Making Work From Home Work - Are We Putting Too Much Trust in Big Tech? Feburary 2021 Watch This Space Podcast

10:58PM Jan 28, 2021

Speakers:

Jon Arnold

Chris Fine

Keywords:

metrics

jon

workplace

world

worker

podcast

chris

business

unionization

regulation

search

driven

technology

space

score

called

productivity

future

based

work

Dump, dump, dump, dump, dump,

dump, dump dump dump. That's me doing my impression of playing piano for the theme song I haven't come up with yet that we're going to use on watch this space. How do you like that for an opening? Chris?

I think it's great, Jon, I can't. I'm waiting for the next phase.

I am anxious to get to this next phase. And I'm hoping we'll have it ready for next month. So with that, welcome, everybody to watch this space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging technologies and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. i'm Jon Arnold. And these trends are my focus as an independent consultant in this space, and my company is called J Arnold and Associates, Chris,

and I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and advisor focusing on strategy for workplace technology, security, IoT and other related topics. My company is integrative technologies, LLC. Good morning, Jon, how are you?

I'm just doing fine. Thank you. And I hope you're doing okay, too.

All good here. Thanks. I hope all of you listeners are doing well.

Yes. Okay. And we are officially in 2021. It's getting, I think, we're past the point now where we say Happy New Year, I think we've moved on. And for those who are keeping score, we are in Episode Two of season four of our podcast. So we're kind of out of our rookie and sophomore years, Chris. We have got a pretty good, I'd say patter here. And we continue to work on getting it better and better. But you know, it's really, I think the more we do this, Chris, our sensibilities, I hate to simplify it by calling us analog guys. But we certainly use the digital tools, but we bring that sensibility. And I'd like to think we, that the way we filter things that are happening today, is going to be different from the way a digital native would filter the same things that are happening around them.

Right. Right, Jon? Well, I think what we try to do is bring a sense of history without drowning in it. You know, so we want to look forward, we want to be very future focused, but we want to try to bring in a perspective. That is, that is historical as well, because history tends to repeat itself.

Yeah, and try to be fresh, and just like we're getting a fresh start in Washington. And that's, I guess, as far as we'll go on it, but we're in that spirit right now. And I think the events of the early part of this year, there are a few things that ring bells for me as things to talk about. And we're going to do that now for this episode. And it really speaks to the landscape around social media and the reach of big technology companies. You can wear your consumer hat, and look at this very differently. But we also look at it very critically in the business world where these technologies are driving collaboration for us in the workplace. And that's the future of work theme, as much as it drives our personal activities, offline. But out of the office, and in our personal lives.

There are so many aspects of social media and more broadly, the internet and modern collaboration that can be affected by any changes that are made for social or legal reasons. Jon, regulatory, and that you might not see them directly correlated to business, but they are, and maybe that's what we can explore a little bit.

Yeah, business seems to have a free hand because that's the market economy we live in. And, you know, there's been always this constant tension in the world of tech of innovation versus regulation, right? No one wants to put the brakes on innovation that supposedly makes our life better and everything else. But of course, when it's untethered to reality, bad things can happen, and they do. And likewise, you know, the argument for no regulation is countered by the argument for regulation. And that healthy middle has always been, you know, a struggle. But there's a need, obviously, that otherwise it wouldn't feel like this tension, right?

I think so. I think so. It's not clear, exactly to me, at least, what's going to happen, but there are certain areas, starting with perhaps, what I might call the algorithm. So right now there's in social media, where businesses are very often a sponsors, there are all the mechanisms of buying ads and micro targeting and collection of personal information that have driven the marketing and communications campaigns for business, because those are the tools that are out there. And that is something that I feel could be looked at, then maybe looked at, and that would have implications for how businesses approach their customers and the public. I don't think it's necessarily bad. But I think it could change things. What do you think?

Yeah, well for sure, I mean, you know, the default to all of this is that, now that the internet has become the go to source for almost everything we do. And it's, I would say, it's pretty close to 100%. For digital natives, certainly my kids, right, they wouldn't dream of opening a newspaper or listening to the radio. The internet is their source for everything. And if that's your currency, and you are in the workplace, the consumer world is part of it too. But in the workplace, for example, when people are trying to find anything that's not available at their fingertips in house, they got to go outside looking for it, they're going to be using a search engine. And invariably, the results they get, as we know, are going to be driven by those algorithms, as you say, Chris, right. And those algorithms in turn are, you know, the the secret sauce, the magic behind them.

