Generations Blog

One would think that a professional football locker room would be off-limits to texting during meetings. You know — “Sit down, shut up and watch last week’s game tape.”  Apparently not so. The father of an offensive lineman approached me last week during a seminar to tell me that his son spends most of the offensive team meetings texting his friends in the defensive team meetings on the other side of the wall.  Kinda makes me wonder about the level of concentration on Sunday afternoons every fall. After all, if you’re being paid $218,754.30 a game, shouldn’t you be giving it your undivided attention?

Why does this matter? Because if the NFL can’t keep its personnel from texting incessantly, how can you as a manager hope to keep your Millennial employees focused on their jobs? The reality is that encouraging productivity is more complex than simply saying “Turn that thing off!” In fact, you may be discouraging productivity by becoming the texting police. It is becoming increasingly apparent that those making their way into the workforce are able to balance more than one activity at a time. In fact many of them feel a little lost without enough stimulation.

But let’s get practical. Is it reasonable to simply surrender to the onslaught of these emering techno-wizards? Yes and no. They may be able to text and type in a data-input environment. But in the presence of customers, texting should be off-limits in no uncertain terms. Will they push the envelope? Absolutely, that’s what they’ve grown up learning to do. As managers, each of us has to do three things to effectively supervise this generation of young workers when it comes to the ubiquitious cell-phone and PDA.

1. Take a step back at look at the work environment. Is it really necessary that all cell phones and texting be discouraged? Remember, this is not about your preferences as a manager. This is about encouraging productivity in the workplace. Arbitrary rules can turn into your worst nightmare.

2. Set clear parameters about where personal texting and cell-phone use is acceptable and where it is not.  In the warehouse? Yes, provided the work is getting done to the standards necessary. On the showroom floor? No, it clearly distracts from customer care and attention.  

3. Enforce parameters consistently. But above all, ENFORCE THEM! It is one thing to create another policy to deal with disliked or inappropriate behavior. It is another thing to make sure these policies are followed as practices.  Managing can be tough at times, but that’s why you get the extra bucks and if there is one group that will challenge your policies and practices, it will be those in the Millennial generation.