It’s the paradox of the modern workplace: Everything has changed, but somehow everything’s still the same. We have dozens of new tools for sharing our work and communicating instantly with our colleagues. We’re editing a Google Doc together and then jumping into a Slack channel to discuss a hot topic (all while responding to a text from a customer). We’re uploading files to Dropbox and texting our bosses that we’ll be working on that big presentation over the weekend. Increasingly, all of our information is in the cloud.
And yet it appears we have not grown significantly more productive. In fact, some scholars argue that the rapid rise in productivity that fueled the American economy for decades has petered out -- for good. In economics, productivity basically means how much money is made per hour worked. So according to this formula, the emergence of electricity and the automobile accelerated our economy significantly, allowing us to make more money in the same amount of time, but the computer hasn’t. The digitization of the modern office, however, has only given us incremental gains. It may have changed our personal lives and made it impossible to forget the embarrassing things we did in high school, but has it fundamentally changed the way we work?
Nevertheless, digital disruption is starkly real. I’d go so far as to say that the term "digital disruption" has already become a cliché. The rise of the digital world has left some companies in the dust and created billions of dollars’ worth of new shareholder value. We just accept that massive technological change is the new norm.
So why hasn’t it more significantly increased the effectiveness of our day-to-day working lives and economic indicators like gross domestic product (GDP)?