Stephanie at Healthy Simplicity has written an insightful post about why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to ban allergens in schools. In my reply to her post, I talked about how banning something often gives people a false sense of security — and is, in reality, a security that doesn’t usually exist.
This post made me think about something else that often gets banned. Organizations are often fond of banning technologies — giving various reasons such as exposure to risk (whether that risk is leaked information, inappropriate comments by employees, or viruses or other malware).
The usual targets for technology bans are things like peer-to-peer downloading software and instant messaging applications, as well as web sites, which can be banned through an organization’s site filtering software.
There are several arguments as to why software or sites should be banned within an organization, and they basically go like this. Employees don’t really understand copyright, often misjudge what’s in good taste, and waste quite a bit of time — and if we ban certain software and sites, we’ll curtail some copyright infringement, distasteful content and time-wasting.
Peer-to-peer networks have very little usefulness in the average workplace (I’m sure someone can think of an exception to this, but let’s be realistic, very few people would need a BitTorrent client at work). And in this case, it would seem that an outright ban makes sense.
Instant messaging is a bit more tricky however. I’ve often used instant messaging to interact with distant knowledgeable friends and former colleagues about very work-related issues, and have often gotten answers that would’ve involved exchanging many emails and phone calls.
With so many organizations seeking to up the collaboration factor, why are they banning one of the most widely-available and easy-to-use collaboration tools? Well, the short answer would seem to be that they see the risks as greater than any potential rewards.
Most organizations seem to feel that while you may get an answer from a former colleague once in a while, you’ll spend most of your time chatting with your friends and generally wasting time. And that’s the problem.
Collaboration isn’t always productive — it’s an ugly, imperfect activity that can often gobble up time and resources, and churn out more failures than successes. But looking at things that way is often misleading, as successes often arise out of learning from multiple failures.
In a similar vein, collaboration is not an instantaneous, explosive, successful reaction — it’s a muddy process where people need to interact regularly in order to have valuable collaborative experiences, and bans only serve to provide the false sense of security I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Banning collaborative technologies isn’t the answer — it just tells people the organization doesn’t trust them.
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December 21st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Right on. The issue of employer trust is one that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Most people just can’t work effectively in a 9-5 punch in-punch out environment. That’s old thinking left over from the days of factories. Most of us work with ideas and people, not widgets, and so our “productivity” can’t be measured in hours spent at our cubicle but in the successful outcome of our projects, wherever and whenever we work on them, and in whatever weird and wonderful ways we bring them to completion.
Corporate environments don’t get this, and they need to. One of the big issues with large corporations is retaining female workers who are mothers. These are women who are used to multitasking anyway and a lot of them would like the freedom to work from home or set their own hours. This is a specific example but I think most of us feel this way now to some degree.
Think, too, of the environmental cost of requiring people to get into their cars in the suburbs and drive downtown everyday to sit in giant office blocks. The fuel consumed, not to mention the time, is wasteful. We all have computers at home now and many of us have broadband access. Since so much of our work is computer-based, and online collaboration so easy and inexpensive, you’d think they’d be embracing this way to save money and make their employees happier. But so far, not so much…
I predict big changes in the next ten years. Hopefully, more like five…
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Great points, James. The environmental cost is certainly a big factor in this, and with more organizations trying to reduce their environmental footprint, I hope that people begin to see not only the pollution-reduction benefits, but also the efficiency benefits.
While I wouldn’t argue that technology can ultimately replace face-to-face interaction (since so much of what we communicate actually happens non-verbally), I would argue that we should think more about the appropriate communication vehicle that needs to be used in a particular interpersonal exchange. Face-to-face works great for difficult, tense or complex issues, but is often not necessary for simple, routine tasks.
As I type this, I’m watching thousands of commuters fleeing the downtown core out my window — which, as you said, is wasting thousands of hours of time and generating an untold amount of pollution.
Hopefully, along with these changes will come a more trusting, collaborative work environment — and a more eco-friendly workforce to boot.
August 5th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[...] The second, more important, unintended consequence of restricting browsing is that it sends a clear message to employees: we don’t trust you. I talked about this before in terms of instant messaging. [...]