Carnivores

The Carnivores are defined as our millennial generation, although you do have carnivores in older generations too, it is more common for these generations to display the traits of omnivores than outright carnivores.

Carnivores are born with technology and data access as an expectation – touchscreens and smartphones / tablets are second nature. Why can’t I have that as an app? Why do I need to wait to access this, or god forbid, come all the way to the office just to access something that should be on our cloud storage already?

They don’t see technology adoption as a project or a decision but just as a natural thing you do when you find a new app or platform – test it, do I like it? Does it make something easier?

• Are the answers to any or all of these questions yes?
• Then I’m using it!

…at least until something better comes along…

Carnivores won’t enter an organisation and sit on their hands for years waiting for someone to decide they can use a new technology – they will use it regardless (potentially causing major liability issues if communications are suddenly not covered under corporate policies).

Another option, leave the company entirely – ‘why should I work at a place that won’t let me use the potential that is out there?’.

Other companies are adopting various technologies to let their people work from multiple locations, increasingly dispersed times – agile development for example is a great enabler not only for speed of delivery, but also flexibility for the members of the team.

Mindset

Putting yourself in the mindset of a Carnivore is a challenge to most for reasons that are entirely logical, but this doesn’t help alleviate the frustration. They simply don’t have the same limitations that you do (if you are a Herbivore or Omnivore).

Their ‘default mode’ is why not?

Imagine looking at a pile of files in the archive room and thinking “what are they doing there?”…What comes next?

If you’re a Herbivore, you sit down and organise the files, probably look for a nice manila folder (or several) so that you can categorise the files then store them on a shelf somewhere for future reference.

If you’re a Carnivore you think, why aren’t these just saved in PDF format and dumped into cloud storage…

The scary part of an example as simple as that is that in a relatively short period of time, there will be colleagues you work with who won’t even understand the first example unless they like watching ‘old movies’.

Challenges

The challenge with Carnivores is not in restraining them, rather harnessing them – if you are smart, they’ll do all the work in evaluating your suppliers for you and they’ll probably do a better job than you could anyway. This is because they care about the tech – let them do the testing and figure out which platforms are worth looking at, then you step in and handle the costs and other negotiations.

Imagine if the next time you needed to select a new vendor for Unified Communications or Internal Collaboration (File Sharing / Cloud Storage / etc.) you were able to take any or all of the combined knowledge of the Carnivores in the company who already spend half their time trawling blogs and tech forums and apply it to your evaluation and decision making process…

Carnivores are energetic, they are curious by nature, and if you let them, they are incredibly creative too.

Instead of stopping them from being who they are by their very nature, give them a challenge to harness their energy and even increase their own sense of purpose within the organisation.

You will see teams bonding closer together, performance and morale inherently go hand in hand with team unity so what scenario do you see evolving from this approach?

Carnivores are the future whether you like it or not – none of us can stop the passing of time.

Are you going to feed them with meat that you select and prepare or wait for them to eat the closest ‘steak’ they see?