Stop wasting your time with technology
Posted on 23rd August 2023 at 15:57
Stop wasting your time with technology
Karen Turton, CEO and Founder, Purple Story
This isn't a plea to return to analogue and I'm not talking about the bottomless sinkhole of social media, relentless click-bait news' or the addictiveness of candy crush!
Digital technology has revolutionised our world, refreshed the workplace, and is rewiring our brains. We now have more more data points, platforms, widgets, and gadgets then we know what to do with.
There are undeniable wins with this unstoppable tide, but for the most part, we're simply wasting our time.
Technology has the potential to drive huge efficiency when used properly. The problems start when yet another new platform, digital process, or piece of kit is rolled out with a promise that this will solve all our woes… and then teams are just left to get on with using it.
Without a proper plan to embed it and help teams understand the how and the why, ‘game changing’ tech changes nothing. Uptake is erratic and inefficient. ‘I can do it better myself’, ‘the old way is easier’, or ‘I just don’t trust it to work’ are common attitudes.
Once upon a time, area managers had to physically visit their venues to see what was happening there. Nowadays, the range of data available means you could get a clear picture of performance entirely from the comfort of your home office.
There are obviously many reasons why this isn’t advisable in practise, but the point stands that all the answers you need to unlock efficiency are there in the data.
To be truly efficient however, requires not just the technology and data, but also the mindset to integrate it and interrogate it effectively.
Launching new tech without including the behaviours required to support it, is a results-centric approach which will have limited success. When the launch includes the proper training on the ‘why’ and teams have the opportunity to appraise it, the approach is built on trust and challenge, creating a solid base for success.*
This isn’t just theory either. Feed It Back, the customer experience dashboard, can provide valuable insight on its own, but when coupled with an academy on how to interpret the data teams use it to make better decisions on how to deliver truly exceptional service.
Hospitality Data Insights (HDI) provide valuable independent data insight to UK hospitality businesses and can give you detailed site-specific customer behaviour and local market information. Sounds great already, but they can also teach you how to critically evaluate this data to find untapped revenue in your sites and create meaningful behaviour change in your team.
Workplace culture experts, Korero, created a platform for having better, future focused career conversations, but they also deliver the leadership training that underpins why that is important (clue: a happy, fulfilled work force leads to high performance) and how to use it to maximum benefit
These are three tech companies succeeding – and setting their clients up for success - because they know that embedding the behaviour is just as important as the tech.
Otherwise, we’re just wasting our time.
A key model we reference at Purple Story is the Pyramid of Trust, based on Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team model. Simply put, teams which have TRUST as a foundation upon which CHALLENGE, BELIEF, and ACCOUNTABILITY can be built, will see the best possible RESULTS.
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