Bringing humanity back into tech

What should modern workplace technology deliver besides improved productivity, efficiency and innovation? It should enable people to “stay connected internally and externally; and feel safe and cared for. It should facilitate the comfortable and expeditious flow of people, ideas and emotions,” wrote thought leader and HR executive Louis Efron in an article in Forbes.

This has a pretty human-centric value to it. Technology isn’t there instead of people. It’s there because it enables better human intervention. We need to carefully consider how the technology we adopt will impact people’s working lives – but it’s not a clear-cut choice between people and machines. For example, looking through Talking Circles’ workplace learning lens: career development, networking, mentoring and the building and maintenance of organisational knowledge can only be successfully achieved through a combination of humans and technology.

While early workplace tech was aimed at improving productivity and efficiency by removing human interaction, it also instilled a level of mistrust from employees; consider time recording or email monitoring as two examples. As Efron points out, these technologies were driven by the need to address negative behaviours in the workplace.

In contrast, fast-forward to the present and take a look at an initiative like The Edge, an office building that uses technology to learn about our habits at work. Here, technology complements and extends human capabilities rather than removing them from the process.

Technology for good

What people factors need to be considered in the introduction of technology in the workplace? Is adequate consideration given to the impact of technology on employees’ well-being? Poor and outdated technology can degrade the employee experience in many ways, making work less rewarding, more cumbersome and less connected than it should be. In the worst-case scenario, poor technology can leave people and organisations exposed to cyber-crime. Revisiting the make-up of the social enterprise, since technology has the capability to influence our human behaviour, the organisational decision-making process behind technological implementation is an important ethical consideration.

Digitally maturing companies push decision-making further down into the organisation, says MIT and Deloitte. They suggest that the key traits of effective digital leadership are about enabling the organisation – providing vision and purpose, creating conditions to experiment, empowering people to think differently, and getting people to collaborate across boundaries.

While 59% of CEOs believe they are pushing decision-making down, only around 33% of VP and director-level respondents report that it is happening. Although one may be tempted to conclude that leaders are unwilling to surrender their authority to others, some of our evidence suggests that employees may be reluctant to step up and assume their roles as digital leaders.

In summary, it is a combination of technology traits that makes life at work better for people. While most of the narrative in the media about AI, automation and workplace technology seems dystopian, HR and people development body CIPD has claimed that “focusing on the idea that technology will leave human beings with no jobs”. I believe these tech movements are allowing for some degree of role expansion by augmenting jobs that people are already doing. Using advanced technology to bring humanity back to the workplace is where it delivers the most exciting outcomes.