THE TECH RESISTANCE MAKING OFFICE LIKE HELL

Advice on how to tackle ineptitude or strategic incompetence in the workplace

- Cristina Lindblad and David Rocks

Most of us have a dirty IT secret we don’t want our co-workers to know about. Some people struggle to send a calendar invite or generate a Zoom link. Others are stumped about how to save a document as a PDF. A colleague asked you to comment on their slide deck—if only you knew how.

One might think, almost three years after hundreds of millions of employees around the globe were very suddenly—and often not very willingly—forced to master the intricacies of videoconferencing software and collaboration tools on the fly, that we’d have made a great leap toward universal tech literacy. 

That’s not the story I heard when I interviewed several managers, all of whom asked not to be identified because they wanted to avoid shaming their staff. One woman, who leads a team whose members are mostly older than she is, told me she wants the people she supervises to feel comfortable asking questions. Yet she’s frustrated that employees continually come to her with IT issues rather than contacting the company’s help desk or just Googling for answers.

Young people may appear more technologically in the know, but they often have their own blind spots. A few managers told me they’ve had to have conversations with Generation Z members of their team about checking email, as in: “You need to do it. Regularly.”

Part of the problem is that new technologies don’t replace older ones. Instead, for extended periods of time, they commingle. As media theorist Neil Postman wrote in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, “a new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”