Enghouse’s group VP of marketing & alliances, Jeremy Payne, is in no doubt about how cloud-based communications and collaboration saved the business world, in the past 18 months. “Without cloud technology, cloud infrastructure, the enterprise would not have survived in the way that it did,” he reflected. “There have been so many business benefits, from security to scalability, flexibility, elasticity…
“But like with most things, there’s always an equal and opposite force to be reckoned with.”
The main challenges seem to stem from the fact that the technology enabled working patterns to shift so fast, that culturally, emotionally, it was difficult for the humans involved to keep up — grappling with all the personal implications of a global health crisis, on top of the up-ending of business planning.
The present-future is unevenly distributed
“Some people ended up with promotions, better opportunities, as a result. Others were forced down routes of technological change faster than they could really cope, and culture and practice could not travel down the same road at the same speed”
The people affected are operating in a broader socio-economic context beyond their work, where promises of unlocking restrictions feel like a moving target, they cannot take the overseas holidays they were looking forward to, and inflation is eroding their income just as some leisure opportunities unevenly return — the effects of which have barely begun to be felt.
“From the work point of view, the enabler of everything was cloud-based UC, and this gave us the ability to carry on working, to keep the plane in the air. Without that, the world would have ground to a halt,” Payne pointed out. “It’s actually remarkable how the national and international telco infrastructure stood up, to the increased demand for video calling, the way it scaled and held up.
“But there’s been a price tag building up for that, in human terms, and we’re approaching the point where that price will have to be paid.”
Heading off the backlash
The technology which enabled us to step up in the moment and maintain business continuity, may be hiding a backlash which will hit businesses just when they least expect it… as everything is apparently ‘getting back to normal’.
“There’s an element of people’s lives which has not caught up emotionally, and it’s like The Truman Show, or maybe Groundhog Day — you wake up, sit at the same desk, make the same kind of calls, look at the same emails, go through the same routine, then you go to bed before you wake up and do exactly the same thing.”
“This has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with it,” he explained. “For example, some companies have zero trust in their employees and deploy software to monitor people’s screens, capturing keystrokes, etc”.
Quite apart from the psychological damage of working under this degree of scrutiny and assumption of time theft and slacking, there is definitely a lack of consideration of the emotional impact, of this kind of monitoring taking place in people’s own homes — the place they should feel most private and safe.
Time for a cultural CTRL+ALT+DELETE
So, the next revolution for the future of work will have to be a cultural accounting and reset, a rethinking of the way we support and motivate and empower people, to do their best work in the ‘new normal’ of forever-altered circumstances. Otherwise there will be burnout and churn, which damages teams and businesses just as much as it damages individuals’ mental and physical health.
“We need to develop tools for better workforce engagement and encouragement, to ensure that UC is not the victim of its own success”, he concluded.