It's almost like in a restaurant, like you don't want to know how the food is made, as long as it tastes good. And that's kind of how I feel about a lot of that when you're completely dependent on, you know, search, that's algorithm driven, is driven by all kinds of biases, and, of course, commercial, you know, concerns that the advertisers want to get out of this. That's a very different experience for finding information as opposed to how we would have done it, which is going through a library. Right, and getting the source material, unfiltered. Right, just the direct experience. And, you know, I certainly think, you know, you could get a wider search, but we always get a better search as debatable, of course, right?

Well, I think if a search returns, emotion-based results, or emotion, incorporating results versus factual, factual probably might not be the right word, but informational, as you say, It means, doing an internet search is not like looking something up in the library, as you say, the closest you might come is if you look up a Wikipedia article, but the way results are returned and the way feeds are generated, are really about influencing you to buy product, which is emotional, it's, it's an end to maximize your time in front of the screen at that location. And so, you know, may, I think there may be some questions about whether that's really something that can just, that will be regulated or regulates reward will be controlled properly, by the forces of the market. Because the forces of the market are always going to be in favor of strengthening that emotional connection. And so is that in line with what debatably is the public good, I think, is maybe the question.

Yeah, yeah. And adding to that, you know, those searches are also dictated by what you've searched for in the past, because it knows your habits and patterns. So it will, it will steer you to results that they think you want based on what you've done in the past. And the world is not a fair place, marketplace of ideas I should say, because if you search on Amazon for things about Google, or if you search on Bing, for things about about Amazon, you will not get the same results. We know that. We know that they will have their own biases driven by whoever is running that search engine, they don't want to steer you obviously to their competition and get you off that page, as you say, they want you to stay on their page for as long as possible, and possibly click on a few more links along the way. And then before you know it, you're down a rabbit hole like we get on Facebook. And you know, that's just such distraction from the, you know, the mission of trying to get objective, truthful, complete information.

Or at least balanced. Right, Jon? I mean, because, you know, there's always a question of what, especially in some kind of debate what side is actually correct. But the fact is that, without balance, you're only going to hear one side of it. And that could be either side. It's not necessarily restricted to one side or the other.

And because the internet's become the go to, I don't think it would ever dawn on a millennial to go to a library and look for information. And as we know, that online world is dominated by, you know, you can count them on one hand, a very small number of companies and they're so far down the road, it's hard to imagine those changing or having challenges come and displace them or give us real alternatives. And that raises that whole issue of yeah, regulation versus innovation. But you know, it's, it's not just search is one element of it.

But in the workplace itself, I just wanted to touch on Microsoft Teams as an example. They're all in that same boat, but you know, there's been a lot of pushback recently against what they have is called productivity score. And while it may be well intentioned as a way to gather metrics to help workers be more productive, especially when they're working from home in isolation, it's equally well, and is seen by many as a surveillance tool. It's just a portal into your, into your world, so they can keep tabs on you, you know, under the guise of, well, we can't see you in the office. So, we have to somehow keep tabs on what you're doing. And so obviously, there's that issue of, you know, privacy and personal space and, and just the sheer reach of these major players who dominate the space.

It's interesting, because my editorial opinion is that I'm something of a skeptic, as to whether you can even really derive that score. I've done a fair amount of work at various phases of my career in IT, of deriving certain scores of how much somebody is doing, or Windows and productivity and all of that stuff monitoring on, you know, with anonymized data, obviously, but monitoring the functionality of a screen. And it's, it's a real slippery slope, Jon, you know. It's, you have to be very careful to infer anything from that. It's easy, it's easy to see what, see a pattern and think that has a result that is not right. And so I think I think what, at least what I always found was that, you know, there's no substitute, there's no substituting for a good outcome based sort of 360 review system and feedback system. In a business, you can't substitute for that by just collecting statistics, and paying too much attention to them. You know what I mean?

I totally agree, it's a bit like in sports, you know, when you listen to the good seasoned announcers, kind of like we are here, Chris.

Seasoned, I'll give you.

There you go. But they'll tell you that, you know, the stats, you know, say in baseball, you know, all the standard metrics they have, don't tell the whole story. And there are many, many elements of athlete's performance that we don't have stats for. But if you watch the game and understand the game, you say, see that little thing he did there, that's why they won the game. But that will never show up in the score sheet, or the stats. And the concern I have in the workplace is that, you know, there's a broad trend these days towards data-based decision making, which is fine. But because executives place a lot of faith in those metrics, the source of those metrics is everything. So when you have things like this productivity score, and I'm not trying to single out Microsoft, by any means, but the fact is, they have to invent metrics, that, things that can be measured, because the data behind those metrics is what people pay attention to.

