The digital-ready worker Digital agency and the pursuit of productivity [REPORT]

​To be effective in an increasingly technological workplace, workers must know, not just how to use digital tools, but when and why to use them. Critical to this ability is digital agency: the judgment and confidence required to navigate and be effective in unfamiliar digital environments.

Imagine that it’s Friday, just after lunch. The new college graduates you hired have had a busy week, so you’ve decided to host an after-work social event so they can unwind. You give one of the graduates some money and ask them to procure drinks and nibbles, confident that they will solve this open and somewhat underspecified problem. Later, during the event, you pause, reflecting that the same graduate who so easily arranged for the drinks and nibbles was unable to engage, and even balked, when you asked them earlier in the week to create a status page for their project on the company’s internal wiki—a similarly scoped problem that you thought they should have been able to solve.1
 
This inability to engage with a digital problem in the workplace—where an intelligent, otherwise competent worker proves strangely unable to use digital tools to address workplace needs—can be thought of as a form of learned helplessness.2 The worker has learned, through many interactions with digital tools and technologies, that these tools are only to be used in particular ways to solve particular problems. Experimenting with different ways of using them often leads to unfortunate consequences: confusion, failure, or even a “bricked” device.3 This reinforces the natural tendency to stick to known, habitual, “safe” tools and methods of use. After accumulating many such experiences, a worker may come to believe themselves incapable of navigating the complexities of a new digital tool, or even the digital workplace in general, without being explicitly taught how to do so—and, consequently, give up even trying.

Learned helplessness in the digital workplace is an increasingly serious problem not only for frustrated workers, but also for the organizations for which they work. Today’s workplaces are saturated with—defined by, even—digital technology. Much, if not most, of an individual’s work requires interacting with digital tools, and these tools are becoming ever more prevalent. The thoughtful use of digital tools can often not only make the work easier, but also yield a superior result. But the more complex the digital environment becomes, the greater the danger it will evoke learned helplessness—even as the technology becomes more and more crucial to organizational success.

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