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Buy those leg-ironsThere is a constant onslaught of new technology that everyone is trying to sell you. It's worth taking a moment to think about the point of all of this cool stuff. You've probably never heard it discussed so cold-heartedly. The point, dear reader, is to keep workers' butts in their seats. The product literature and magazine articles say that it's to make people more productive. But how do we make them more productive? By making it easier and faster for them to communicate, use resources or get information. And that, my friends, means keeping them at their desks, hands firmly on the mouse and keyboard, staring into that computer screen. So what we in the technology business really do, if you want to be brutally honest, is provide the boss with virtual leg-irons for workers. Let's see how this works. Email - This is pretty obvious. We want to prevent your staff from actually walking across the aisle and talking to people. You already gave them telephones, but they still insist on walking around. So you gave them email. Now they'd rather carry on long, interactive conversations electronically instead of leaning against the sides of door-jambs and cubicles. Why, I don't know. But you can't argue with success! Some people can't even function without email anymore. If you're worried about the unproductive use of email, like chatting with a girlfriend in the accounting department, there are tools to scan email for "non-business related" content. The Web - Rather than walking over to the department's administrative assistant (the only person in the office literate enough to actually own a dictionary), your staff can now simply look up a word on the Internet. Plus they can also access maps, almanacs, encyclopedias, vendor sites, catalogs, news, business magazines, etc. Frankly, it's gotten so bad that even I would rather look up information on the Internet than look in the file cabinet two steps away from my desk. Hmmm, no wonder I've gained weight. Concerned about surfing on company time? Get a content filter to prevent users from accessing non-business sites. Fax servers - No longer does your staff have to write a letter, walk to the printer and retrieve it, walk to the fax machine and stand around while it gets sent. Now, they can type the letter at their desktops, and then simply fax it from their computers. This technology actually isn't as ubiquitous as it should be, but the potential is there for companies that REALLY want their employees to make permanent impressions on their chairs. Scanners - But wait! What if I have a document that didn't come out of my computer? How do I use a fax server with that? Well, with the price of scanners being in the same range as a family pack of Tootsie-Rolls, every employee can have one on their desk. Then they can scan the document, and send it out via the fax server. For that matter, they can email it as well. Digital copiers - There's no longer any need for your staff to gather around the copier while waiting to make those 20 double-sided, stapled, 30-page reports. Today your staff can just send those print jobs to the copier from their desktop, and pick them up when the jobs are finished. This might even eliminate the temptation for your employees to photocopy certain parts of their bodies. And, since they can't just stand around the copier, they'll probably be making fewer copies of their club's newsletter or their latest batch of resumes. Video-conferencing - One of the last refuges for peons...er, I mean employees, who wanted to get out of their cubes, was to go to meetings. But with the advent of the little cameras on everyone's PC, pretty soon they'll be able to attend meetings while sitting in their comfy chair, in their comfy cubicle. They won't have to waste all that time walking to the meeting room. Won't that be swell? You'll be able to turn the meeting rooms into even more cube space. And your donut costs will plummet. Cheap printers - With the dramatic reduction in the cost of printers over the last few years, you can put a high-quality printer on everyone's desk. This reduces all of the unproductive time spent "standing around the printer waiting for my job and socially interacting with my co-workers." Notebook computers - For the occasional employee who just can't be tied down to a desk, they can take everything with them. Now there's no need for them to go out to a restaurant at night while they're on the road. With a modem, they can be doing everything they would do in the office, but they're doing it at night, on their own time, at their convenient workstation in the hotel room. Such productivity could only be dreamed of 10 years ago! Just make sure they don't abuse room service. So what do we have to show for all of this technology? Employees are sitting at their desks more and more. There's less face-to-face employee interaction, less wandering the hallways, fewer meetings, and less standing around the water cooler. And with notebooks, even if they want Christmas Day off, the odds are they'll do a little work at home anyway. Scrooge never had it so good.
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