So what I what my concern is that if there's too much stock put into this idea, as you say, Chris, productivity will come to be defined by things you can measure. But those things don't necessarily you know, the correlation between those metrics, and a great outcome is far from 100%. So just because I am spending less time on phone calls, and maybe more time on email, and since those metrics seem to show that I'm not engaged enough, on a social platform, or on a video chat call or text chat thread, that I'm somehow less productive, therefore less valuable to the organization. When in fact, you get into a team meeting, and everyone says, so who, who really did the best work here. And the leader points to this guy who was using those legacy metrics could say really well, no, we couldn't have done it without that. That doesn't show up. And so there's I worry that when everything gets filtered through what's measurable for things that people value, the other things of course, become less valued. Then, of course, our worth to the organization, our performance evaluations are all going to be based on that. And that's, that's kind of a bit of this, how the nature of work is changing. And of course, that's our future of work theme here. And as we try in these podcasts, where is the soul of technology? If we go too far, that sucks the soul out of the workplace, right?

It does. And it also produces interesting reactions. So since we're two analog guys, and we usually have to invoke some kind of historical precedent for things. I would mention something called Taylorism, where there was actually an industrial age semi equivalent of some of these statistics.

Time and motion studies.

Time and motion studies, right. From Frederick Taylor, the sociologist of the late 19th century, early 20th, was very widely adopted in industry, the auto companies, industrial companies, and it actually influenced a lot of workplace metrics, all the way until, essentially the Japanese reinvented manufacturing in the 1970s. And those techniques were brought more widely into use. But it had the side effect of greatly empowering labor, and making labor more activists. So if you look at a couple of interesting things that haven't gotten, in my view, a lot of publicity, the unionization of Google. Right, so think about that, and probably from a macro perspective, at least in the US work, probably coming into an era that's more friendly to labor, and where the idea of empowering labor a little bit, and when you look at some of the characteristics or expressed characteristics of the emerging younger workforce there, their surveys say they are more open to that. And they're the workforce. And so I think that organizations may need to try to balance this really carefully. With, potentially, not looking great from the worker's perspective.

Yeah, yeah. Cool. We are, yeah, you're we're setting the stage here, maybe for our next podcast topic, because I know we're coming up on time here, but absolutely agree. And when we talk, again, broader strokes of future of work, as that digital native population, works from home or becomes more ensconced in this gig economy thing, that dissolution of the social contract between worker and an employer becomes very messy. And everything seems to be on the worker's shoulders, to take to do all, just everything is so self-service oriented, but they get nothing out of it, right. I mean, you know, Uber drivers, do all the work, take all the risk and get none of the protection. And the workplace, I think could become that kind of environment, too.

So yes, absolutely, that unionization idea seems very ripe. If people are starting to feel they're competing with automation, robotics, you know, all the AI stuff that's coming, that's forcing everything to be metricized. It's leaving less and less room for the human element in the workplace. And you really start to wonder, if I'm just a gig worker, you know, what do I got?

So I think we've identified two themes, Jon, in answer to your original question of what do we think that recent events and changes sort of in the macro environment of economics, and politics and social thinking, are going to have that, that tinge into our world? We've talked a lot in prior episodes about the pandemic. And I'm sure we'll talk some more about it. But, you know, looking at the most recent set of events, I think we've identified a change in the approach toward scrutiny and regulation of some of the big tech companies behind this and some of the technologies themselves, or a changed attitude toward them, or an evolving attitude. And then I think, the second is the ascendancy of labor again, and how workers feel and how workers are empowered. And that is definitely a watch this space based on everything you said about productivity metrics and some of the other things we can talk more about.

Great. That's a good place to stop and, you know, yes, divide and conquer has always been the strategy of rulers. And they do it because it works. And the atomization of the workforce is, you know, long-term is worrisome to me. And that to me, you know, that's the future of work, not going in the right direction. And I think, we're social by nature and unionization. organizing ourselves as part of that equation. And I think it's a healthy thing. So yes, that's, that's certainly going to be revisited. As long as this work from home thing stays, you know, that stays on the table, and I think will only kind of percolate and things will come along to make it more visible. So I'm glad we're bringing attention to it here.

Okay, that's great. Let's pause it there. So that brings us to the end of our time for today's episode. So we'd like to thank you for all for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and will continue with us as we explore the future of work here on watch this space. As our, kind of, lead out, you can access all of our episodes at the website, www, watch this space dot tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review or rating. We'd love to hear about that. And if you also are interested, these podcasts are transcribed. And they are, you can view those on my website in the podcast section, just an FYI. So with that, I will hand it over here. I'm Jon Arnold and Chris, you can take us out.

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks, Jon. Thanks, everybody for listening to watch this space and we'll be back next month.