(From Forbes) -- Workplace culture evolves with each generation, and today’s hires have demands and needs quite different from what their hiring managers are used to. And of course, the batch of future employees who have yet to master the alphabet will bring still another set of cultural attitudes to the workplace when they arrive.

As just one astounding sign of what’s to come, note this fact: some kindergarteners are already more familiar with Twitter than their grown-up cohorts. Five-year-olds are condensing into 140 characters the lessons they learn each day, and working with students from all over the globe as they do so.

“They’re connected kids. They view the world differently,” says Heidi Echternacht, a Princeton, NJ teacher who tweets with her Kindergarteners. Her class tweets regularly with their “play partners” in Cairo, Egypt, about such topics as their classroom pets, local wildlife, and global time differences.

Echternacht’s colleague Amy Murray uses Twitter conversations with an Indonesian partner class to spark her students’ interest in cartography and weather patterns. “Every time we log on, we learn,” Murray said in a recent blog post.

She and other teachers using Twitter, who communicate through an online group called #Kinderchat, encourage their students to build a global mindset at the early age. This helps foster the emotional and cultural intelligence needed to thrive in the future workplace.

1) Build A Global Mindset

The ability to work with individuals, teams and organizations of diverse cultures is already crucial, but will become even more important with time. The workplace is increasingly “global” due to technology’s ability to shrink the boundaries of distance and time. And according to Dr. Mansour Javidan of the Thunderbird Global School of Management, successful executives possess a cocktail of intellectual, psychological and social attributes that enables them to influence colleagues from different backgrounds. These attributes comprise the “global mindset” now heralded among forward-thinking recruiters.

Increasingly, companies and organizations are seeking ways to foster that “global mindset.” They do so through formal training programs as well as informal initiatives – like twitter conversations facilitated around the themes of #globaled or #globalclassroom.

When today’s Kindergarteners enter the workplace and begin engaging with colleagues, customers and partners around the globe, they will already be seasoned at cultural intelligence.The companies they land in will have to be as well.

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