the virus and efficiency
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
There's a joke in (seemingly endless) circulation on the Internet about how the virus and associated changes have led to more efficiency at the office. It usually goes something like:
Who is in charge of your workplace initiative to automate?
- CEO
- CFO
- CIO
- Coronavirus
The proximate reason for this has been the drive to eliminate processes that require people to go to the office. But I'm beginning to think that there might be a lot more going on here, and I suspect it's going to be permanent. Some of the symptoms are:
- Housing in the suburbs is having a resurgence in sales and prices.
- Public transit ridership is staying down even when things "reopen".
- Sales of PC's (remember them?) and monitors have been reversing a decades-long slide.
The reason, of course, is that firms are issuing work-from-home orders. Google's just told everyone to stay home for a year. Who knows how many other large employers are doing the same. But the workers having been voting with their feet for months, already. I have a staff member who's just decided to buy a home 170km from the office. That's a brand new state-of-the-art office into which our employer moved at a cost of twenty million dollars.
The impact of work-from-home has been interesting at my shop. I see several signs that productivity is going up despite people not regularly meeting. We're finally making real use of all those communications and workflow tools. And there are a LOT of these. By my count, we're using:
- Video conferencing (I run at ten such meetings a day)
- Instant messaging (one:one and group)
- Three 'kanban' systems, which let you move tasks from pending to in progress to done.
- A ticketing system that allows semi-automated workflow.
- A virtual whiteboard tool.
- An intranet-publishing tool.
- A notes/minutes sharing tool.
- Mobile texting.
- Mobile phones for voice communication.
Also, the situation's highlighted inefficient processes & systems. At the firm in March (two days before the WFH order) I found I had to try to identify all the projects that are currently running. So far I've counted around fifty. That's with an IT department of around one hundred people (of whom at least twenty are in a purely operational, ticket-management stuff). Most of these are some form of modernization project.
One involves the document scanning solutions we have in place: yes, of course there's more than one. Between the software/support licenses and the VM's required to run the software, we're paying about $40 to scan each page of paper that comes in the door plus upgrades that are obscenely expensive.
But the long-term solution is, of course, to stop receiving and scanning pieces of paper! There's no one in the office, why do we demand paper-based solutions? I was last involved in a paper-scanning automation project in Canada in the mid-'90s! I chose to lead this commentary with that joke because it's really true: we waited until a crisis to start managing these inefficiencies.
As for all those office staff who will no longer be occupying all those towers? I believe that the impetus for efficiency will only build. Once everyone's realized that they can get more done by scheduling discussions with only the key people needed to make a decision, they quickly learn who is key (and who isn't). I've found myself, at the 4.5 month mark, dealing with people who seem to have suddenly realized that they're not perceived as 'key'. One of my peers in the organization was missing in action for the entire first four months I worked at this firm, and is now everywhere, piping up to be heard and otherwise making a commotion but his only work product is to disturb work in progress. So it's dangerous times for non-performers. Maybe if we can keep this up we can actually start weeding them out of the workforce.