On a baseball team, a utility player adds value by playing well in a multitude of different positions. Team managers routinely call utility players into a whole variety of situations, because they can count on them to always help.
Technology used to be fairly direct. Early technological advances in the workplace were simply a digital means of doing work you would otherwise have done the same way, through analog means. An interoffice memo became an email. A day planner or Filofax morphed into an online calendar and reminder app. A Rolodex turned into a contacts list.
By and large, though, each piece of tech kept to its own swim lane and served that one specific purpose that really hadn’t changed much since the days of typewriters.
All that is changing.
Here are five ways tech has emerged as a candidate for MVP in many of today’s digital-native workplaces.Over the past few years technology has emerged not just to be a tool you use as you manage a team, but to be a sort of extra team member—a virtual utility player that allows managers and coaches to achieve new and versatile things we could not do before. Technology adapts to us, and can permeate more than one area of our work—offering exponential and sometimes unexpected benefits.
Learn more about the role of technology in coaching your digital native workforce to success in our new white paper: The Tech-Enabled Culture: The role of coaching and feedback in a digital-native workforce.