Social media might be one of the hottest topics around, but finance professionals still overwhelmingly rely on their trusty emails to get business information.
Research by automation software provider V1 found that 88% of IT and finance professionals rate email as the most important business communication channel.
Email was rated as the preferred choice by all generations – baby boomers (born in the 1940s and 1950s), Generation X (born in the 1960s and 1970s) and Generation Y (born in the 1980s and 1990s). Interestingly, all generations thought social media channels were of low importance for business updates, with Twitter and Facebook being their two least preferred methods of business communication.
Catherine Murphy, head of marketing at V1, said: “It seems across the generations many employees still have a reluctance to receiving information via social media channels.”
It is clear that the popularity of paper in the office is declining. The youngest employees were most likely to give paper a low rating (42%), followed by Generation X (33%) and baby boomers (31%).
The research also revealed a number of other IT trends that differentiate the generations. For instance, baby boomers spend an average of 90 minutes online each day for business purposes, with an additional 57 minutes for social use. For Generation X, the figures were 140 minutes for business, and 55 for social. Meanwhile, Generation Y spends 167 minutes a day online for business purposes, and 107 minutes for non-business activities.
The middle-aged group was most likely to have a LinkedIn account (56%), suggesting it sees networking as more important than any other generation. Younger workers were the least likely to use LinkedIn, with 42% having an account. Meanwhile, 47% of the baby boomers are on LinkedIn. Generation Y, at 56%, were the biggest users of Facebook, followed by Generation X (39%). Baby boomers were least likely to use Facebook, with 28% having an account.
Overall, Twitter was the least popular of the social media platforms, with Generation X having the highest number of users (28%), Generation Y second (22%) and baby boomers using it the least (19%).
Sally Percy is editor of The Treasurer