As a child, I remember my mother’s desk at work holding a stack of neatly piled papers, a jar of pens and pencils, a typewriter – the laptop’s forerunner, with its tactile hardcopy screen and wireless capabilities – and a telephone. The last on this list was the only mechanism by which she could be reached, short of a face-to-face conversation.
And just so we’re clear, this wasn’t all that long ago – the little girl once doing homework in the corner of her mother’s office is still under 30 years old.
Yet, as I sit in my own corner doing grown-up work all these years later, the thought strikes me – with a deer-in-the-headlights awareness as to how axiomatic it sounds – that technology has changed our working lives completely. There are three devices in front of me that enable people to communicate with me – a landline, my cellphone and my laptop. The latter two hold a number of communications options in and of themselves: phone calls, SMSs, WhatsApp, various email accounts, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viber and, if you’re my adolescent sister, Snapchat.
Face-to-face conversations, of course, are still an option, and I relish them.
All of this self-evident waffle is to say that these many options, when put to good use, enable working environments to operate more coherently and efficiently. The immediacy with which we live our lives often gets a bad rap (in fact, I’m often the first to dish out the criticism), but a simple WhatsApp group between colleagues – whether the entire team, members of management, or those working on a specific project – can help streamline processes and pre-empt disasters.
This very tactic helped Flow PR recently when most of the team found themselves at various events, with only two of us left manning the fort. Being in the office during this time gave the sensation of being in the eye of the storm: there was clearly untold fuss happening beyond our office walls, but within them was a small haven of peace. Keeping a finger on the WhatsApp pulse meant that we knew exactly where our colleagues were, what help was needed, which clients and journalists needed to be contacted, and when to have cups of coffee (or glasses of wine) ready for our colleagues’ return. Keeping in touch saw this frantic time pass by without a hitch.
While typewriters and telephones – and basic human interaction – have their place, there is much to be said for the role of a single application in the working world. Worth US$19-billion? Probably not. But certainly worth a blog post in its honour.