Millennials, those young adults of Generation Z born after 1980 and to whom we sometimes refer as the ‘Boomerang Generation’ possess a shared set of digital habits that have left companies playing catch up. In the U.S., millennials have become the nation’s largest demographic and in the next ten years they will come to dominate the workplace, constituting three out of every four employees by 2025.
This is good news for employers, thanks in part to their advanced tastes in technology. Their fluency with video feeds, web-based applications and their addiction to smart devices is saving their employers heaps of time and money, and also suggests that millennials might be more productive than their older colleagues.
Whether this is true or not, meetings that follow a linear tick-box approach have become the first item on the agenda for these young workers to abolish. Samsung Insights team reports that millennials gain an average of 63 minutes extra work time and 69 minutes of personal time every day because of their smartphone usage. An extra two hours per day more than their older colleagues.
Samsung also found that young workers are less likely to use traditional smartphone apps and are more dependent on video conferencing than their older colleagues (51 percent versus 39 percent), audio conferencing (45 percent versus 30 percent) and web conferencing (38 percent versus 33 percent). These generational differences and their inevitable efficiency savings cannot be overlooked, and in fact the adaptation to this new working-age demographic is already underway.
Our new software Canvus-Connect allows people to share, manipulate, draw and input information across a live platform, like a digital canvas that can be used by any employee or stakeholder, at any time and in any location with a wireless connection. And it’s no surprise to us that a number of Fortune 500 companies and world-renowned organizations and institutions – IBM, Flex and Columbia University Medical School – already use the Canvus-Connect to bring their employees together and boost productivity.
In answer to the question above and in spite of the smartphone’s prevalence as a business communication tool, the answer is yes: meeting rooms continue to have a future, but they have evolved to suit a diverse range of company requirements. We are pioneering this evolution with our MultiTaction® iWall, a giant touchscreen that can be scaled up or down for all manner of workplaces: War Rooms, Boardrooms, Situation Rooms, Innovation and Training Rooms. You name it, we can mix and match the iWall to suit any space however large or small.
As the means of communication change so do the spaces in which we communicate.
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