We recently set out on a mission to investigate the way that people are working today, in an attempt to better understand the working environment that our customers, partners, suppliers and friends are dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
So what have we established so far? Well we know that office workers today are receiving volumes of information from a vast range of different sources – something that is having a negative effect on our day-to-day work and ultimately affecting our happiness. We now also know that using visualisation as a method of working – both individually and in teams – increases productivity and reduces wasted mental resource, when compared with traditional ways of working – something that can help to ease and (dare we say it) even solve these problems.
But now it’s time to take a look back- after all, they say that to truly solve a problem, you have to go back to the root. So now we look at historically how we as human beings have been forced to adapt to developments in the tools that we use to complete our every-day work, how have we had to change to deal with these advances, and the speed at which we have been forced to do so in the digital age in recent years. We do this through our infographic – ‘Evolution of Workplace Technology’.
[sourcecode language=”html”]<a title="Evolution of Workplace Technology" href="http://bit.ly/KRaNEF"><img src="http://images.learn.mindjet.com/EloquaImages/clients/MindjetLLC/%7B59a0c09c-1d20-44bd-aef0-fa2e01785797%7D_Evolution_of_workplace_technology_infographic_-_RGB_(2).jpg" alt="Evolution of Workplace Technologys"/></a> Infographic from <a title="Collaboration Tools from Mindjet" href="http://blog.mindmanager.com">Mindjet</a>[/sourcecode]
Dr. Lynda Shaw, PhD CPhsychol comments on this topic; “Throughout the last few decades in particular, the amount of data we have to process has increased substantially, but we’ve made very little movement forward in how we’re helping our brains to cope with such a huge influx. In the last 150,000 years, our brain’s structure has developed minimally, if it all, yet we’re still expecting them to be able to cope with more and more increasingly complex documents, spreadsheets, databases, e-mails, social resources, specialist software and everything else above and beyond.”
So what does this mean for todays’ workers? Workplace practices and technology will never cease to continue evolving, so essentially, it’s not going to be about the volumes and methods of information we have to deal with changing. It’s about us recognising our limitations as human beings, and utilising the tools out there to get smarter and adapt our ways of working to deal with the changes and advances that are thrown at us.