Final month, I wrote about the truth that economists are having problem discovering proof that the know-how 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 after 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 staff, and it has labored out nicely,” he wrote. “I’ve observed in my 20-plus-year profession as a associate that productiveness has constantly continued to drop. We used to suppose it was the staff being much less productive, however now we predict in another way about it.”

“Our personal impression is that as know-how has developed, the complexity of our regulatory atmosphere has developed 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 know-how choices, which at occasions could be distractions.”

All companies, we’re instructed, are know-how companies nowadays, however what that usually appears to imply is we’re all spending a substantial amount of our time on know-how, and never essentially on the enterprise. The period of time all of us spend on e-mail is an ideal instance: E-mail hastens our work processes enormously — however how a lot of the time saved is given over to managing our overflowing inboxes?

Writ massive, this query is legitimate for all applied sciences: How a lot time can we find yourself devoting to them, or to the opposite necessities they engender, moderately than to the work they’re meant to allow? (And that is with out counting the time after we’re rendered unproductive as a result of they’re out of order, or offline.)

This isn’t to recommend that know-how is a web adverse, or that it hasn’t performed a important position in companies with the ability to push by way of an ever-increasing quantity of labor within the face of an ever-diminishing workforce. It has completed all that; however, has the power to do extra — and extra advanced —issues, merely led us to pile on increasingly more of them? In different phrases, is know-how consuming up its personal productiveness good points?

Economists are unsure about this very concern, and I am no economist, so I am much more unsure — and I am curious what you suppose. How far more productive has know-how made you? And how much return are you getting on on a regular basis and vitality and cash you spend on managing all of the know-how in your agency? Let me know at daniel.hood@arizent.com.