Why Responsible Business Should Weigh Between People And Profit As Best Of Both Worlds

Technology innovation has driven amazing change in business. The working life of an employee today looks nothing like it did 50 years ago – every action, conversation and strategy is augmented with technology.

But as innovation continues to speed up, there’s a danger of leaving employees behind. Companies considering new technology investments have tended to make decisions based on business goals – can it save us money? Can it speed up processes? Can it improve company performance? While those are valid considerations, it neglects an essential question – how will it impact our people?

However, today’s business leaders stand at an important juncture. There is a growing awareness about our collective responsibility – to our environment, to our employees and to ourselves, driven by major global events such as climate change and the COVID-19 outbreak. But this doesn’t mean that companies have to choose between profit or people. Perhaps this is the start of a better kind of business, where putting humans at the heart of business decisions means the best of both worlds.

Progress? What are the costs?

The past decades have brought a revolution in employee productivity and communications. Today, an employee is able to create, use and store massive amounts of data, communicate digitally across vast expanses, and effortlessly complete tasks in seconds, which used to take weeks.

While this new era has clear appeal for business decision makers in reaching ever more elevated productivity objectives, a progress at all costs approach can lead to unanticipated risks. Employees can struggle to keep pace with the changes being introduced, feel overwhelmed by the volume of information they receive, find new tools too daunting or complex and as a result, potentially even resist change altogether.

The cat leading the horse.

To realize this new era’s potential, the adoption and roll out of technology needs to go beyond productivity goals. Business leaders need to make technology investments with their employees in mind – do they truly understand how effectively their employees are adopting technology? How intuitive will the new technology be to use? Will it solve rather than create challenges? These are considerations which need to be front and center of the investment consideration process.

All too often, this human perspective isn’t given adequate focus. Rather than looking at technology as a means for employees to make better use of their working day, it’s viewed as an end in itself. Affirmations such as we need to be doing Machine Learning or can we put this data on a block chain? tend to miss the point.

You need these technologies where they serve a purpose for the human feeding the commands to the machine. They do not serve as panaceas for business problems in their own right and, done incorrectly, can actually make the user’s life more difficult.

Taking Responsibility

Employee expectations have seen a marked change in recent years. Growing public awareness of ethical and environmental issues have percolated into the workplace –employees now hold their own employer to higher standards. For example, research has shown that four out of five people now think that companies have a duty to help the environment. Meanwhile, employees are more concerned about their company’s recycling policy, the ethical nature of its supply chain and its efforts to protect the mental health of its employees.

In turn, this has led to businesses to consider and bolster their responsible business strategies. Mental health services are becoming commonplace in corporate environments, reflected in the fact that 82% of people said they’d be more willing to discuss mental health issues in the workplace than they would have a few years ago.

In our current situation, unprecedented events surrounding COVID-19 have forced organizations to take a more flexible, empathetic approach to their staff. Businesses that would not normally allow working from home are being obliged to do so. But more widely, organizations are having to recognize the reality that isolation forces working and home lives to collide – with many employees looking after their children during the working day. As a result, many companies are offering more flexible hours to support their teams. Will these allowances continue long term? Time will tell, but it reflects a wider trend for businesses taking a more responsible, human-centric approach to business.

Thinking Human

With the right planning, technology can be the tool that unites these aims – human benefit and business profit. When applied with the right objectives, it creates the potential for employees to work faster, bypassing some of the laborious manual processes that took the shine out of their daily tasks. From project management and business intelligence, through to video conferencing and messaging, software advancements have enabled users to add creativity to what was once mundane, bringing distinctively human qualities into how they work and what they produce.

And this is exactly what technology is supposed to be. It’s a way to be better than before. To find genuine satisfaction in everyday work and make life easier. To break down the siloes that made collaborating with anyone more than a couple of feet away just too hard. To think and act in a way that drives new levels of personal achievement.

At this point we see what really matters. Existing technologies will advance, new innovations will emerge, but what remains constant is people. Only by thinking human can we seek to reduce unintended negative impacts on humans and begin to explore what really matters.

A springboard for change

It would be remiss not to put all this into the context we’re all experiencing. In recent months, workplaces around the world have found themselves in a situation that few would have anticipated. The transition from business as usual to the next new normal didn’t offer much warning.

While it’s still premature to be seeking out silver linings, the current situation has made one thing immediately apparent: stripped of the physical office location, we see the human side so much more clearly. Businesses have had to be proactive in supporting their employees through the crisis, helping them to stay safe as the primary priority.

Amid ongoing uncertainty, we hope that the consequence of the current global context will be to usher in the next phase of enterprise development, where employee impact and welfare are as high a priority as the business’ financial and productivity goals. Where responsible business is seen as an opportunity and not just an afterthought. At Intellinks East Africa, in partnership with Lenovo, our goal is to support leaders to take action to enable a human-centric approach to innovation that will provide value for many years to come.

---