A study of the conference call habits of the UK professionals has uncovered how the British millennial generation works. Millennials, born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, are adaptable in their use of conferencing technology, according to a research from Polycom, the global leader in voice, content and video collaboration.
Deloitte predicts this demographic will make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025* in its latest annual global report on millennials. It is important for employers to understand this generation’s work habits and think ahead about how technology can empower the productivity of the millennial workforce.
Millennials and business productivity
Millennials have grown up with technology, which explains why when it comes to conference calls those between the age of 25-34 are more adaptable to where they work. This generation are most likely to have participated in a conference call, without digressing from business objectives, from:
– A garden: One in five (21%) compared to 15% of 45-54 year-olds
– A taxi: Nearly a quarter (23%) compared to just 2% of those aged 55+
– A train: Almost a third (28%) and twice as many as 45-54 year-olds (14%)
– A bus: Around one in seven (15%) and almost twice as many as 35-44 year-olds (8%)
– A plane: Only 6%, but this is above the 5% average
Millennials are good at managing multiple tasks, with more than half (51%) of 18-34 year-olds who agreed compared to 32% of professionals aged 55 years or older. Further underlining the value that millennials find in conference calls, they are by far the most likely to have won a significant piece of new business via a conference call, with one in five of those surveyed (18%) having done so; compared to just 5% of 45-54 year-olds. As a result, over two-thirds of millennials (70%) find conference calls productive.
Tim Stone, Vice President of Worldwide Revenue Marketing at Polycom, comments: “The workspace is evolving fast. The UK workforce is getting ever more mobile and workplaces more flexible, with two-thirds now working from disperse locations at least once a month. Millennials expect their employers to provide collaborative communications tools to enable them to be productive wherever they are, and our data suggests that collaborative working is something they excel at.”
Millennials take an informal approach
As well as being highly productive and deriving business value from wherever they operate, millennials take a far less formal approach to conference calls than their senior colleagues. 18-34 year-olds have attended a conference call in a casualwear (23%), more than twice the number of 55+ (11%) who have done the same. More than one in five (22%) 25-34 year-olds have had something to eat or drink compared to just one in twenty (4%) of 55+ year-olds, and at times, have even had some interaction with colleagues’ children (25%) or pets (27% dogs, 13% cats).
Polycom’s Tim Stone continues: “We can work and collaborate from anywhere nowadays, which often means from a different office location, a co-working space or even from home. Millennials are comfortable and remain productive regardless of their location and provided they have the right conference call technology in place. There are lessons here for employers – the workplace flexibility and culture is evolving and the next generation of managers want to work efficiently but less formally.”
About the study
OnePoll interviewed 2,000 UK professionals on behalf of Polycom during September 2017.
* Deloitte Millennial Survey: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-dttl-2014-millennial-survey-report.pdf
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