Technology – Unlocking your Productive Workforce & Beyond

Over the past two decades, western economies have undergone a productivity revolution, due in most part to technological strides that have made modern workers hyper-efficient in relation to historical benchmarks. The same rationale can be applied today to up to 40% of the workforce who deal with some kind of alternate method of reaching their objectives within the firm. Technology, in the business/disability space, provides powerful tools that increase the output of not only PWD, but can be used to lever other workers output as well.

Technology in the business/disability space is often high-jacked by lawyers and is talked about in terms of accommodations and compliance. This tack seriously undermines technology’s role as a driver of margins and the purest lever for growth. For the average unit of labor in today’s workforce, technology has exploded their standard of living by multiples. Need evidence? Think of performing that Excel spreadsheet you did this morning with pencil and paper, oh, and your undo button was a rubber eraser. Think of how much more you can get accomplished today, as opposed to 1990.

Now, imagine doing that pencil and paper ‘ledger’ if you couldn’t read or write. There is a portion of your workforce, being highly skilled and talented, who are in that position right now. While they aren’t staring at the rubber eraser anymore, they are not using the tools on their desktop to their full extent, because of some type of disability. Whether it’s due to a learning disability, vision, hearing or some issue with dexterity, productivity is leaking from a material portion of your workforce because they cannot fully interact with the technology the firm puts into the field.

How material? This author estimates that 8%-10% of your workforce has some kind of learning disability that can be tactically neutralized with various pieces of software, and at a low enterprise cost. The measurement of productivity lost from this is tricky, but a 25% loss from 10% of your workforce seems reasonable, and should get any manager’s attention.

Vision and hearing issues have long been understood in the medical world, but not in corporate circles. Again, technology is there today to ramp productivity and maintain cost sanity. The beauty with sensory issues is economies of scale. The issues are very similar from person to person, and solutions can be rolled out on firm-wide level enjoying the cost savings that come with such a roll-out. Many of these technologies now come off the ‘rack’ like Instant Messaging, email and video-over-internet.

Dexterity issues with technology are a different animal. Solutions range from simple fixes like changing the settings on Windows to involved hardware that makes interfacing with a computer simple. The overwhelming majority of these are simple changes, costing nothing, or under $100. It is interesting that the expensive changes seem to get the most press, consistent with the theme of focusing on the ‘tails’ in business/disability. The overwhelming majority of these fixes carry tiny costs relative to the productivity gains they create. There are the occasional projects that end up under water, but this should be of no surprise as sometimes technology outlays are a loss-leader to open future doors in new markets. Business/disability is no exception to that rule.

Here is the magic of technology fixes in business/disability – they drive productivity gains across the entire firm. Everyone benefits from better interfaces with their PC. The keyboard and mouse are not the most efficient ways into the digital world. Voice, physicality and eventually thought will cause Logitech to drastically change its business models. Voice recognition was originally developed to assist those who could not use a keyboard effectively, yet it is now widely used in the workplace to compose emails, reports and other documents.

Baby boomers put this topic into over-drive. 78 million boomers in the US alone are aging, whether they like it or not. One of the defining characteristics of this segment is that they like to be in control of their own destiny, and they likely will remain in the workforce long after their vision, hearing and dexterity start to change. This is a good thing, as the firm benefits longer from their spirit, wisdom and creativity. They want to maintain, and even enhance their productivity as they have become accustomed to over the years.

Finally, your website. This is the storefront of the modern age. It is where most of your customers get to know your brand and many even transact right there. To attract the largest audience possible, design is important. As boomers age, they need bigger fonts to read text. Sound cues and asthetic design can make the site easier to browse, for all customers. Cluttered sites not only look horrible, but can be hard to navigate…for anyone. The reason to design an accessible site has nothing to do with Supreme Court decisions, it’s just good branding and good business.

A second(third?) wave of productivity gains is coming, and it is being driven by business/disability. Senior technology leaders at large firms looking to provide solutions to their entire populations can ‘kill two birds with one stone’ by providing solutions that give PWD the tools they need, while giving the whole team alternatives to speed up what they do day-in day-out. Whether the new hours are spent with family, or envisioning the next new widget, hours are the real deliverables of technology. New hours across the firm have direct consequences to shareholders – growth.