To Call or Not to Call; To Facebook or Not – Part 1

Posted February 24th, 2010

I teach 11th graders in Sunday School and have been teaching youth for over 30 years. in the early years of teaching, I contacted the youth by mail or on their home phone or even visited their homes. Mail still works, even though it is a quaint practice. When I want to talk to a parent or a younger sibling, I call the home number. The youth give me their cell phone numbers, but don’t like phone calls as much as they do text messages. Teens do not want to talk as much as they want to text.

For a few years, e-mail worked well for communicating and it still does for me. It’s a passive channel, however, and feedback would be nice. Now the youth tell me to send a message via Facebook. That works well for them and for me.

What is the primary mode of communication in your company’s daily operations? Phone, texting, e-mail, radios, Facebook (probably not yet)

What issues will companies face dealing with preferences of different generations? I remember that a pipeline scheduler e-mailed a change in the pumping schedule to a pipeline operator. Guess what? The pipeline operator did not check his e-mail. The operator was used to schedulers calling on the phone with changes. The operator was 20 years older than the scheduler, and the scheduler used e-mail all day in his office job. When the schedule was not changed, the batch was not pumped. This error of omission caused problems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Human Factors, In the News, Observations.