Do we distance people from work?

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. So, when I read that 70% of US workers are supposedly disengaged in the workplace I wonder what we have done to design work that could so distance people from participating meaningfully in work. Maybe, we need to give more thought to what shapes the way work is done and our relationship with work.

Technology seems a reasonable place to start. The office is filled with 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, we have 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 the way 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, say, 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, but for me there remains an important idea—it is the idea that technology puts distance between people and the work they do.

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 on hitting it with my hand. So, the technology of a hammer is important and useful advance. But there are other technologies (and maybe they are mostly communications technologies) that distance or remove us from what might be important parts of the work we do.

For example, the introduction of the Dictaphone distanced the executive from the secretary. The introduction of email distanced one person from another despite the fact that they are two office cubicles away. I have expressed it as a distance in relationship between people but it is also about the objectification of 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 put 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 its own condition), and it put distance between the doctor and his (as it was mostly then) own intuition and judgement.

In some ways 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 own judgement 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 that 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 own 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 the work they do? The skill of judgement in decision making and direct engagement in the work they do.

It is the idea that technology puts distance between people, and perhaps most importantly, that it puts distance between one’s own 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’ are now see to be bringing 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 given 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—the 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 that human interaction in the workplace is one that is inherently valuable.

I share this view. My experience is that innovation arises from familiarity in the workplace. It requires an interaction that is not based just on my knowledge of my colleagues work persona's but also on 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 relationship 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 we abrogate our decision-making responsibility to technology then 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 that this connects us more deeply with the work we do—the skill, the judgement and our engagement.

I do wonder whether technology already has a stranglehold on the workplace, and what we might have lost already. Are the much reported feelings of angst, stress and disengagement in our modern workplaces the result of people being distanced from their work? (And technology 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, how we understand it as part of the social system of work, and how position ourselves in relation to 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 maybe less talk that focuses on the 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?