Five ways to tempt and tame Gen Y

The Facebook generation can be dream employees - if you know how to manage them. Danny Bradbury offers tips for keeping them under control and productive.

They're young, precocious, tech-savvy - and they like shiny stuff. Generation Y knows what it wants, and if managers and employers want to retain their talents, then they'd better give it to them.

The newest generation of employees grew up with technologies that appealed to consumers, such as Facebook, MySpace and Skype - and they want to carry those experiences into work.

But employers have to tread a fine line between allowing employees to access consumer technologies, and protecting their technical resources - and their reputations. There are a variety of risks associated with opening up IT to a generation of users that want your systems to work like Wikipedia or YouTube.

How can businesses make sure they are pleasing their younger employees, while also keeping their lawyers happy and their systems secure? Here are five steps that will help you to retain a balance.

Create a demilitarised zone
Quarantine an area of your network to keep it safe from any attacks that your precocious young employee base might allow in. The resources on this network - mission-critical equipment including database and email servers, for example - would be rendered untouchable by being placed on their own VLAN. The demilitarised zone would be an open area in which employees could access their online resources without fear of infecting the equipment in the network's militarised zone.

Ideally, access to the militarised and demilitarised zones would be governed by the account that the user logs in with - which should be a non-administrative account, limiting the potential for malware to infect the system. This would also help them to psychologically separate the account that they might use for personal interactions online from the account that they use for work purposes. Naturally, though, the devices connecting to the system should still be using endpoint scanning software to help ensure that they are clean.

Use gateway protection
A gateway content scanning system will help to ensure that your employees don't stumble into trouble when connecting to web 2.0-based resources. These systems can be configured to allow or refuse specific sites, and many of them can also be instructed to change access to those sites based on the time of day, and on the person attempting to access them. Companies may only want employees using Facebook during their lunch hour, for example, while allowing human resources to access the site at all times, so that it can conduct background checks on would-be employees.

Embrace mobile computing
Generation Y workers like flexibility. They love their smartphones and other mobile devices, yet these can be toxic for corporate networks. Network access control can stop unauthorised devices from connecting to the network, and can be used to authorise those devices that can connect, based on their ID, and their current software footprint. Policy and authorisation servers can be used together to quarantine access to the network based on the mobile device's status.

Implementing VPN technology is also important in a working environment where a significant proportion of the employee base is mobile, and perhaps works from home. You must ensure that the link between the mobile device and your home network is encrypted.

Set a usage policy
If you're going to allow Generation Y to connect to social networking sites, you'll have to create policies so that they know how to behave. Inappropriate use of online resources could have an adverse effect on your organisation, by damaging its reputation or compromising its data. Your acceptable use policy should govern the posting and retrieval of online data from consumer-based services, alongside the use of local IT resources.

Employees should understand what your organisation considers to be inappropriate content to post online. This should include intellectual property owned by the company, alongside content that could potentially harm the company's reputation (such as drunken pictures from the office party, or prejudicial comments). Workers accessing data online should also be told in clear terms what constitutes inappropriate material (such as videos not pertaining to work that take up lots of bandwidth, for example, or copyrighted material downloaded via P2P sites).

Cater to their needs
Perhaps the most powerful role that a company can play in supporting Gen Y workers is to ensure that its own systems support their need for interaction. With blog and wiki software essentially free to implement, employers could do worse than installing these tools on their own networks, and making them available for workers to use.

Businesses could encourage workers to write blogs on topics related to their jobs, for example, or enable them to share knowledge and experiences with co-workers via wikis. Provided that you have an acceptable usage policy in place, it might also be appropriate to use external resources. Why not take advantage of Facebook's infrastructure by creating your own company group, and having people join?