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KM Professionals Respond: Meeting the Needs of a Cross-Generational Work Force

APQC asked a roundtable of KM professionals about how organizations can improve their content management. We asked: What are the keys to having content that different generations of employees can use and understand?

José Carlos: I’m not sure if it’s a generational issue. Some people say that Generation Y and Millennials are more fond of “information nuggets” (i.e., synthesis). But we’ve found this content preference is also true for Baby Boomers. This is because every day we deal with huge amounts of information, and the challenge is to capture and analyze it in a rapid manner. Content management systems should provide an answer to this challenge. In general, the answer has a lot to do with creating a content management system that offers true learning experiences—not just a system where you can “find” relevant information.

Ewen Le Borgne: Especially if the content management system is actively used by various people, it’s important to ensure all users are properly trained and coached on an ongoing basis. Users should have a way to ask questions and find help. There should also be a central function that provides quality/consistency guidelines and checks what is posted.

I would also recommend ongoing analysis of content and involving different people to co-create and review content. Having conversations about the type of formats used to create content is also useful, as different generations of employees will absorb content in different ways: written, audio, video, and different lengths of each format. Finally, I’d recommend regular stock-taking efforts to build upon the good resources of the past and present them together according to thematic properties (e.g., a special series on theme XYZ with all relevant existing content on that theme).

Chris Piereman: I’m hesitant to make a strong connection between actual content and generational tendencies and norms. The actual content is about the business need of the firm and it’s independent of generations. It’s project plans, documented processes, management or technical approaches, and so on.

However, the direct ties lie in how the content is packaged visually from within the user interface (UI) that delivers the content. Millennials may emphasize graphics, iconography, and mobile apps, while Boomers may be used to a text-driven approach. It’s all in the UI in how the content is delivered, not what is being delivered. As such, there needs to be an accommodation in the UI for multiple generational perspectives. But this does not alter actual content management in my mind. After all, a technical solution or capability, a client deliverable, or a response to an RFP [request for proposal] is still the same piece of explicit capital regardless of the generational mix that is tasked with providing that service or deliverable.

Stuart French: For some reason—with the possible exception of the medical field—most university graduates spend years at school only studying, then enter the workplace thinking they know everything. They have amazing skills and computers full of information, but they have neither the context nor the experience. So when they try to build a content management system, they replicate that learning: storing skills, information, and hard data separate from case studies and historical narratives. They do it in one big project, all the while expecting the future reader to see the content with the same thick context they have in their own heads at the time. When content plays a supporting role to a community of knowledge holders, it’s much more likely to be successful over generations.

To see more KM professionals’ responses (and extended responses from some professionals featured in this blog post), check out this free article: Content Management Roundtable: Meeting the Needs of a Cross-Generational Work Force. The roundtable included the following participants: