Martijn Aslander | Tech Philosopher | Guest Speaker | Thought Leader | Martijn Aslander | mail me |
Knowledge workers suffer from work stress and are more likely to have a burnout, they look forward less and less to opening their laptops at the start of each working day. They suffer from an overload of information that is inadequately filtered.
Over the long term, this is dangerous and expensive: knowledge workers will temporarily or permanently disengage.
The fact is, most employees lack ‘digital fitness’, a concept that we can break down into five pillars. How do you improve that digital fitness? Well, for example, by letting employees develop effective agreements at team level about when they can best use which digital tools, for what purposes and in what ways – preferably agreed unanimously.
Draw up a digital work manifesto
Employees should check regularly whether new, better digital tools have come onto the market. Have detailed discussions about this within the team each month and draw up a digital work manifesto.
In addition, given the increasing speed of change, it’s a good idea not to set anything in stone but to go for temporary solutions that are easy to adapt and improve. In that respect, we can learn from programmers, who refer to the open development phase of their programmes as being in a ‘permanent beta state’.
Wrong or limited use of our digital tools, combined with the proliferation of mails, notifications and other distractions, has overloaded our brains. But people don’t dare to raise this issue within organisations, so that the focus and budget goes to the wrong approach to dealing with the fallout. It’s high time we broke this taboo. Because the fact that in practice information and communication flows increasingly falter has far-reaching consequences.
Ashamed of our lack of digital skills
There is, of course, a direct link between physical fitness and digital fitness. Knowledge workers spend an average 95% of their work time indoors, where the air quality is poor and physical movement limited to a few trips to the espresso machine. Everyone realises that physical fitness is vital to digital fitness; but the reverse is also true.
Another factor that can stand in the way of digital fitness is that most knowledge workers, from senior to junior, are essentially in fear of their computers. They feel uncomfortable with the idea that they spend a large part of their day using a tool which they don’t fully understand.
Being ashamed of this fact, they don’t dare ask colleagues for digital help. This shame, which certainly affects managers in the higher echelons, can have far-reaching consequences. In England, for example, incorrect use of Excel led to 1,500 extra corona deaths, because people using the National Health Service’s contact-tracing programme overlooked more than 20,000 cases of infection.
In practice, many knowledge workers only use their computers as a glorified typewriter, leaving most of its potential untapped. So they continue to work the same way as they did in, say, the 1970s.
Not only do knowledge workers themselves have to keep their digital skills and knowledge up-to-speed. This is also a key task for both line managers and HR, who both often lack the necessary digital skills. They tend to be far too quick to assume their employees or colleagues have mastered their digital tools.
This is pure wishful thinking, and ensures that any given digitisation project is doomed to failure. It is estimated, for example, that 60-70% of all knowledge workers who use a computer on a daily basis don’t know what hitting alt+tab lets you quickly switch between programmes. And if this lack of digital skills also undermines psychological well-being within an organisation, then you have a real problem.
If people don’t feel safe to ask for help and tips about this kind of stuff, a logical consequence is that some of them will feel less engaged and no longer feel they’re making a significant contribution to the organisation. Which is disastrous for their motivation and can even lead to them quitting.
More quantity, less quality
There are those who draw the conclusion from all this that how we work isn’t working, but their response then tends to be simply to work even harder. We email even more now and with increased cc’s, thus causing even more disruption.
The fact is, one can communicate far better with someone through a face-to-face chat or a phone call. Email is increasingly being misused to send documents back and forth, which is essentially another symptom – we’ve never really thought about what knowledge work is and how to do it.
What we should be focused on is the human aspects of digitisation. People who work hard become tired and communicate less effectively. The role of managers is crucial here: don’t, for example, interfere with team members’ work too much, because employees want task-autonomy.
The more pressure they feel, the greater the chance of a burnout. If we look at how things really work within organisations, sadly we must conclude that too often the task-autonomy of knowledge workers is ridiculously low. Though managers don’t see it that way; or don’t want to see it, because they’re afraid that ‘delegating’ autonomy will come at the expense of their own influence and powerbase.
Quite apart from the work-related stress that this directly causes for knowledge workers, managers shouldn’t forget that they can better focus on managing workflows than people. As management theorist, Peter Drucker, pointed out as early as the 1950s: you will never know what’s going on inside the head of a knowledge worker.
So you should let that knowledge worker work autonomously. If the way they solve a problem is by taking a long shower or lying on a lawn, then let him do that. They’re still working. So don’t concern yourself as a manager with how a knowledge worker does their job.
Do you want something to be done, or do you want it to be done your way? Many managers want the latter and that, as Drucker rightly points out, is a fundamental mistake. Concentrate instead on managing the workflows because that’s where the real challenges lie.
Screen fatigue
What has been the impact of the corona crisis on all this? Corona has made working remotely commonplace and forced us to adopt it lightning fast. Many employees want things to stay this way, or want to move towards a hybrid model where they spend at most only part of their work hours in the office.
A logical consequence of this is that we now do much more online, including everything from hours of meetings to online Friday after work drinks. This also has a big impact on how you provide leadership: middle managers in particular suffer from a tendency to keep ‘their people’ glued to their screens all day because they want to direct and control.
This is a very traditional reflex, and leaders and managers instead need to investigate how they can best implement remote leadership. Some may find this challenging, as it means they will have to focus mainly on trust rather than control.
What’s more, the war for talent is with us once again, as the global economy picks up and more and more vacancies remain open longer. So, managers will be well-advised to respond to the wishes of talents to work (more) remotely.
To be able to work well digitally or remotely, you must be digitally fit. All things considered, digital fitness is probably more important now than ever before. Many knowledge workers have reached their limit: their ‘screen fatigue’ is worse than ever before, especially as they are not fully proficient with their digital tools. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, then, if they could significantly reduce their screen hours by having excellent digital skills and good digital hygiene?
Achieve more in less time
This means knowledge workers should spend a few evenings a week learning about smart systems, and how they can use their digital tools more effectively and efficiently.
Research amongst civil servants showed that while 98% of them use Outlook, only 4% have mastered its capabilities. So they work several hours a day with a programme while having little or no knowledge of its full capabilities.
Researchers have shown that we can only work in a concentrated and focused manner for about 3 hours a day. So, my proposition is this: if you work a maximum of 5 hours a day, 4 days a week; are digitally skilled; and are given the time and opportunity to work in a concentrated manner, you will get a lot more done. And in far less work time than we are currently used to.
But we prefer to spend long working days operating inefficiently, for heaven forbid that someone accuse us of being lazy. Yet it is precisely by offering space for radical experimentation that such a 5-hour working day could become a possibility.
In conclusion
At the start of the last century, by conducting radical experiments with standardisation and the assembly line, Henry Ford was able to increase the productivity of the workers in Ford factories by a factor of 50.
Unfortunately, in recent decades we have neglected to attempt any such radical experiments to achieve similar increases in productivity. So, we need to give more thought to the cognitive load on the brains of knowledge workers. But a prerequisite of that is digital fitness.
