Keep it human: why more technology means less work

Social anthropology is leading the way to better business performance, reports Richard Brass

If you arrive at work tomorrow to find someone sitting in a chair right behind yours, try not to panic. The clipboard may be a little unnerving, along with the fact that everything you do gets written down, and the uncomfortable truth is that the person is there to find out what the hell you do all day.

But, rather than some company axe-sharpener doing an obligatory evaluation before inviting you to spend more time with your family, the chances are that your new companion is someone far more exotic and a lot less threatening. Instead of being dressed up to be dispatched, you are probably being studied by a social anthropologist.

Experts in the field, who have spent years studying the behaviour of indigenous communities in sweaty parts of the world, are now being hired to shed light on the darkest mysteries of the British office.

Simon Roberts is one such light-shedder. He earned his PhD in India, studying the effect of the arrival of satellite TV on the population of the city of Varanasi, but one recent job for his consultancy, Ideas Bazaar, has been a study of day-to-day work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the first time the accountancy firm has dipped its toe into ethnographic research. For Roberts, picking apart the patterns of daily life is just as fascinating in a London office as on the streets of Varanasi, but what’s in it for PwC?

“We aim to give an organisation deep insight into how it works and, if things are going wrong, why,” says Roberts. “We provide a high resolution picture of the culture within an organisation from the specific detail of what’s going on on people’s desks.”

Roberts and his ethnographic flying squad conduct one-on-one shadowing at various levels of responsibility in an organisation, examining the tools being used and how staff really spend their time. “We want to know what a day really looks like. What does it involve, what are the tasks, how are they performed, what are the frustrations, what are the pleasures?”

The findings vary hugely, but the common factor is the impact of new technology in changing the nature of daily work, a pressure he believes has been increasing since the arrival of the fax machine back in prehistoric times. “Three iconic new technologies have come in - fax machines, then e-mail, and now BlackBerry - and they have each made working life a good deal more intense,” he says.

The long term effect of the BlackBerry on working patterns has yet to emerge, but the impact of e-mail is clear and negative. “Employees feel they have a lot less control now over the scheduling of their day, and the big culprit there is e-mail. When I sit watching someone, I can see they have a sense at the beginning of the day of what they want to achieve. Incoming e-mail is very good at disrupting that, at making the day longer, knocking you out of kilter and making stuff carry on to the next day. That’s a very significant change.”

But, says Roberts, while companies tend to regard technology as a tool to solve problems and increase productivity, new technology will in fact fall into line with an organisation’s culture. Examining the culture must come first.

“It’s our job to make it apparent to people the extent to which technology is adapted and incorporated in accordance with the shape of the existing culture,” he says. “It’s not a neutral thing that exists outside of it.

“For example, in a company that is quite stratified and has lots of different levels of authority, e-mail is used to reinforce this hierarchy, no matter whether the hierarchy is an efficient or productive culture. So a partner or director will send an e-mail and put someone on the cc line, saying ‘So-and-so will do this’. I call the cc line ‘Colleague Commandeering’. The recipient hasn’t been directly asked to do something, but they know it’s something they’ve got to do. That really stresses people out. Because e-mails are very easy to fire off, they’re being used to reinforce pre-existing power relationships, but in an unproductive way.”

It’s a perspective shared in another discipline being called on in the drive for a better office. Rob Davies, managing director of Water for Fish, a management consultancy that uses occupational psychology to advise clients on their culture, believes the central problem is a decline in the number of boards prepared to take the lead in shaping the way things are done.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago loads of people were saying: ‘We haven’t got the culture that supports our obsession with customer relationships, so we need to change it’,” he says. “I don’t think we see that much anymore. There’s much more passivity about it. It irritates me when I see how much care and attention businesses put into any decision about premises or hardware, or about financing or capital investment, while the people bit is just left to fill in the gaps like self-levelling concrete.

“It works because people are hugely adaptable, but those companies are really missing a trick. The people who are likely to succeed are the people who look at and actively manage the benefits of technology, creating the kind of culture they want in the light of what they’re trying to achieve with their business.

“It’s all about how you decide to use the technology. The mere fact that something’s got functionality doesn’t mean that you have to use it. If some idiot decides to be really macho and contact a colleague on his BlackBerry to discuss work on a Sunday afternoon, that’s not a technology problem. The problem is that the guy’s an idiot, and the company he works for hasn’t paid attention to the way they do things.

“A good example is with call centres. The technology’s the same, but you ring some centres and you can tell that they’re well run and managed, because the people are happy and helpful, but you ring others and you can tell that the people there are suicidal. That’s not about technology but about organisational design. Now that we’ve got so much more technological capability, deciding how we use it is more important than ever.”

Congregate to communicate

The solution may be a very low-tech one. Many organisations are increasingly providing “third spaces” where employees can take time away from their workspaces and congregate. The owner of Phones4U, John Caudwell, set an interesting precedent when he banned all internal e-mails, claiming it would save three hours per day per employee and encourage staff to talk to each other.

“I saw that e-mail was insidiously invading Phones4U,” Caudwell says. “Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by e-mail proliferation. The ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect. The quality and efficiency of communication have been improved tremendously in one fell swoop.”

Simon Roberts agrees with this direction. “E-mail is such a big problem that I’ve recommended to several organisations to encourage people to use the phone. High-tech doesn’t offer the intuitive connection, the emotional intelligence that phones can offer. People love it when they get a call from a senior member of the organisation saying ‘I really appreciate the work you guys have put in’. That’s so much more effective than just another one of a hundred e-mails.

“Frankly, technology puts so many barriers in front of us that it’s amazing we get any work done at all.”

Richard Brass is a freelance columnist and feature writer.