The Complexity of Work
Relationships between people, time, and technology
A 12-minute Read. (Image: Original curtesy of Pixabay.com modified by Dr Reg Butterfield 2022)
Welcome back to the journey of organisational discovery. In our last newsletter we discussed that knowledge workers are becoming an increasingly important and majority players in the way that organisations work. We argued that it is crucial to find novel ways of using power and control in organisations if knowledge workers are to be attracted to and retained within an organisation. The traditional bureaucratic hierarchical approach is less valid today than the past to achieve this task, if it was ever valid in the way that many organisations operated the system.
Today, we continue to examine the nature of work as we move towards understanding what needs to change in the way that organisations are designed and managed. In doing so, we examine the impact of technology on the nature of work for more clues in our continuing quest.
Hands up if you owned or purchased an iPod, that strange innovative music storage device that was introduced to the world in 2001 by Apple? I say strange because it was nothing like its predecessor the ‘Walkman’, which also changed the way that music could be listened on the hoof. Both forms of technology aimed to meet the needs of the consumer – providing music wherever you wanted to listen to it. It was an excellent example of how technology changed behaviour and led from buying and playing music cassettes to online streaming. Aficionados of music will complain about the limited level of sound quality, yet this didn’t stop it changing the way that music was enjoyed by 450 million people who purchased one.
The iPod is a bit like work, it has pretty much retained its original approach for decades and is now having to accept that the world has changed. The smart phone challenged and changed the way that music is stored and played today even though the quality hasn’t improved, so the iPod is no longer being made. How long before the smartphone reaches its zenith is still unknown, albeit its eventual demise is inevitable.
So, where are we as far as the work situation is concerned? We know that technology has brought about significant change in the way that people work. Yet the needs of the workforce seem to be unmet if the high level of disenchanted or disengaged people are accurate indicators.
What is the impact of increasing use of technology in organisations? One thing that we know is that the doom and gloom of the ‘experts’ and media of the early 2000s has not become a reality thus far. There has been no great drive towards unemployment, albeit the labour market may be changing from blue collar work to knowledge worker roles as we mentioned in our newsletter last week (Knowledge workers).
The manufacturing industry has certainly experienced significant change because of new technology. Not only in the speed, efficiency, quality, and flexibility of production, but also its availability to smaller organisations through digital technology. Whilst automated systems and complex machinery have revolutionised mass production, their impact on the role of people at work has also changed. The use of increased automation, smarter robotics, IoT connecting machines, self-monitoring, etc., has meant that the blue-collar roles are rapidly vanishing. A new form of white-collar work, such as data analyst is taking its place. The spread of the knowledge worker is really having an impact here.
The increasing use of 3D technology, particularly with smaller manufacturers, inventors, and entrepreneurs is becoming more popular. 3D printing requires less time and material to produce complex designs, and the technology is becoming cheaper with every new model. Products or components that are created with 3D printing technology are not produced along an assembly line. They are often created at a single workstation reducing the number of subcomponents and manufacturing steps needed. However, the industry needs skilled engineers to design and manufacture these goods, almost like the artisans of the past that we mentioned last week. Once again, this means moving from a blue-collar workforce to a highly trained white-collar profession.
Technology has effectively changed the business model of manufacturing and the skillset of the workers. The new products of the technologically advanced manufacturing processes now require specialised talent that is beyond that of just a decade ago. We know from last week’s newsletter that this implies a new approach to organisational design and management if these people are to be attracted as members of the workforce that is needed now. This is underlined by the current demand for such people outstripping the supply across much of the world. This will get worse unless organisations change the image of engineering and attract new talent – the UK alone will have almost 20% of its engineers able to retire by 2026 and engineers represent about 21% of its active workforce. Other countries face a similar situation.
The predominant focus of using technology in the manufacturing and production arena has been to increase the volume and quality of products. At the same time, it has been able to reduce delivery times through improved flexibility and inter-production unit collaborations via IoT. All this makes sound business sense and 4.0 Technology, and 4.0 Supply Chain Management actively supports this approach. However, these laudable outcomes can only be reached if the organisation’s infrastructure supports these changes.
