The first few weeks of the year signals the back to work influx, in many cases now also a return to the office, from the suburbs to the city. For the vast majority, even in 2025, it means back to the same desk and view surrounded by the same people who most likely did the same things during the 2025 Summer as they did during 2024 or any other summer break for that matter. Corporate types will be hoping that their favourite café will be open and school teachers are preparing to deal with the little darlings that will be presented to them to look after for the coming year. IT pundits and other “experts” will be looking for the suffix to their marketing hype titled “What’s new in 2025?” or “2025 will be the Year of….”.
1984.
Way back in the dim, dark past and before many of the 2025 pundits were born the office or workplace for most people looked pretty similar. There were the guys in the warehouse shipping out or taking delivery of whatever it was the company produced. There was a team of Sales guys and another in Engineering trying to make work whatever the Sales guys had sold. Chances are Engineering and Sales never interacted much less had drinks together on a Friday. There were the guys in management and the even higher echelons of the executive, but no one ever saw them. There were the ladies in Finance and the Typing Pool. There was probably a Tea Lady and most importantly the Mail Boy. IT teams, not that such a thing really existed, actually repaired breakages and large-scale outages were pretty rare.
1990s.
The 1990s were an era of enormous disruption mostly caused by the rapid advancement of technology not just in the workplace but, at home too. The World Wide Web was invented and has quite simply changed the world. DVDs became commonplace along with GPS systems. PlayStation is released midway through the decade and the various online retailers including Amazon and Netflix that we know today were born.
For those working in the computer industry, document writing applications had been around for a while. These tools really didn’t hit the mainstream until the late 1990s with Microsoft Word and Excel starting to change the workplace. Combined with email, albeit in its infancy, Word and Excel saw the end of the Typing Pool, the Mail Boy and much of the gender-specific roles in the workplace. The dawn of the paperless office was here!
2025.
Fast forward into 2025 and what’s changed since 1984? Our society and personal lives are vastly different much attributed to the invasion of technology. In our work lives for many of us though not much, it appears. Certainly not in the workplace or more accurately in how our workplaces operate. Of course, in most workplaces now the gender balance has appropriately swung to more of a middle ground across the board. In many organisations so called working from home is the flavour of the day. Many work from home on a regular basis and some even have their own business in fields or selling product that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.
Far from being paperless, workplace consumption of paper has increased significantly. Recently a survey conducted by this author of an organisation with around 3000 staff found that over a million pages every month were being printed for use there. Read that sentence again.
So, despite all the talk over decades the office isn’t paperless; the workplace isn’t digitally transformed; AI is not as widespread as the pundits and their headlines would have you believe and, most people are doing very similar jobs with similar outcomes to those that would be recognisable by their parents, or worse, grandparents.
Surely that’s not the case cry the voices in the wilderness! Take a good look at the organisation you work for and the basic activities on a given day. There’s a good chance that you must print out an approval form for a new starter or for some leave that you want. Perhaps you were ill yesterday? That needs a medical certificate to be sighted by someone. These forms need to be approved and signed by a bunch of people. Your new starter can begin with your organisation by filling out a bunch of forms for various uses. Chances are the new starter will need access to the team’s shared drive too. Another form. Shared drives – so 1990. Timesheets anyone? You won’t get paid if you don’t fill in your timesheet.
We’ve Always Done It This way.
The antithesis of progress – we’ve always done it this way. Unfortunately, this antithesis is also the foundations upon which most organisations are built. Even startups are not immune.
Probably a feeling of safety communicated throughout organisations by expectations being met resulting in a sense of predictability and reliability. No longer seen as a pillar of strength by transformers, the inertia of these organisations affects them in many ways. Many are seen as being difficult to do business with or are seen by their customers as being out of touch. Employees of these organisations are seen as inefficient struggling through the day’s meaningless work on the slow march to end of day.
Digital transformation is an often talked about, but an all too rarely completed concept. Whilst it is true that computers have transformed the way work is done, they have not transformed what work is done. As outlined earlier, not much has actually changed in the workplace. Instead of writing a memo you now send an email and instead of having a meeting you’ll gather around a Teams or Zoom call. You’ve the changed the way but not the what. Regardless of the dictionary definition, they all agree to transform something necessarily requires improvements to the original thing whether that be a business or even a person. Otherwise, why invest the time and effort and other resources into the transformation? It would make no sense.
True Transformation.
A remarkable transformation occurred a few years ago in a government department that I worked in. The Concessions area is a team that helps support some of the vulnerable people in their community by enabling concessions to various living costs such as gas and electricity, water and sewage rates and other costs of living pressures. In 2019, the Executive Director decided to investigate the length of time it took for a concession approval to be approved which was around 6 weeks. For people needing these payments, many with other issues affecting them such as mental health or employment challenges, the time taken to get an approval was exorbitant.
The Concessions team all leant into the process review and soon realised that the long approvals process was full of redundancy and re-work. Documents being checked multiple times or various approvals at every step of the process being approved so that the approval could be approved to go ahead to the next step. An ludicrous and certainly outdated process that had grown organically over time without too much planning.
After this review, a new streamlined process was developed and reduced the 6 week or more process to 5 working days during the following pilot. There were no job losses in the unit, yet the outcomes were a significant improvement for their clients. A truly transformative project that had significant and sustainable outcomes for all concerned.
These types of reviews can be conducted across all business and government layers.
- Start small with a clearly defined workflow. This isn’t an expensive process needing lots of consultants and contractors.
- Engage staff in the affected areas to begin a process documentation effort. The real process not what the business thinks is happening but how the teams spend their days.
- Begin with a defined pilot with SMART performance indicators.
- Don’t be afraid to kill off an obviously unsuccessful project. Beware the fallacy of sunk costs.
- Check the legislation. Particularly in government circles, the enabling legislation is often used, incorrectly, as a reason for not making change.
- Keep your eyes on the outcomes. Plan for a better what and do it with a new how.
They allow a prudent approach to transformation without the huge associated costs of an “all in” approach. They focus teams on the end customer and remove the waste and redundancy in most business processes. Making your business or organisation more efficient allows your people to do the less mundane and more interesting work so you employee satisfaction also goes up. Additionally, having your teams really and actively involved in the review process ensures buy-in from them too.
Starting with a goal to transform the entire business is a pipe dream and leads to failure and disillusionment. Start small, celebrate the success and remember that everyone wants to join a successful team.
