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Final month, I wrote about the truth that economists are having issue discovering proof that the expertise advances of the previous decade or so have produced any significant improve in productiveness (see “The productiveness drawback in accounting“), and from there I identified the same thriller of whether or not accounting agency workers turned roughly productive once they began working remotely en masse as a result of COVID pandemic.
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That sparked a really considerate response from Jason Reis, a associate at Reis & Reis CPAs in Wisconsin, that I’ll quote at some size, as a result of he raises some very fascinating factors: “Our agency has each distant and flex workers, and it has labored out properly,” he wrote. “I’ve seen in my 20-plus-year profession as a associate that productiveness has constantly continued to drop. We used to suppose it was the workers being much less productive, however now we expect in a different way about it.”
“Our personal impression is that as expertise has advanced, the complexity of our regulatory setting has advanced with it, and it quickly adjustments now greater than ever,” he continued. “We do extra trainings and analysis now than we ever have with workers. That additionally contains the unending panorama of expertise choices, which at occasions might be distractions.”
All companies, we’re informed, are expertise companies as of late, however what that always appears to imply is we’re all spending a substantial amount of our time on expertise, and never essentially on the enterprise. The period of time all of us spend on e-mail is an ideal instance: Electronic mail quickens our work processes enormously — however how a lot of the time saved is given over to managing our overflowing inboxes?
Writ giant, this query is legitimate for all applied sciences: How a lot time will we find yourself devoting to them, or to the opposite necessities they engender, somewhat than to the work they’re meant to allow? (And that is with out counting the time once we’re rendered unproductive as a result of they’re out of order, or offline.)
This isn’t to counsel that expertise is a web detrimental, or that it hasn’t performed a vital position in corporations having the ability to push via an ever-increasing quantity of labor within the face of an ever-diminishing workforce. It has performed all that; however, has the flexibility to do extra — and extra advanced —issues, merely led us to pile on increasingly more of them? In different phrases, is expertise consuming up its personal productiveness positive aspects?
Economists are unsure about this very challenge, and I am no economist, so I am much more unsure — and I am curious what you suppose. How far more productive has expertise made you? And what sort of return are you getting on on a regular basis and vitality and cash you spend on managing all of the expertise in your agency? Let me know at [email protected].
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