FT: Generation Y Requiring Rewrite of HR/PR

Not sure if you caught this article yesterday in the Financial Times' Digital Business, but interesting look at how new crop entering the workforce are playing by a different set of rules.

An excerpt

Picture this scenario: a video from the latest sales convention has made its way on to Facebook. The quality of the video is not high, but it does have your company name and logo in a prominent position on the podium in the conference centre auditorium.

It also includes one of your sales managers, who appears to have tripped over one of his subordinates and is seemingly making several unsuccessful efforts to stand up.

The people involved happen to be your highest performing staff - from a profitability perspective. You cannot afford to lose them, but you appear to have a PR nightmare on your hands. The video is spreading across the web like wildfire.

What can you do?

The answer is nothing. Any attempts by you to ban membership of social networking sites or even ban their accessibility from your intranet during the working day will result in a mass evacuation of your organisation.

The world is changing. The staff cannot be controlled and nor can your corporate messaging. It's time to let go. Generation Y and online social networking are here to stay. The HR and PR rulebooks need to be rewritten - now.

The point is well taken that a new generation of professionals is invading companies and bringing in new technologies, new ways of collaborating and sharing information and want to be managed differently. But (here's my Gen X side and PR and management experience coming in) there is still an important element of adherence to brand consistency. No, we can't control the message -- I get that. But we must have some level of management over consistency and clarity, otherwise we lose the ever-growing challenge of inconsistent positioning.

Clearly there's room to find a balance between message management and message freedom in the Internet era, but I will always insist on consistency, just as long as the message isn't consistently wrong.