Last month, I wrote about the fact that economists are having difficulty finding evidence that the technology advances of the past decade or so have produced any meaningful increase in productivity (see “The productivity problem in accounting”), and from there I pointed out the similar mystery of whether accounting firm staff became more or less productive when they started working remotely en masse due to the COVID pandemic.
That sparked a very thoughtful response from Jason Reis, a partner at Reis & Reis CPAs in Wisconsin, that I’m going to quote at some length, because he raises some very interesting points: “Our firm has both remote and flex employees, and it has worked out well,” he wrote. “I have noticed in my 20-plus-year career as a partner that productivity has consistently continued to drop. We used to think it was the employees being less productive, but now we think differently about it.”
“Our own impression is that as technology has evolved, the complexity of our regulatory environment has evolved with it, and it rapidly changes now more than ever,” he continued. “We do more trainings and research now than we ever have with staff. That also includes the never-ending landscape of technology options, which at times can be distractions.”
All businesses, we’re told, are technology businesses these days, but what that often seems to mean is we’re all spending a great deal of our time on technology, and not necessarily on the business. The amount of time we all spend on email is a perfect example: Email speeds up our work processes enormously — but how much of the time saved is given over to managing our overflowing inboxes?
Writ large, this question is valid for all technologies: How much time do we end up devoting to them, or to the other requirements they engender, rather than to the work they’re meant to enable? (And that’s without counting the time when we’re rendered unproductive because they’re out of order, or offline.)
This is not to suggest that technology is a net negative, or that it hasn’t played a critical role in firms being able to push through an ever-increasing amount of work in the face of an ever-diminishing workforce. It has done all that; but, has the ability to do more — and more complex —things, simply led us to pile on more and more of them? In other words, is technology eating up its own productivity gains?
Economists are uncertain about this very issue, and I’m no economist, so I’m even more uncertain — and I’m curious what you think. How much more productive has technology made you? And what kind of return are you getting on all the time and energy and money you spend on managing all the technology in your firm? Let me know at daniel.hood@arizent.com.
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