How can organisations cope when a digitally empowered employee carries out activities that can negatively disrupt their businesses?
Most businesses today are thinking about digital disruption. Either they are trying to unleash it, or they are seeking ways to avoid being victims of it. Some are involved in both activities.
Most employees are on board with all of this. Call them the digital dissidents. In today’s workplace, the dissidents can carry a disproportionate amount of power – and, ironically, it is to a large extent the digital revolution that has empowered them.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman talks about this issue in his soon-to-be-released book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. We have to come to terms with what he calls the “Power of One.” If you think that is an exaggeration, read up on what Edward Snowden accomplished at the National Security Agency. Not long ago, it would have taken at the very least the director of the NSA to cause an equal amount of disruption.
For businesses, the important question is what they can do to blunt the power of their digital dissidents. Remarkably, many employers would probably want to find ways to control them, perhaps with threats or negative incentives. I think this is remarkable, because we have amassed enough economic history over the past couple of centuries to show that this is ultimately a futile strategy.
John W. Merriman, a professor of history at Yale University, sees the Industrial Revolution as an era when industrialists were able to induce workers to work the way they wanted them to work. Fine-china maker Josiah Wedgwood was an early pioneer in exerting industrial discipline over an extended workforce. Just before 1800, he thought long and hard about how to get all his workers to work the way he wanted all the time. He and his fellow industrialists were very concerned with preventing workers from wandering off and spending time enjoying themselves. Wedgwood’s ultimate objective was having a pool of workers who would respond “as fingers on two hands” to his commands.
Today, we might be tempted to congratulate ourselves that the methods of old have been left behind. And indeed, in much of the world, the conditions of the workplace are stringently regulated. Employees work in clean, safe environments. But coercion is still a favoured response for a lot of people. We live in a world of non-disclosure agreements, where a politician can rise to the top with talk of banning all Muslims from the country. Think about this, though: firing all of your digital dissenters won’t advertise your company as a great place to work.
Is there a better way? Surely. The approach that seems to display the most humanity, and to offer the best counterweight to alienation and possibly the greatest likelihood of working, is simply this: in an age of super-empowerment, management needs to be asking, “What are my digital dissidents trying to tell me?”
In other words, communicate. This goes beyond having regularly posted office hours. It is part of creating a culture that says to everyone, “How you feel is important. If something is bothering you, we can talk about it.”
