Bosses are being forced to reach out to Gen Z employees on Instagram as more young workers ignore business emails
- Bosses are finding that many young Gen Z workers aren’t checking their email
- Executives are being forced to switch to more modern communication methods like Instagram
- “We have about 20,000 who don’t even check an email a month,” says the head of IT
Bosses are turning to Instagram or Linkedin to speak to employees as more young Gen Z workers don’t check their email.
Thierry Delaporte, chief executive of Wipro, one of the largest IT companies in the world, spoke about how employers need to rethink the way they communicate with their employees.
Mr Delaporte said he stopped using email to contact staff because he knew many simply wouldn’t read the message. Instead, he takes a more modern approach.
According to the Telegraph, Mr Delaporte said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos: “To speak to my staff, I go to Instagram or Linkedin. It works better.
Chief Executive of one of the world’s largest IT companies Wipro, Thierry Delaporte
“Sometimes they don’t even check their email. We have about 20,000 that we know don’t even check one email a month. They’re 25, they don’t care.
“They don’t go to their email, they go to Snapchat, they go to all those things.”
Mr Delaporte of Wipro, which employs 4,500 people in the UK and 260,000 around the world, said about 10 per cent of its staff “don’t even check an email a month”.
He spoke of a “wake-up call” for employers – and in a culture of working from home, he’s thinking about how to make sure he understands employees who are much younger than himself.
Video platform Vimeo executive director Anjali Sud backed Mr Delaporte’s comments by comparing emails to outdated user manuals in modern society.
At a panel discussion in Davos, she said that communication is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s digital world.
Employers have a ‘wake-up call’ about how young Gen Z workers communicate (stock image)
Adam Butler, workplace solutions expert, founder and CEO of Officeology, has previously delved deeply into the video-sharing platform TikTok to try to understand young people’s views on common behavior in the workplace.
Speaking to FEMAIL last year, he explained common annoyances faced by Gen Z workers.
According to Gen Zs on TikTok, all work-related slacks and texts should be as short as possible, with many suggesting one sentence is enough and even half-sentences are entirely appropriate.
“Don’t send me paragraphs, I don’t have to read an essay,” is the message that a young boss wants to spread.
“Be short – be light – be gone,” she suggests in her video, explaining that she gets bored with everything.
“I don’t have the time, energy, or frankly interest to read paragraphs.”
“Chats are a sentence at most, a GIF at best,” said another.
“A project manager sent me three paragraphs of notes, all of which boiled down to putting a hyphen in the title of the document,” added another.
Another woman shared her verdict on word count: “Listen — words in chats, sentences in emails, paragraphs in meetings.”
Mr Butler admitted it can be difficult to find the right path here as “everyone has their preferred method of communication”.
“Work together to decide what works best for both of you,” he suggested.