Gist.

Has a co-worker ever asked you for help with an IT problem, only to have you respond with “just Google it?” Well, it was probably good advice given the growing numbers of workers bringing their expertise with consumer devices, services and apps to the increasingly consumerized workplace. As more and more technologies cross the line between work and play, employees are heading to Google, Lifehacker or TheNewBoston as a first resort to troubleshooting their own IT challenges, both at home and at work.

Just ask a millennial. They’ll tell you. Want to learn HTML? Google it. Printer offline? Google it. Setting up work email on your phone? Google it. Need to make a screencast? Google it. You get the idea.

Millennials are walking into their first jobs with more up-to-date and sophisticated IT know-how than the IT departments themselves — that’s if they even exist, and they don’t in most startups. This new generation of future workers are more self-sufficient and technically resourceful than ever before. For more on the Millennial mindset, check out Cognizant’s video here.

In Gist’s New Workstyle, being self-sufficient is a a core attribute of the modern worker. But being self-sufficient extends beyond the practical knowledge of navigating IT, mobile devices and a world of productivity apps — it’s also a state of mind. The modern worker is entrepreneurial, independent, enterprising and technically adventurous. They are hungry for new tools, they want need the latest beta invite to that bleeding edge productivity software (looking at you Asana), they implement Agile methods on their own in small teams, they stay connected and can work from anywhere — reliably mobile in every aspect of execution. These are workers confident in taking initiative and finding solutions out on their own, while experimenting with different means to productivity.

There are two key factors driving the self-sufficient modern worker and their relationship with technology. As GigaOm Pro’s report on the Future of Workplaces explains:

1. Disintermediation of IT

“The widespread availability of cloud services has empowered individual workers to bypass IT and use of services that would otherwise not be available or would take an enormous amount of time to be deployed. Box.net is a classic example of this: A simple file-sharing service with its easy-to-handle interface is used by millions of workers who do not need the complexity of enterprise-grade collaboration applications such as SharePoint.”

2. Decline of Legacy Technologies, Emergence of Consumer Technologies

“Information overload and the failure of legacy technologies to manage such overloads are leading to their decline as new ways of working take hold. For example:

- Only 35 percent of workers expect to use email more in the future compared to last year.
- Similarly, the use of office landlines is also likely to decline.

These two technologies have been a foundational communication system for close to two decades, but as the data shows, their effectiveness in managing work is declining.  Increasingly, alternative forms of communication are mobile phones, social networks, video communications and instant messaging/chat.

All of the above started not at an enterprise level but within the homes of workers, employees, students, relatives, parents and colleagues.”

For more reading on the New Workstyle check out our previous posts:

The New Workstyle is Always Connected, Not Always Available
The New Workstyle is Authentic
The New Workstyle is Built on Trust
The Mobile Workstyle