How should digital workers work in a digital age?
How should digital workers work in a digital age? How can digital work be made more ‘digital’? How can individuals and organisations develop a digital mindset
Most organisations aren’t very digital in their approach to work. They still apply an industrial way of working to digital work. And because this mindset is so pervasive it’s hard to imagine that there is any other way of working, but the industrialised approach of mass-production isn’t the only way, it’s simply a way that has existed for a few hundred years. Before that there was a different way of approaching work that existed since the agricultural revolution, and before that there was the hunter/gatherer approach to how a person spends their time adding value to something bigger than themselves.
Digital workers are still expected to turn up on time (at a time that works best for the organisation), sit down and get on with their work, not think or talk about things that aren’t part of their job description. This is an industrial approach and it doesn’t really fit digital work. So, trying to force an old approach onto a new world of work is clearly not going to be successful in the long run. As the digital age is only a few decades old we haven’t yet figured out what this new mindset looks like and it’ll probably take a few more decades until we reach any kind of collective agreement on what a digital approach to work would include and involve, but it’s definitely coming and organisations that figure it out are going to have a competitive advantage of those that don’t.