Coping with Digital Change

We often discuss the seemingly endless array of gadgets and technologies that make, well, a (digital) nomad a nomad. Let’s put the tech aside for a second and focus on the human element of this. Or should I say, let’s not forget the human element and be aware that it’s humans that need to adapt just as much as the technology does.

Last Monday, Vince, a co-worker of mine, sent me an Outlook meeting invite. The locaton of the meeting, said, “Conference Room Delta”.

For those of you that are not in Corporate America, this is fancy talk for, “Let’s meet in a conference room”. For a diehard home office/in the car/Starbucks worker like me, this means, “Waste 2 hours driving into the office so we can meet for 30 minutes and so you can be gossiped to death for the remainder of the day because everyone misses you.” Perhaps I am a tad introverted and mildly cynical but you get the point.

So I responded back to Vince with a WebEx invite and it was declined. I asked him to drive to my home office; the invite was declined. To this day, the meeting has not happened because this guy is insisting on a live, in-person meeting, in the office. The reason: it’s his office and that’s his person’s comfort zone.

To me, this isn’t an opportunity to battle with someone and it isn’t a chance to push a virtual worker agenda. It is however a chance to educate and offer to meet Vince in person on a day that I can at least double-up on meetings so I can kill two birds with one stone.

Lack of flexability will delay your initiatives and in this case, Vince is going to wait at least 2 weeks simply because he’s not being flexible. If you were to add up delays like this across an organization, it would be pretty staggering. How many Vince’s do you have?

While many large IT organizations are slow(er) to adopt and push new technologes, those that do need to educate people and need to employ strategies that are much deeper than ‘How to Operate”. The strategies need to include sessions named, “How to Cope”.

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