Fundraising solicitations drop into my inbox every day. I usually ignore them, but one caught my eye recently, and not for a good reason. The subject line read, “The reason we have to send so many fundraising emails.” I was intrigued and began reading. It wasn’t until the third paragraph that I found out the answer: They send so many emails because “only 1 percent of our readers ever make a donation, and that’s a problem.”
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A new technology walks into an organization and says, “I’m here to solve all your problems!” Yup, you have. We get it, the last generation of digital tech, particularly email and social media, created a cacophony of messages and amplified the always-on, toxic work culture. You have every right to be furious at whoever created the “reply all” button.
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During November 2021 alone 4.5 million people quit their jobs—the highest number on record. The pandemic work experience encouraged many employees to draw a line in the sand between what’s important (family, flexibility, and free time) and what’s not (toxic work cultures that lead to exhaustion, mistakes and ultimately burnout.) Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) have particularly felt the strain of office life with 97 percent wanting a hybrid or full-time remote working model (compared with 79 percent of white knowledge workers in the U.S.)
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The next wave of digital tech, or “smart tech,” has the potential and power to help us rehumanize work. Rather than doing the same work faster and with fewer people, smart tech creates an opportunity to redesign jobs and reengineer workflows to enable people to focus on the parts of work that humans are particularly well-suited for, such as relationship building, intuitive decision making, empathy, and problem solving. But it will require organizational leaders to make informed, careful, strategic decisions to ensure the technology is used to enhance our humanity and enable people to do the kinds of relational, empathetic, problem-solving activities we do best. This article offers some initial steps to get started introducing smart tech within your own organization.
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Kanter and Fine have presented us with a stellar comprehensive guide for furthering nonprofits’ forward momentum. They lay out the pros and cons of planning for a smarter future, show the balance needed to integrate humanity and technology, and provide a structured plan for implementing the transformation needed as our world becomes increasingly automated. Their expert perspectives are poignant, timely, and essential.
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Most leaders of traditional organizations are missing enormous opportunities to tap into the social networks, ingenuity, and good will of their own constituents.