Get Older Workers to Use Technology (Whether They Like It or Not)

There's a common myth that older workers are technophobic and won't use new technology as well as younger workers. This is a myth, and a dangerous one. Every member of the team needs to use the tools at their disposal effectively, and if you don't give older workers the benefit of the doubt, you're putting them, and your whole team, at a disadvantage.

What is true is that Baby Boomers can be reluctant to adopt new gadgets and frequently struggle to learn them. The trick, then, is to help your more experienced workers understand how the new software or equipment ties in to the work that has to get done, and then give them the chance to actually learn it. Bear in mind that there are exceptions to every generalization, and some folks in every age group are way out ahead of the pack.

That disclaimer out of the way, here are several misconceptions managers of remote teams have -- and how to overcome them:

• Older workers are technophobic. "Phobic" implies that people are afraid of something. Remember that the Baby Boomers are the people who put a man on the moon and gave us a computer at every desk. Most people in this age group are not afraid of technology, they just don't have the same relationship with it that younger workers do. What is intuitive to people who are regular users of Facebook, say, might not be second nature to someone who insists that a "friend" is someone they have actually met. Show them actual, practical examples of people who use these tools and the results they'll get.
• They're resistant to almost any changes in how they work. There is a certain logic to this, after all the way they work has gotten them to this point in their careers, and change is hard. What's amazing is how quickly any worker will adapt if something actually makes his or her job easier -- or helps to get lousy jobs done faster. If it doesn't seem like Boomers are the first ones to adopt a new tool, kindly remember that some of them (okay us) spent weeks putting our entire record collection on cassette tapes, only to have to put them on CD, and now we have to convert them to MP3 and....well you get the picture. One thing I hear from clients all the time is that "our older workers will never use webcams and such, it's not worth even trying." Oh really? Move their grandchildren to Australia and see how fast they become proficient Skype users. It's all in the motivation.
• They require too much hand-holding and training compared to younger team members. It's true that older workers learn differently (as a general rule) than younger workers. They tend to do less poking around and learning on their own and prefer to learn from live people as opposed to recorded tutorials. Partly this is the way they (okay, we again) learned to acquire knowledge, and old habits die hard. Partly it's because they have better uses for their time than trial and error when there's other work to be done. In the time it takes to log into the recorded tutorials and find what we need to learn, we can pick up the phone or just email the file to a boss who will tolerate our old-school approach. As the leader, you need to show a return on time invested. If something takes me 20 minutes to learn, it had better be worth it and save me a lot of time and work on the back end. Oh, and "because it's policy" doesn't count as motivation
• They insist on doing things "old school." I mean, who still uses the phone? Sometimes the latest tool doesn't give you the same rich experience as a real-time conversation, even if it's over the telephone. Also, remember that many men over a certain age never learned to type in high school -- so email, or especially Instant Messaging, is not natural or fast. There are few physical reasons for people not to use technology, so age shouldn't be a legitimate cause for not using the team's prescribed tools. There are, however, plenty of psychological barriers to adoption.

Photo courtesy Flickr user x-ray delta one, CC 2.0.