- Research from Creative Strategies shows that workers under 30 are unlikely to collaborate through e-mail, while it remains a preferred choice among older workers
- Tools used for business collaboration will likely need to adapt as younger employees age and become more dominant in workforce
- Workers use a suite of collaboration tools from multiple tech companies
Many a worker has grumbled about a meeting that could have been an e-mail, but younger employees may be more likely to say the get-together could have been accomplished through a Zoom conference or iMessage. Recent research from the consulting firm Creative Strategies shows that workers under 30 don’t usually rely on e-mail for office collaborations, even as the decades-old technology remains a favorite among older workers.
In a poll of 1,000 remote workers in the United States, Creative Strategies found that more than one-third of employees over 30 named Microsoft Outlook as the app most closely associated with collaboration. Just 13.1 percent of employees under 30 did so, while more than half said they relied on Google Docs for collaboration.
No one company held dominance in collaborative tools used by workers, with one in four using tools from four different companies each day. Employees have also been increasingly likely to choose their own technologies, and businesses will likely need to adapt their own offerings as younger workers age and become more dominant in the workforce.