Big Brother is the fictional leader of a totalitarian state in George Orwell's famous novel 1984.
There’s a widely held belief that Covid has permanently transformed the modern workplace into a digital wonderland in which physical presence is no longer required. In April 2020 Satya Nadella—the leader of one of the world’s preeminent technology organizations—asserted that he had seen more digital transformation occur during the preceding two months than in the prior two years. His claim has been echoed by multiple CEOs who have publicly proclaimed that historical work practices have been permanently altered by the global pandemic.
Businesses responded to Covid restrictions by equipping their knowledge workers with a host of digital tools that provide immersive collaboration experiences. Enlightened CEOs immediately requested reports on the usage of these tools to ensure that their employees weren’t goofing off while working from home. Quarantine productivity was measured in terms of Zoom minutes, Slack messages, Jira tickets, email traffic, file uploads, Kanban tickets, code submissions, etc.
The ready availability of these activity metrics is now being institutionalized in a new set of tools that purport to measure the productivity of employees, teams and even whole departments. The digital surveillance capabilities of these tools are unparalleled. They’re able to monitor how you spend your working time on a monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or minute-to-minute basis. They are able to determine the nature, frequency and content of your interactions with co-workers and non-co-workers. The subjects of these tools—which is all of us—have developed an appropriate slang term for these surveillance services. They’re popularly called bossware. Surfshark, a personal privacy services company, has identified over 30 varieties of bossware currently available to employers.
Although they profess to respect the privacy rights of individuals, bossware tools are inherently invasive. They blur the long-held distinction between the supervision of exempt and nonexempt employees. If a totalitarian regime in a third world country performed a similar level of surveillance on its citizens, the U.S. State Department would undoubtedly file a human rights complaint!
Activity does not equal productivity
Besides the sheer creepiness of knowing that Big Brother is constantly watching, the whole premise that digital activity is a measure of personal productivity is fundamentally flawed. The productivity of assembly line workers, cable box installers or repair technicians can be directly measured in terms of units or assignments completed per unit time. It’s much more difficult to identify the concrete outcomes of many forms of knowledge work and doubly difficult to relate such outcomes to measures of digital activity.
There’s a subtle irony here as well. The same managers who demand regular productivity surveillance reports are the first to challenge employees seeking pay raises on the basis of such activity. One of the frequent lectures that employees receive during their annual pay reviews is that ‘we reward accomplishment in this company, not activity’.
Collaboration tools can actually undermine productivity
Survey after survey reports that employees suffer from too many digital distractions at work. They’re being inundated with alerts, notifications, updates and text messages. Furthermore, they frequently need to master multiple tools that perform the same function such as mastering the use of Box, OneDrive and Google Drive to share files with colleagues working in different departments. The continuous context switching required to manipulate the smorgasbord of collaboration tools that exists in most companies may actually undermine the productivity that such tools were intended to foster.
Digital distractions not only interrupt work in progress. All too often they become procrastination triggers, sidetracking employees from working on higher priority, higher value tasks. Psychological studies have repeatedly shown that sustained mental flow is needed to accomplish the most meaningful and difficult tasks. Procrastination triggers provided by digital distractions are the nemesis of productivity, not the enablers.
Intentional collaboration versus accidental collaboration
None of the foregoing discussion is intended to imply that collaboration tools are inherently evil or unable to deliver productivity benefits. Their utility is compromised when they’re allowed to proliferate with no constraints (i.e. ‘to each his own’) and the manner in which they’re used is unconstrained as well. Unbridled proliferation and ungoverned usage results in the digital angst encountered in countless employee surveys.
The solution is simple in principle but devilishly difficult to implement in practice. Any organization that is able to standardize on an enterprise-wide collaboration toolkit and enforce guidelines regarding the use of individual tools will invariably improve its efficiency and perhaps its effectiveness.
Best practice guidelines are familiar to every reader of this article. Text messages of certain sizes should be promoted into email messages. Email messages of certain sizes sent to large numbers of co-workers should be promoted into video calls. Terms such as ‘Need Help’, ‘Please Advise’ or ‘Information Only’ should be inserted in email subject lines to denote required response times. Meetings should have a specific purpose, limited audience and written agenda. In many instances information communicated in meetings could be shared more efficiently via email or view-on-demand video messages.
Although guidelines such as these are well known, they need to be customized to suit the business needs, geographic dispersion and age/gender/cultural demographics of individual organizations. If such guidelines can be established—through consensus or fiat—then digital activity metrics become useful. If an organization is able to define its collaboration goals in terms of digital usage guidelines, then bossware becomes a useful tool in achieving such goals.
Bring in the anthropologists!!
Business Systems Analysts play a critical role in optimizing the use of business applications within every IT organization. They provide a bridge between IT and its business partners, translating new business requirements into technical specifications that IT can understand while also explaining the technical capabilities of applications to business users in terms that they can understand.
The proliferation and popularity of collaboration tools has created a need for a similar role focused on the use of such tools to optimize workplace productivity. We desperately need the services of trained anthropologists who can function as Collaboration Tools Analysts, studying the ways in which work is actually performed within different organizations, developing customized guidelines for the use of specific tools, configuring tools accordingly and assisting managers in monitoring guideline compliance.
We’ve spent far too long letting the tools dictate how work is being performed. We need to leverage the expertise of professionally trained anthropologists to impose our behavioral requirements upon the tools. In the words of the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity!”
