Technology – a double edge sword?

Online meetings are now the standard in most organisations, with the prevalence of Zoom, Microsoft Teams et al.

My first use of online meetings dates back well over a decade, when Skype was the order of the day. I was managing a multi-national team that I could only converse with via telephone conference facilities and physical visits – all of which needed a level of consideration and planning. Suddenly, this new software presented a new opportunity for instant face-to-face dialogue that I had never experienced before, which I was delighted to have access to. But, over time, I started to notice that all was not well.

As team manager, I was starting to “over-step the mark” – getting too much into the intricacies of detail of what team members were doing, even in technical areas which were beyond necessity. It was too easy to “jump on a video call”. In hindsight, appeasing me became a key activity for my team in itself – with more time being spent by the team trying to impress me and answer my inane irrelevant questions, rather than deliver the true value that the team was there for. 

My over-exuberance with Skype also had unintended consequences on the empowerment of the team. As skilled professionals, they had previously felt trusted to make decisions – but this trust had been significantly eroded by my excessive interference, to such an extent that even the most banal of technical decisions was being referred to me, much to my initial annoyance. It was a very sobering realisation to make – that I was the root cause of this problem. It took time for me to reset boundaries, and even longer to restore the team’s confidence. They weren’t an under-performing team by any stretch, but my actions had inadvertently left them feeling like one.

AUTOMATING BAD PROCESSES

W. Edwards Deming once famously said, “A bad system will beat a good person, every time”. Although this quote comes from a book, “Out of the Crisis”, which is almost 40 years old, it has relevance to how we apply technology today.

Too often, technology is seen as the “golden carrot” which will make a situation instantly better, when in reality it is a dose of process re-engineering that should be prescribed. Throughout my career, I’ve seen first-hand the disappointment in organisations that have spent a fortune on automating bad processes, only to find that they are left with a big software implementation bill, and negligible gains.

WORSENING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

In the last decade, we have seen an increasing trend for customer interaction to be automated or made “online only”. When this is done right, the interaction between customer and business is seamless, to such an extent that many consumers probably can’t remember leaving their sofas to go shopping or order a pizza.

Indeed, the unrivalled success of Amazon, and the dire situation of the High Street, is a testament to how technology has changed the behaviours of your average shopper.

But is this change always for the better? How many of you get frustrated by being passed around like a hot potato at a call centre, for a relatively simple query? And aren’t there sensitive times, like these, where the lack of ability to speak to a person just seems downright insensitive?

USE OF DATA

To be clear, I am not going to talk about ethics (Cambridge Analytica), or the like, here – that would require a much longer article. Technology has the power to give us access to unprecedented levels of data and insights, on pretty much anything of our choosing. But this new “data feast” can be fraught with its own inherent dangers.

Early on in my consulting career, I remember working with an organisation that had made significant investment in an analytics system, which I was boldly told could provide data on “absolutely anything”. This was evidenced by statistics that were proudly shown for coffee consumption, broken down by caffeinated, de-caffeinated and fair-trade etc., and toilet roll usage.

In this situation, my advice to organisations is quite simple: think about how you are using this information, and how it is helping to improve your business outcomes – “because we can” is not the right answer.

NOT CONSIDERING THE IMPACT ON HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

My final point is regarding the impact that this technology is having on our behaviour, as human beings. Does the relative ease at which we can now do things that we couldn’t before mean that we are far less considerate to the impact?

Is it now too easy to fire off that ill-considered email late at night? Are we becoming less compassionate, and less human, through our incessant use of technology? Some studies (1) are cautioning that this may be the case – particularly for our children .

If you are brought up in a world where your elders shout “Alexa”, and make all sorts of instant demands – with no “please”, or “thank you”, there is a real danger that this could become the norm for how our future generations interact with one another.