New Technologies Are Forcing Workers to Act More Human
True story: A gaggle of top managers at a hotshot Silicon Valley company hated their weekly meetings but loved their electronic mail. E-mail was quick, direct and to the point. Meetings were gassy, bloated and a waste of time. So they decided to cancel their regular meetings and meet only when confronted with problems just too tough to handle over the network.
Barely three months later, these champions of high-tech management unanimously agreed to resume their regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings.
What happened?
They discovered that they had created a morale-busting, network-generated nightmare. When the managers did get together, the meetings turned out to be unpleasant and unproductive. Precisely because they could use e-mail to reach consensus on the easy issues, arguing the thorny issues face-to-face turned their “big problem” meetings into interpersonal combat zones.
E-mail interaction had effectively erased the need for the sort of casual agreement and social niceties that make most meetings tolerable. In fact, the e-mail actually became more hostile as participants maneuvered themselves in anticipation of the big-problem meetings. All of a sudden, those weekly face-to-face meetings didn’t seem like such a waste of time after all.
To be sure, an ever-growing portion of business interactions are now being mediated by new technologies. These days, if an organization isn’t setting up its own “intranet” with each and every employee having his or her very own World Wide Web home page, it’s using IBM/Lotus Notes or GroupWise to share information across the enterprise. The conventional wisdom is that digital networks are becoming the dominant medium for managing human work. This is undeniably true and becoming even truer.
Focusing on this conventional wisdom, however, obscures the truly provocative impact of these technologies. Asking how people will communicate and collaborate across tomorrow’s networks is the obvious question. But there is a more-intriguing issue: How will these networks transform traditional face-to-face interactions? As more and more meetings are managed on-line, what happens to the context and content of personal presence? How will our virtual interactions reshape the expectations and qualities of our physical conversations?
Socio-romantic observations that “there’s no substitute for looking someone straight in the eye, feeling the firmness of their handshake, assessing the cut of their jib, etc., etc., etc “ are beside the essential point. Of course, face-to-face communications will remain a vital part of the relationship repertoire. But, as that Silicon Valley company painfully discovered, the network can radically reframe what it means to have a physical meeting in a virtual world.
At the very least, an organization’s networks can pretty much guarantee that the relevant individuals have access to the information necessary to make their decisions. Indeed, the network can even facilitate all manner of messages and conversations before and after the decisions get made. Perhaps an ever-growing proportion of decisions are even made and implemented without the principals ever having to be in the same room.
But what of those decisions that--by virtue of culture, circumstance or complexity--require interpersonal interactions? Clearly, the quality of these conversations is going to be heavily influenced by all the digital interactions that preceded them. To dramatically expand an organization’s digital reach at the price of undermining its interpersonal interaction hardly qualifies as a triumph of cost-saving.
So all this technology has really brought the organization back to a stubborn reality: The challenge in productively managing these organizational media lies less in their opportunity to create new online interactions than in their impact on how people actually work with one another face-to-face in real-time.
Indeed, the real value of these technologies may come from their ability to generate face-to-face meetings that simply wouldn’t have existed otherwise. For example, Boeing used a high-level computer-aided engineering network to manage the development of its new 777 passenger jet. This software network had the ability to alert Boeing engineers whenever their proposed modifications in sub-assemblies interfered with other subassemblies, e.g., when a hydraulic system modification might interfere with an electrical system. The software alerted people that a potential conflict was brewing.
To its astonishment, Boeing management discovered that its engineers were deliberately making modifications in the plans that interfered with other systems. A form of software sabotage? Not at all. The Boeing engineers were taking advantage of the network to actually find out who was working on the other systems. That way, they could actually get together to talk about their designs. In other words, the network created the opportunity for productive collaboration around the 777 that Boeing’s own management structure could not.
The irony--and it is a tasty one--is that as it becomes ever easier and cheaper to automate various facets of face-to-face relationships, what’s seemingly left behind becomes even more important. Those casual chats in the cafeteria, the chance encounter on the elevator, that upper-management retreat at the resort all assume disproportionate significance precisely because they are part of that dwindling share of organizational time devoted to physical interaction. Precisely because more and more work is being conducted in virtual contexts, physical contexts acquire a greater prominence and profile.
The role of non-technology-mediated interactions and their relationship with the technology-mediated environment thus becomes one of the most vital issues for organizations that truly care about getting the best return from their network investments. Indeed, it’s time perhaps for more organizations to start asking themselves what relationships and interactions should absolutely not be mediated by technology.
The rise of all these new networks and media represents a golden opportunity for both individuals and organizations to re-evaluate the meaning of productive relationships and the role technology can play in managing them. In a very real sense, these technologies represent a gift. They offer a medium for people to figure out what really matters in working well with others. Some things just can’t be automated. Indeed, even the things that can be automated require humans to become even more sensitive to their impact on the quality of their interactions. Ironically, these technologies are really pushing us to be more in touch with how we want to communicate with others. These technologies, appropriately, are forcing us to become more human and less like machines.
