Sure, this is very ‘old man shouts at clouds’ but hey, I’m not young anymore, and those clouds deserve it…
10-15 years ago, you couldn’t get a basic office job for love or money without proving your IT credentials. ‘Must be proficient in Word/Office/Windows etc’ seemed to be in the small print of every job description. More recently, I’ve been wondering what the hell has happened since these halcyon days.
Outside of the IT department (and - worryingly - sometimes inside it) I’m seeing an agonising trend, whether it’s in presentations by sales staff or admin teams doing simple tasks on their PCs. Everything is long-winded. Jobs that should only take minutes take hours. Nobody remembers how to use keyboard shortcuts. Countless examples of ineffective and unproductive uses of basic technology. To quote one of the greatest living philosophers of our times: “It’s twisting my melon, man.”
None of this is rocket science. Take clipboard history apps as an example. Use it, and the last hundred things you’ve copy-and-pasted are at your fingertips and a keyboard shortcut away. So why am I seeing people copy-and-pasting two identical bits of information time and time again, from two different programs into a database? Or people going back and forth, back and forth, fumbling around with the mouse, and resizing and minimising windows with no concept of multi-screening?
It’s painful. And wastes a huge amount of time. But it’s hard to point fingers at the people who are working like this - if they don’t know, they don’t know. If they aren’t given a chance to learn, they won’t learn. So it’s business leaders and decision-makers who are responsible. Every company shouts about its embracing of glittering new technology, but there’s very little attention paid to the simple, unshiny stuff - like teaching basic IT skills.
It seems we’ve moved from consciously being in a position where people would have these skills - or we were prepared to teach them - to a place where everything is assumed. And it’s not like any of this stuff is particularly innovative: it’s things that have been a feature of office software ever since Windows 98. So what’s the solution?
In all seriousness, I think if a company invested in short, 20-minute ‘lunch and learns’ on various micro subjects every week, it would have a huge impact on employee productivity which would pay for itself. One week you could go through copy and pasting, the next week we might look at shortcut keys. Maybe the week after we can look at customising Word headers and paragraphs and building templates so you don’t need to do it every time you open it.
Honestly, it would save one person several hours a week. If you have 50-100 employees, that’s quite a few resources you’ll be able to redeploy on other, far more profitable tasks. So, if you want to chat more about this, let’s go shout at some clouds together…
