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Waking up to change, how technology disrupts workplace culture

Businesses need to implement new technologies to remain competitive. Due to the customer’s increasing adoption of a digital lifestyle, each company needs to review how it operates and interacts with other businesses and consumers on a daily basis. Inevitably, the only choice that businesses can make is to adopt new technology in order to remain operational.

Sometimes this adoption can be coordinated and in tandem with updates to practices and by smoothing out the workplace culture; however, there are times when this isn’t possible and some businesses are not focused on running technology and culture in synchronicity. Even where there is a focus on cultural change, there can still be employee resistance and in some cases businesses want to force changes. This can all add up to a disjointed and dynamic picture.

We look at five technologies that have the potential to alter workplace culture, either by design or by accident. The unifying feature is that the culture is different to before.

Anti-distraction apps

The Internet has an array of useful information, for work as for at home. It can also be a major time-waster and an attention-sapping platform. In addition, there are notifications from Facebook, Slack, and Skype, plus alerts on smartphones. Such distractions can be particularly troublesome for the remote worker, but also for the desk-based worker at the corporation. Some workplaces have installed apps that block almost everything other than the task in hand, to help the employee to focus.

Three examples are: Freedom, which allows the business to block specific websites and apps. A second is Hocus Focus, which displays to the worker only recently-active applications (this app only works on Macs). The third is called Mindful Anti Distraction, and it encourages the worker to get off time-wasting sites by sending out a series of increasingly nagging nudges.

Hiring and firing

The recruitment process is being disrupted, to various degrees, through artificial intelligence. Machines can screen a person’s job application and make a recommendation to a businesses, thereby reducing a manager’s time and cutting out some human resources costs. For would-be employees this can be intrusive, especially when this strays into scans of social media activities.

Some technologies also have the capability to fire an employee, although for various legal reasons this is not in widespread use. Some technologies will, however, try to guess when an employee is thinking about leaving. South Carolina-based ENGAGE, as an example, uses artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that someone will change jobs based on their professional background and company-related events. This type of technology can be used internally as well as by headhunters.

Biometrics to monitor employees

Biometrics have given the health industry a boost, especially through wearable fitness devices. Whether biomnetrics has a place in the workplace is more debatable. Nonetheless, a Gartner study discovered that 6 percent of U.S., European and Canadian firms have put in place systems that track employees using biometrics. This tends to be using fingerprint or retinal scans to know when workers clock on. This could one day extend to monitoring physical performance at work, to see how much effort is being put in. Such technology is not likely to go down well with many employees.

Humanics

For workers facing technological change at work or the risk of losing a job due to automation, the best strategy is not to try and select a safe job and hope that it won’t be automated. One reason for this is because which jobs might go can be hard to predict; automation will displace many jobs over the next ten to 15 years, according to a McKinsey review.

The best strategy, according to Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun is to focus on updating your skills. He proposes can approach called humanics, which essentially runs that to survive at work employees should focus on developing their technical ability (and understand how machines work); second, learn how to navigate and analyze the data that is generated by machines at work; and third, work put what humans can do that machines for the foreseeable future will not be able to emulate. This strategy can be useful as a workforce transitions and faces up to the cultural challenges arising from the adoption of new technologies.

Blockchain

Blockchain is changing the way business-to-business transactions take place. With supply chains especially, blockchain arises as global trade increases and there is a need for greater efficiency and transparency for each transaction.

In some ways blockchain is not faster, especially with smart contracts and this requires a change to how businesses work. Decisions can take longer due to the need for collaboration. Each participant is required to express a views that needs to be discussed, vented, and voted upon. This requires a different mindset within the businesses in order for the blockchain to be embedded and used efficiently.

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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