When training for new tech, don’t ignore employee hierarchies | Organizational Culture - MIT Sloan News

New technologies are upsetting workplace status hierarchies. By properly introducing them, managers can mitigate the turbulence, as MIT Sloan News reports.

Photo: Creative Wonder/Shutterstock

Machine learning, blockchain, augmented reality, Internet of Things. An array of young technologies is transforming huge swaths of the economy. Businesses in almost every sector are striving to understand — and forecast — the implications.

So is Kate Kellogg, a professor of work and organization studies at MIT Sloan. In new research, Kellogg and her co-authors find that the introduction of new technologies in the workplace often creates friction between junior digital natives and their more senior coworkers, upsetting fundamental power hierarchies. To mitigate the effect, they recommend careful attention to how this technology gets introduced and, specifically, how trainings take place.

“I’m very interested in how new technology is affecting the future of work and workers,” Kellogg said. “I’ve started to focus more carefully on the way organizations that are introducing new technology upskill their workforce to use it effectively.”...

The results, which are published in Organization Science, present a dichotomy. At three of the five clinics, promoting more junior employees to be peer trainers created backlash. It drove a competitive wedge between coworkers. Especially among more senior employees, who saw their status undermined, the trainings created resistance to, rather than acceptance of, the new processes.

The other two clinics demonstrated a different response: the trainings were interpersonally peaceful and the new processes were both accepted and quickly diffused. The most prominent difference? At the two successful sites, the role of trainer was not fixed; rather, employees rotated in and out of the job. This process, it appears, provided a degree of deference to existing power structures and offered all employees a chance to fill the role of trainer while also ushering in a new way of doing things.

Read more... 

Source: MIT Sloan News