Unless you have been living an extraordinarily sheltered life (which is difficult to do in business), the concept of millennials will probably be familiar to you. Millennials are people born at some time during the period 1980 to 2000 (although these dates are approximations). Also known as “Generation Y”, they are typically at ease with digital technology and big on digital collaboration, among other traits.
If a millennial has never see a printer working for example, it’s because he or she doesn’t use paper, preferring electronic data, apps, mobile devices, and the like. Traditional IT disaster recovery is then easily dismissed as “tl;dr”. Read on to find out why this can have such a big impact!
“tl;dr” is millennial shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”. Besides being avid mobile users, millennials have also grown up with SMS on their phones, and a reflex of cutting away superfluous information to keep their text messages – and other content – as succinct as possible.
Consequently, they may have lower levels of tolerance for large paper or even electronic documents, including disaster recovery manuals and processes. In fact, manuals are anathema to many millennials, as they believe that products and services should be intuitive and easy to use, without having to wade through pages and pages of explanations.
Add to these points the statistic that millennials already make up a large percentage of the workforce, a percentage that is set to increase further over the coming years, and you can see that little “phrase” of “tl;dr” will become increasingly important too – if you want a disaster recovery plan and process that other employees will read and take onboard.
You won’t have the luxury of lengthy instructions, which are often out of date by the time you’ve written them anyway. The more your disaster recovery plan looks and behaves like a good mobile app (clear, simple, stick to what is essential), the more likely it is that you will get the support of the new millennial workforce to whom it applies.