The New Workforce – Technological Update Essay

Introduction

The new workforce is difficult to image without innovative technologies and solutions. Technology makes communication easier and faster, it goes beyond geographical boundaries and national borders. New technology brings to the new workplace the speed and accuracy. Technology is easy in use incorporating the ways in which social cues may be achieved when communicating.

Thesis: Technology brings a lot of benefits to modern workforce including speed, easy access and invisible boundaries, thus it hides many dangers for people – lack of personal communication and interaction.

Main body

The main advantages of technology for new workforce are speed and easy access. Since advantages may differ among hierarchical levels, technology designers need to tailor the presentation of advantages to the level of the potential user. This shared knowledge is mediated by mutual trust and influence. This implies that organizations need to be sensitive to opportunities for social interaction to enable the development of trust (Norman 20).

Technology may be to facilitate the distribution of information, to monitor organizational units, or to enable the generation of ideas within a group. From a management perspective, communication technology should primarily serve the intended goals. The fundamental question arising is concerned with the relationship between this external parameter and the agents – knowledge workers – of the organization.

Herndon underlines (1997): “technology is designed to enhance or augment human skills, rather than merely to replicate them. As a result, human needs, skills, and decisions are foregrounded, with technology serving as a resource or support” (93). As technology is introduced, workers have to make media choices that translate into alternative ways of processing information. These media choices are made in the context of having to achieve an expected level of individual performance (Weil and Rosen 72).

The second advantage is that technology makes business work boundless. It eliminates possible geographical destinations and opens the world for a common worker. “Since technology is a strategic enabler of one of the most basic tasks within organizations, namely information processing, it has to be viewed as a unique technological tool for organizations” (Norman 43). This uniqueness implies that communication technology not only has an impact on organizations, but transcends all organizational activities. Although the technological impact perspective provides insights into the determining aspects of technology, the actions of humans in developing, accepting and changing technology have largely been ignored by this group of researchers (Thorne 32).

In particular, communication to a large number of people required compromises in the degree of richness. With the increasing breadth of communication choices, the economics of information exchange have changed, since the boundaries of cost-effectiveness for richness and reach have blurred.. Persons are capable of acquiring information necessary for generating new knowledge, correcting faulty knowledge, and remediating skill deficits. “Knowledge may be power, but in the domain of strategic communication, praxis assumes an equally important role in the production of optimal performance” (Weil and Rosen 66). The existence of a friendship-maintenance goal might prevent an individual from employing certain aversive compliance-gaining strategies and tactics

One of the limitations and drawbacks of technologies are that they deprive a person interpersonal communication and verbal communication opportunities. Recent years, more and more people prefer to work at home isolated form the rest of the world. Because of the wealth of information available in face-to-face interactions, it may also be possible that in this situation anticipators cannot increase their information intake because they are in danger of experiencing cognitive overload.

In spite of technological innovations, computer interaction cannot replace face-to-face communication and human relations. Interpersonal communication involves gestures and facial expressions impossible during computer interaction. Following Herndon (1997): “technology monopolizes our thinking by privileging the assumptions underlying technology and rendering traditional beliefs invisible” (93).

With the increasing standardization of technologies, communication costs are reducing for both richness and reach, thus diluting the economics of the boundary of organizations. The increasing standardization of technology, and more specifically its use, is changing the quantity, quality and means of production and distribution of information. This raises substantial questions for the theoretical understanding of organizations, since information is at the core of co-ordination within organizations. “The social context is, however, rarely addressed when implementing communication technologies” (Thorne 32).

In order to overcome this problem, communication technology designers need to gain a profound understanding of the user context, at both organizational and group level in order to overcome potential barriers to implementation. The goal of acquiring information about others is frequently pursued along with other social goals and in many cases may be a precondition for the attainment of other goals as the procurement of information about others is crucial in retrieving or developing plans to reach social goals. Knowledge or lack of skill may prevent users from achieving their social goal and effective communication..

Conclusion

In sum, technology proposes both benefits and threats to the new workforce increasing the speed of information but reducing face-to-face communication. One should not lose sight of the fact that such a focus ignores the complex goal and planning interactions that accrue from the simultaneous striving for multiple interaction goals.

Works Cited

1. Herndon, S. L. Theory and Practice: Implications for the Implementation of Communication Technology in Organizations. The Journal of Business Communication, 34 (1997), 93.
2. Norman, D. A. The invisible computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
3. Thorne, S. L. Artifacts and Cultures-of-Use in Intercultural Communication. Language, Learning & Technology, 7 (2003), 32.
4. Weil, M. M, & Rosen, L. D. TechnoStress. New York: Wiley, 2006.