Do we distance people from work?
A hammer is a tool, not a decision-maker. All the technologies available to us in the workplace are tools.
The philosopher A.C. Grayling has helpfully pointed out that we might reasonably expect to live for about 1,000 months. A large part of this time is spent asleep, but another sizeable portion is spent working. When I read that 70% of US workers are supposedly disengaged in the workplace, I wondered what we have done to design work that could distance people from participating meaningfully. We may need to think more about what shapes how work is done and our relationship with work.
Technology seems a reasonable place to start. The office has labour-saving devices, but we are working longer and harder. The problem might be whether we have taken the time to fit technology into the social system of work or, as I suspect, just added technology to work.
Implicitly, this is a question of whether or not technology in the workplace is socially and organisationally neutral. This is not an arcane theoretical question. How we respond might tell us more about ourselves, others, and work.
To illustrate this point, Neil Postman (in Technopoly, 1992) talks about how introducing the stethoscope changed medical practice and, in some important ways, the philosophy of practice.
This is not to say that the stethoscope was not an advance in medical practice over guessing or random prodding; it was. The question is, what else did this tool change? Postman outlines some of the objections raised by practitioners at the time:
…interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant. Doctors would lose their ability to conduct skilful examinations and rely more on the machinery than on their own experience and insight.
Postman was criticised (mostly by doctors) for over-blowing this example. Still, an important idea remains that technology puts distance between people and their work.
I recognise that I stand, as Galadriel says, on a knife edge here. I am the first to concede that using a hammer on a nail is a significant advance in hitting it with my hand. So, the technology of a hammer is an important and valuable advance. But there are other technologies (primarily communications technologies) that distance or remove us from what might be important parts of our work.
For example, introducing the Dictaphone distanced the executive from the secretary. The introduction of email distanced one person from another even though they were two office cubicles away. I have expressed it as a distance in relationships between people but also about objectifying how work is done.
For example, in Postman’s view, the stethoscope contributed to objectifying the patient in the relationship between doctor and patient. It puts distance into the relationship. There was a patient to be examined in a detached way using technology (and a patient was an unreliable source of information about their condition), which put distance between the doctor and his (as it mainly was then) own intuition and judgement.
This rings true for me when I think about the technology we have introduced into the modern workplace. How often do managers set aside their judgment when confronted by the ‘truth’ offered by data delivered through technology? We are constantly told that machines are faster and more reliable at processing information on a scale we could never hope to match. I’m told daily of the virtues of ‘big data’ (which I understand is old news, and I should now be focused on ‘fast data’). Why wouldn't we question our fallible reasoning in the face of the ‘evidence’ provided by technology? But to what extent is the manager being distanced from the important human part of their work? The skill of judgement in decision-making and direct engagement in their work.
It is the idea that technology puts distance between people, and perhaps most importantly, that it puts distance between one’s judgement and actions, which I find interesting in this story.
I have been interested to see the big technology firms that were among the first to advocate ‘teleworking’ now bring people back into the workplace. In encouraging teleworking (or flexible work), these companies sought to provide their employees with the freedom to choose to work in a way that balanced work and life while simultaneously freeing them from what was seen as the stifling bureaucracy of the workplace. The anticipated outcome was improved productivity and innovation. Intriguingly, the reason for encouraging people back into the workplace seems to be the acknowledgement that work is a human activity that requires human interaction to generate productivity and innovation.
Teleworking might be seen as another example of technology putting distance into a human activity—technology redefines what work is. It allows work to be personalised, piecemeal, specialised, and isolated. It can distance the person from management, their colleagues, and the organisation. The recent response to bringing teleworkers back into the office seems to subscribe to the view that technology is a tool and that work is an essentially human activity that requires a sense of personal relationship in the workplace. The idea is that human interaction in the workplace is inherently valuable.
I share this view. My experience is that innovation arises from familiarity in the workplace. It requires an interaction based on something other than my knowledge of my colleague's work persona and what I know of them as people. It brings together different perspectives and views, and the relationship allows these to be tested, refined, and adapted in a way that draws on more than just what we know as ‘work’. It draws on all the fuzziness and insightfulness of human relationships and judgements. I have applied the learning people have gained from riding mountain bikes to business planning, from people who play online games to the possibilities of enhanced collaboration through technology, and from people who cook on the ideas of organisational balance. We advance through these interactions.
A hammer is a tool, not a decision-maker. All the technologies available to us in the workplace are tools. If we allow technology to objectify our workplace relationships or abrogate our decision-making responsibility to technology, we and our workplaces will be poorer for it. There remains an essential need for human observation, interaction, and critical thinking in the workplace. I also think this connects us more deeply with our work—the skill, the judgement, and engagement.
I'm curious whether technology already has a stranglehold on the workplace and what we might have lost. Are the much-reported feelings of angst, stress, and disengagement in our modern workplaces resulting from people being distanced from their work? (Technology is necessarily the culprit in this but my illustrative example.)
As Adam Smith, whose quotes on pin makers and the division of labour are widely cited, also said:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
How we apply technology in the workplace, understand it as part of the social system of work, and position ourselves concerning work are important questions. There can be no doubt that technology is essential to work. But there is a need to think more clearly about the relationship between people, technology, and work. And less talk that focuses on technology alone. It is about embracing the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of technology. It is about reflecting on Henry Thoreau’s observation that technology has the potential to offer ‘improved means to unimproved ends’.
So, how might we avoid unimproved ends in the workplace?
