Monday, March 31, 2008

Has Technology Lived Up to Its Promise in the Workplace

Businesses and workers alike generally laud technology improvements, both using examples such as e-mail and the Blackberry in pointing out how technology has allowed businesses to operate more efficiently. However, when the issue is more closely examined, it's really not that clear cut.


According to a new survey issued by The Radicati Group, e-mail volume has increased a whopping 55 percent since 2004, with the average corporate e-mail user receiving 126 messages daily. The report goes on to say that if growth in e-mail volume continues at its current pace, workers will spend almost half their days managing messages by 2009.


While most bloggers who picked on this study stuck to the main issue, I thought I'd expand it a bit to examine the basic premise of technology and its promise of bringing efficiency to a variety of processes. There are countless examples of promises that were issued when new technologies emerged that haven't really lived up to reality. For example, I can remember businesses using videoconferencing over ISDN connections as early as 1993 and even then, equipment providers were touting how they would replace meetings and make business travel much less frequent. And of course, e-mail was supposed to cut down on the need for meetings, allow problems to be solved faster, etc.


Before going any further, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying these things haven't occurred in some cases, but it's fair to say they haven't occurred across the business world at large. In theory, if technology were making our lives more efficient, shouldn't we be able to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, either getting more done in a standard workday or having a shorter workday?


Obviously, at least in the U.S., neither has happened; and rather than blame the technology, I suggest the reason these radical changes haven't happened is we've failed to adjust our attitudes, the way we think about work and the way we think about what we should get done in a formal work setting. Simply put, unless you change what a worker does during their day, the presence of technology won't necessarily enable you to get more done.


To bring this back to the PR world, I suggest we haven't done enough to change the PR business model through technology in a way that makes it possible for the ever-growing number of small and mid-size businesses with limited marketing budgets to engage a PR counselor. For example, a company with a limited budget could be presented with an account option that includes limited meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming (e.g. expensive) options for one that features mostly electronic client communication. That would enable the PR counselor to spend more of the company's billable time on actual program initiatives, greatly increasing the productivity that can be expected from limited budgets.


When thinking about technology and its impact on the business world, we'd do well to develop a plan that will allow the technology to reach its full potential and that focus should include just as much on the workday structure and the way we think about work as what the technology promises to do.

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