A technological step up is in the offing
Coping with stress at work often means coping with the IT. Like it or loathe it 21st century work means a perpetual chase to keep up to date with technologies that simply refuse to stand still. If you’re not a natural techie this can all-too-easily make you unnaturally tetchy.
You know the feeling: as soon as you get used to the printer, a new and improved one turns up in the office complete with a whole alphabet of incomprehensible hieroglyphs. Happy with your HR management, your content management, your mobile integration, your firewall settings, your client feedback, your invoicing, your cms and your stock control? If you are now, it’s odds on that you won’t be for long.
Changing times
Change is the new constant. The average lifespan of a mid-sized electronic device is between two and three years. For some of us that’s about how long it takes to learn how to adjust the settings on a toaster. No wonder work is stressful. And software ages even faster!
So this is a call to step back for a moment, to pause for an organic breath and to take stock.
All those machines and all that invisible software are there to help you. However many times the latest version of PowerPoint refuses to do what you want, and no matter how many emails you have to dig out of the wrong folder, the machinery is not the enemy.
IT integration
The good news is that IT for business is growing up. Increasingly the boffins and the geeks have developed integrated packages that are consistent across everything that they do. Instead of dealing with the detail, soon we’ll just be like airline pilots with all the controls at our fingertips.
Cezanne HR is an example of a provider offering a comprehensive human resources package. Every aspect of HR is brought together within a single suite that puts you in control – now there’s a thought! If comms is your bag, Blackerry are amongst a slew of big hitters running out Enterprise Mobility Management systems that tie all of a company’s hardware into a single centrally managed system. And if you’re more oriented towards sales and marketing there are providers such as salesforce.com who will organise all of your customer relations management for you.
Less tools better work
Have you spotted the pattern? More and more, the minutiae of business life are being hoovered up into suites of software that make keeping an overview that little bit easier. So the good news is that instead of having to learn to cope with countless different bits and pieces of technology – and all their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies – we are taking a progressive step towards a working culture that will allow us to concentrate on the job rather than the tools. Doesn’t that sound great? That is not to say that we won’t have to learn these systems in the first place – but it does mean that we might be able to learn them once and once only.
Happily for some of us, toasters tend to evolve quite slowly.
