I’m all in favor of learning from today’s college students. Let’s not resist new technologies just because they’re new and have the potential to change the way we interact. Let’s embrace them and allow them to help us do better work for our customers.