It’s time to talk about the Trust Tax. You’ve seen the sales pitches for employee monitoring: dashboards glowing with productivity scores and heatmaps that claim to tell you who is a rockstar and who is slacking off. From a leadership perspective, it looks like oversight—a way to protect your investment. From your team’s perspective, it feels like surveillance—a digital leash that proves you don’t trust the people you hired.
Most stories you consume will follow the format of introduction, rising action, conflict, falling action, and resolution. The tense parts of the story, the rising action and conflict, are what drive it forward, and they’re also what make things interesting along the way. That said, you can’t run your business like a story, and you can’t run your IT in this way either.
We’ve all been there: You’re deep into a complex problem, finally finding your rhythm, when, “ping”… A quick question pops up on one of the platforms you use to communicate (we all have several, personal and professional). You answer it in thirty seconds and try to get back to work. If this happens one time, it might be okay, but if it happens repeatedly as the day goes on, the damage is already done.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you invest in a high-priced technology solution, only to find that the solution isn’t what your business needs. The technology is effectively a “lemon,” where it costs your business a lot of money without any real return on the investment. This sometimes happens when you use technology to fix a short-term problem without a clear long-term strategy; you lose money and productivity due to incompatibility issues, and without a strategic roadmap to move forward, you’re left wondering where you’ve gone wrong.
Is your business’ technology hindering your employees, or is it making their jobs easier and more efficient? The right technology can go a long way toward improving the employee experience, morale, company culture, and most important of all, productivity. Let’s look at three ways technology makes for a better employee experience.
While hiring anyone to work in your business offers an assortment of challenges to overcome, it’s especially complicated when that hire’s role involves managing your IT. Technology is a complex subject, after all, and your expertise more than likely lies elsewhere in your organization’s needs. This knowledge gap could lead to the wrong fit being brought on… an expensive endeavor in more ways than one.
When it comes to your technology, can you honestly say you have a plan? Or do you just pick things up that you think you need without a second thought? If your business doesn’t take technology acquisitions seriously, you’re setting yourself up for failure—and that’s where an IT roadmap presents a ton of value.
Even though it’s incredibly helpful, technology can be frustrating—sometimes to an absurd degree. Businesses can’t function without it, so they have to learn to live with it, but it doesn’t have to be hard. You can develop some habits by using these tricks to reduce some of the friction in your workday.
Artificial intelligence has consumed the zeitgeist and isn’t letting go anytime soon. Businesses can leverage this trend in technology to great effect, provided they can get over how intimidating some of the more complicated use cases of AI can be. That said, there are plenty of easy ways to leverage AI, even for small and medium-sized businesses.
While you want to believe the best of your business, including your IT staff, it’s important to recognize when they’ve reached their limit regarding knowledge and workload. To combat these limitations, you can work with an outsourced IT provider. Combining the two can help you meet your business’ technology needs.