The nature of today’s production methodologies enables a significant amount of automation in decision-making because they are repeatable decisions that are perfect for algorithmic heuristics. This ability to deal with more data quicker and the automation of decisions enables the reduction of the number of the people in production who would historically rely on a combination of experience and limited real-time information. Which is too slow for today’s needs. The remaining people in production now need a different level of knowledge and decision-making, hence the knowledge worker.
There is also a ‘hidden’ downside to this focus on speed of production, the compression of time. What does this mean, and does it matter? Dr Ross Wirth and I believe that it is one of the major issues confronting organisations today. The shorter timescales involved from start of production (SOP) to delivery of the product to the end customer is becoming ever shorter as technology replaces old ways of working. This ability to reduce cycle time in many instances has created an expectation of speed and customisation for everything, even if it’s not practical to do so. Before going into more detail let’s explore more of the work.
If we move on to the support infrastructure and those who work in these areas we have a slightly different situation, currently. The support infrastructure consists of different roles and responsibilities that are linked to two major areas, ‘products and services’, which are also subdivided into ‘internal and external’ customer facing. For example, manufacturing requires internal support services such as maintenance as well as the people who design the products that are eventually the products that they are going to produce, and so forth. Equally, there is a need for some form of finance support system, strategic direction through leadership, supply chain system, and recruitment and training through HR services, etc.
Whilst not going into fine details about this complex relationship it is sufficient today to focus on what may be an unintended consequence of the rewards and benefits enjoyed by the manufacturing production processes. The compression of time and how technology may have inadvertently made the situation even worse for the typically white-collar workers in the support infrastructure.
When I started work there was no technology to assist the support workers unless we refer to typewriters and 1899 vintage Roneo machines as technology! It wasn’t until 1967 that the DRAM was invented and even then, nobody really knew how to use it until many years later. The emerging technology during the 1970s was more about making the existing better, such as daisy-wheel printers that evolved from electric typewriters and so on, until Ethernet was invented by Xerox. This became the local area networks (LANs) that people today will still recognise, even though most are now moving more towards WLANs. This move to LANs was a significant time in the introduction of ‘new tools and processes’ to assist the support workers. For example, it enabled users to work on the same projects without having to download and manually carry copies of work on disks to upload on another workstation, which was the practice before LANs.
One of the major differences between production and support is that for support systems to have any real impact they need to be used within a network. What does that mean?
To assist in making sense of this we refer to Metcalf's Law that was conceived in 1983 in relation to fax machine connectivity. For example, it is no use having just one fax machine. For it to be of value in use there had to be more than one and he developed a formula that was based on “the value of having a fax machine is proportional to the number of possible connections”. Following the work of economist George Franklin Gilder (1993) and with the globalisation of the Internet Metcalf’s law was carried over to users and networks, although its original intent was to describe Ethernet connections. Whilst the original numerical value formula is arguably not achieved today, the implications of the rationale behind the original formula remains true.
Let’s use email as an example to explain this important statement. 2021 heralded the 50th anniversary of email, which began as a small group of people communicating with one another in 1971. 1978 saw the first spam message. This unsolicited email message is said to have created $13m sales for the sender’s company products. Email design and systems have changed over time and went wireless in 2002 via Blackberry.
The take-up and use of email was very slow and relied on recipients having access initially to a LAN and later to the Internet if it was to have any meaningful role. Even then, many people kept printed copies for their records as the trust in such systems was limited.
Today, surveys indicate that support office workers spend at least 25% of their week responding to or writing emails and maintaining a “zero Inbox” is unattainable leaving a backlog of email messages sitting there trying to capture our attention. In an earlier newsletter (The Big Quit) I quoted Microsoft’s research that during the COVID period of working from home the number of emails increased significantly and, together with increased online meetings, added to the stress of home workers.
