Technology isn’t going to fix work

It’s up to us to figure this stuff out first

I read a lot of Signal v. Noise. Even if I don’t use Basecamp at work, I connect with what Jason Fried and DHH say in their posts. Jason gave a great response to a great question about hiring people and letting them do their own work:

What do you about people who aren’t doing their job at the standards you set out? You find out why. Talk to them. Understand them. And then either help them get back on track or decide that it’s probably time to part ways. If you let that behavior continue then it’s on you, not on them.

People surely can have a bad day, week, month or so, but sustained disinterest in the work signals a variety of things. That’s why you have to get to the root causes first before making any decisions.

Maybe you can help, maybe you can’t, but you have to figure out what’s up. Maybe it’s something outside of work. Maybe it’s the work itself. Maybe it’s the way the company is run. Maybe it’s a manager. Or maybe it’s them. You have to find out what’s causing a lack of motivation.

The part I like most is this specific sentence:

If you let that behavior continue then it’s on you, not on them.

And this is where I think we are with the future of work. This is part of the solution to the problem we’re facing as automation replaces more and more jobs. We’re letting broken behaviors continue. We see the problems. We even have solutions to some of them, but we proceed blissfully ignorant of the problem and solutions.

Here are just a few that come to mind…

We know open concept office are problematic, but…

We’ve been talking about it for over two years and keep talking about it and decry it more, but I haven’t visited an office in years that doesn’t have this same layout.

It’s broken, we get it. Now, let sales have their bullpen and the folks who need quite smaller spaces. If we’re all wearing noise cancelling headphones to concentrate and focus, how is that helping community and collaboration?

It’s not.

But wait, group chat will save us!

Probably not. Now, I like group chat. Skype isn’t great for it, but it’s not bad. Slack is one of the tools I have lots of plans to experiment with. I think chat is essential for keeping connected with people in remote offices. Chat is a great way I can converse quietly and not disturb others.

But it’s not a magic bullet.

Hammers are awesome tools. Super for driving and pulling nails. But if someone hits you with it, not so good. Is that a flaw in the hammer? No, it’s a flaw in the person using it (and a big flaw if they hit you on purpose).

I think Slack has real potential to help build information and update repositories people can check at their discretion. I think the communication functions are super, but, folks, it’s still just a tool for communicating with people.

What about Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and the rest?

These are tools to organize our work not fix our work. All of these tools are awesome, but none of them change the culture of work on their own. Each of them only work if the team accepts them and uses them. These tools only make cultural changes in a company if the company actually wants to make these changes.

Thinking one (or several) tools will save problems like not hiring the right people and wondering why you’re still falling short.

Let’s call bullshit on how we work and start changing it

Start asking to work from home. Tell your boss that you can’t get things done in the office as it’s set up. Let them know you’ll be in the cafe across the street or in a meeting room.

Start asking why we have status update meetings and not “here’s our plan for the week to kick ass” meetings.

When people bring in a new tool, if it’s better for getting things done — use it. If it doesn’t work, ditch it fast. If the current set of tools don’t work for you, find solutions and use alternatives.

If workplace rules are more about rules than getting things done, find ways to change them.

We have to face facts that in the next ten years (or less) a lot of how we do our jobs can be automated. Bots reduce the number of support engineers. AIs researching for us. I’d even go as far as to suggest that AIs and bots could draft killer content. Even if it needs human editing, if a computer can churn out 1000 words in a few minutes that only takes 30 mins to edit, polish, and publish…how many content creators do you need?

I keep coming back to Jason putting the onus of bad employees back on the people who had a chance to fix it, and didn’t. Right now we have the opportunity to make real progress fixing the how work is done, what work means, and what kinds of work are going to be most valuable.

And if we ignore this chance, we only have ourselves to blame.