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Young staffers are accessing technologies in the workplace that their predecessors could only dream of. How should credit unions deal with it?
Lauren Davison, SPHR, VP/member service at $110 million/12, 000-member Coors Credit Union www.coorscu.org), with about 39 full-time equivalents in Golden, Colo., believes the lines between our work lives and our personal lives are blurring. Gene Blishen, general manager of $41 million/1, 812-member Mount Lehman Credit Union www.mtlehman.com), with 11 employees in Mount Lehman, British Columbia, feels the same way.
"It used to be that work was work and your personal life was your personal life, but that's not true anymore," he says. "When our employees are home, sometimes they're working, and when they're here at the credit union, sometimes they're tending to their personal lives."
The second part of Blishen's comment has been a sticking point for corporate leaders since the invention of the water cooler (or the telephone-whichever came first), but its stickiness has only increased since the introduction of the Internet and the cell phone.
Today's employees-credit union or not-are bringing into and accessing from the workplace technologies their predecessors only could have dreamed about, including blogs, Facebook, Linkedln, MySpace and Twitter-not to mention text-messaging and Webbrowsing cell phones.
Not so long ago, such activity would have been banned by policies or blocked by software. Actually, that's still the case for many credit unions, but more and more of them are letting down their guard, so to speak, and acknowledging, like Blishen and Davison, that times have changed.
The reason for that softened response, according to Tim McAlpine, who has covered this subject several times as the resident blogger at Chilliwack, British Columbia-based Currency Marketing http:llcurrencymark.et ing.ca), is that today's employees have demanded it.
"There's an unspoken, unwritten expectation among the current generation of employees that they will be trusted by their employers to do the right thing," says McAlpine, who is Currency Marketing's president/chief strategist when he isn't blogging. "That might mean that they check their Facebook page once in a while."
Blishen certainly doesn't mind that some of his staff may be doing just that while on the clock. "I can trust the loan officer to give out a $500,000 loan and I can trust a member...