Emails started off as a good idea to help communication. Have they now become a necessary evil? Instead of printed records people often use emails to show decisions have been made, items ordered, and so on. In doing so they copy other individuals, particularly managers, to demonstrate these activities, which is resulting in far too many emails being received unnecessarily. Further, there is often pressure to acknowledge a message thereby closing the conversation while adding still more to the email clutter we face daily. Email has moved from being a form of communication to another type of record keeping as a form of user ‘insurance’.
The generation of workers now entering organisations do not use emails personally and only use them when required to at work, “emails are for old people”. Young people do not know how to write effective emails and their ‘text speak’ does not translate well in corporate documents. Do not get me started on trying to sort out multiple discussion threads in group text messages!
The alternatives to email are slowly being adopted in organisations and yet they have their own problems, they were designed for social media and not business. A question for the office worker is, how many of the technological innovations are helping them in their day-to-day activities and what is the impact of this on the nature of work and management?
Support services are faced with a wide range of options that are allegedly able to enhance almost any business initiative. The options are applications, software, and platforms that are said to allow collaboration between remote employees, improve customer satisfaction, build stronger company cultures, drive revenue, and even eliminate wasteful inefficiencies. That seems to be great if it is the reality experienced by the greater workforce.
Things may have become more streamlined and automated thanks to technology however, the impact of it on the work environment has also created some problems. There’s a learning curve to implementing new processes, which also require new thinking and ways of operating typically without relevant changes being made to the organisational management and performance measuring systems. Separating workers by screens creates miscommunication, particularly in cross cultural situations. Being glued to your email arguably can seriously disrupt productivity. Automated voicemails can make customers upset and create unnecessary stress on the worker who must eventually deal with them.
Let’s revisit Metcalf’s Law for a moment. Roughly put, Metcalfe's Law states that the more users a network has, the more valuable it is to each individual user. The ‘hidden’ shadow side of Metcalf’s law seems to be more prominent than the advantages sold by technology marketeers, I suggest. The shadow side means that as communication cost decreases, the number of interactions increases exponentially, as does the time required to process them. Remember that the manufacturing and production successes have compressed time in terms of expectations of input to outcome and yet the support processes and software seem to be causing a need for more time. The impact can be seen in the workplace.
The fact that you can work from anywhere at any time, can also mean that your work often takes longer to get done. If you work from home, it may feel like you never really leave the office. Having a (smart) computer in your pocket that is constantly connected to your work email can make it feel impossible to ever really be off duty. Smart phones buzzing and pinging notifications consistently draw workers back to their jobs.
This technology driven approach doesn’t result in better work; in fact, it can lead to burnout, lack of sleep and even mild depression. People who cannot disconnect from work end up with a lower performance because of stress.
I remember a CEO of a high-tech global business asking me how he can compensate his most excellent technical experts. They were at the top of their profession, were paid well over the norm, and he wanted to reward them further. I suggested that as they had everything else, what they would want, and value was “time to think and develop new ideas”. He responded, “that is the very thing that I cannot afford to give them”.
The irony of this response reinforces that as technology moves forward and time becomes more compressed to meet the shortening timescales created by effective technological systems, the workforce at all levels is running as fast as they can only to stand still, or even go backwards.
Research in 2016 by Bain, showed that the average manager working a 47-hour week had just 6½ hours per week of uninterrupted time to get work done. We have found no evidence to suggest that this has improved either with or without increased use of technology in the workplace.
Next week we will move further into the world of managing work and leave this little snippet to encourage you to not only join us in the discussion, but also let your colleagues, friends and network know about management minefields newsletter. Just click on the link below.
Consider -
A study by CEB found that 60% of employees must now consult with at least 10 colleagues each day just to get their jobs done, while 30% must engage 20 or more. The result? Companies take more time to do things. For example, it takes 30% longer to complete complex IT projects, 50% longer to hire new people, and nearly 25% longer to sign new customer contracts. And that’s just in the last five years. What will the next five years bring?
Great Piece! Increasingly, we have call backs. I was thinking with technological improvement, that would have been reduced to a minimum. Alas! Now I know the reason. Compression of Time!