So Much Choice, So Little Control

Source: Reworked, Andrew Pope
Photo: Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Our bloated digital workplaces and all the surrounding choices they necessitate mean we’re all slouching towards productivity. Here’s how we simplify things.

Imagine walking into an ice cream parlor, taking in the huge array of ice cream flavors and choosing the perfect three scoops. Then imagine being handed an ice cream that you didn’t ask for. And, to make it worse, it contains over 10 different flavors — most of which don’t work well together.

Thanks to a combination of technology that facilitates distributed work along with today’s hybrid working practices, we have more choices than ever before. Yet we seem to be stuck with all of them being forced upon us, leaving behind a taste not dissimilar to a bowl of lemon sorbet and rocky road.

The ‘Luxury’ of Choice

Location, technology, time, working practices. Knowledge workers can work almost anywhere, aside from Wi-Fi blackspots such as Antarctica and my home office. And thanks to the nature of collaborative team-working tools, we can also be more flexible in terms of time. Not everything has to be synchronous as we have access to the knowledge and information we need to get our work done.

We can choose to coordinate work using video meetings, asynchronous channel meetings, kanban-style boards, collaborative apps such as Loop and even good ol’ email. We can pick practices that suit our needs, such as collaborative decision-making, working out loud, building focus time and finding ways to boost our wellbeing.

So much choice, yet rarely are we in control.

In fact, it’s staggering just how we don’t actually make these choices. That by carrying on as usual, we hope that adopting available technology will help us to work better.

But what is working better? Does accepting the technology sorbet help or hinder us?

Incremental Working

“Office work” was once simple: A central place to work. To be supervised or to supervise.

Despite a largely educated workforce today compared to the early days of an office, its core role hasn’t really changed, with the possible exception of more collaboration with colleagues to help us deliver our work.

Without changing this central role of the office, however, we have now morphed into both the physical and the digital workplaces. We haven’t ditched anything. We’ve just piled on more tools, places, features and practices.

The nine-to-five was extended from initially reading emails on the bus ride home to responding to chat messages at midnight, long after the office has closed. The humble regular meeting has transcended office borders, and become the de-facto measurement of work, filling up our days. Then there are the additional messages to respond to: face-to-face requests, chat pings, planner notifications, even phone calls (remember those?). Communication and collaboration has simply built more layers of complexity and activity.

Leave It to the Tech

These incremental changes have been compounded by an assumption that more technology will solve things for us. That smart tools will help us collaborate better, solve problems and save time.

Sadly, the opposite is true. This isn’t to say that technology can’t do the above — some decent tools out there can really help us. It’s just that we muddle through with a mix of tech without really understanding the nuances of one collaboration tool over the other, what habits we need to change to really leverage them, and what we need to replace.

Asana’s Anatomy of Work report revealed that, on average, knowledge workers are using around nine apps as part of delivering work. This rises to 10 apps for senior roles. Additionally, 25% of knowledge workers using 16 or more apps are missing messages and actions. But there’s more to this — one app alone can have multiple features to collaborate. For example, in Microsoft Teams we can use chat, channels and meetings all to achieve the same thing.

With so much technology to grapple with, there’s a paradox that the time savings offered by tools like Copilot aren’t realized as we don’t have the time to invest into learning how best to use them for our team. And this can also make things worse in the short term, as we start using Copilot as Yet Another Tool without considering what we’re using it for, and how it can help us most effectively.

So we muddle on, dipping in and out of new tools that come our way. We start using Loop for meeting notes yet also use OneNote, meeting chat and still HOLD AN ACTUAL MEETING. Four things that could have been one.

Take a Step Back and Design Our Work

Simplicity never happens by taking the easy route. Making effective choices as to how we work, and which tools we use, won’t happen by issuing a “which tool when” guide and hoping for the best. It happens through at least two mechanisms: taking a step back to look at what we do and how we could deliver it. And secondly, agreeing as a team some norms, some standard practices, some consistency.

We’re also hampered by the way we’re trained in using the technology. That we’re shown functions and features first, so these tend to drive adoption. “Collaborate seamlessly with your team” is all well and good, but what really matters is understanding why and how we need to collaborate seamlessly in the first place — plus why we need to do so using this specific tool (rather than an alternative tool, that is also available to us).

Fortunately, we can simplify things. A great place to start is to look at communication. Agreeing on one tool for urgent communication and one for general team communication and collaboration means we can be aligned on one area of tech that can otherwise simply swamp us with notifications.

Another technique that is becoming more popular is a team charter. Something that sets out some simple expectations of how we work as a team — such as what we go into the office for, what necessitates a live, synchronous meeting, how we collaborate and communicate and how we ensure decent well-being standards.

Team charters are incredible empowering. They create some control in how we work. Even if we’re not sure of how to use the technology, we can at least build some consistent expectations rather than making assumptions.

We have more ways than ever to empower teams and their workers. Yet by offering more choices that aren’t taken, we’re actually disempowering our people. Modern work is more demanding than ever as we struggle with the demands of notifications, unclear expectations and confusion as to what’s actually happening — spending more time talking about work than actually delivering it.

It’s a massive challenge to find the time take a step back and to agree and build ways of work under the demands of the job and the deluge of apps and practices. But if we do so, it will be the biggest time-saver we can engineer.

About the Author

Andrew looks at workplace technology through the eyes of the workforce, as owner of Designing Collaboration. He helps his clients become more clear and confident in choosing how and why to use digital workplace tools, to overcome a lack of alignment in digital and working practices, improves poor habits such as over-reliance on email and terrible meetings and helps to improve digital health and culture, such as “always on.”

He coaches practical technical and soft skills to lead and empower teams in digital workplaces and develops strategies to leverage collaboration technology to meet organizational, team and individual needs — whether specific goals, increased productivity or improved wellbeing.

https://www.reworked.co/digital-workplace/so-much-choice-so-little-control