Technology is a huge deal. It’s everywhere, it’s ubiquitous – it seems to be present and all pervasive across all sectors of society. We can see its impact on our lives, even the most remote of people on earth. Everyday we are using technology to communicate with each other, to go about our daily work or studies and yes for entertainment purposes as well. Here at Frequo, we have noticed how technology continues to transform, change and enhance the workplace. The days where employees commute to an office building are long gone in many industries. There are a whole bunch of reasons why companies are choosing to go remote or offer hybrid work models and there is no doubt that this has been one of the biggest technological advancements. The continued development of Artificial Intelligence has enabled us to increase efficiency and get more done in a shorter space of time. Many of these advances have been driven by the sudden upsurge in demand for increased efficiency and effectiveness in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So our team wanted to explore one of the big challenges that businesses will face with this increased reliance on technology:
The Big Challenge: Ensuring Technology is Used Responsibly
Whilst there’s no doubt that technology is powering the future, it comes with some pretty complex challenges. For businesses, one of those big challenges is to ensure that tech is used responsibly. There are some pretty big concerns regarding data privacy when it comes to technology, especially AI. There are those who believe that AI is getting closer to replicating human thought, without any meaningful consciousness. It could be argued that the creation of an AI entity with no significant understanding of morality could represent a potential danger to humanity. Questions are raised about the use and application of AI within society, and for good reason. The development of AI represents one of the greatest threats and opportunities for business. The opportunity will come from better use of AI in the workplace. Whilst we may feel a little scared of AI at present. It’s hard not to look at how much technology is evolving and transforming our businesses. It’s evident that there is a huge amount of development and capability when it comes to AI. Whether that is the creation of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant or the likes of IBM Watson which is a powerful cognitive computing system, we are constantly faced with the development of new and more advanced tech.
How Can Christian Businesses Approach this Increase in Tech Advancement?
It’s important to consider how Christian business leaders will view, respond to and manage the increase in tech capabilities and innovations in their businesses and organisations. As Christian leaders, we want to be able to provide safe spaces where people are cared for. That’s really important because we are called to care for people. Now, we live in a tech era. We can’t escape it; however, we can decide how we use it, what we do with it. Do we move with it and adopt it wholeheartedly? Or do we maybe push back against some of what we might see as being not quite right or aligned with the principles that we hold dear? One of the biggest problems Christian leaders face is having to interact with this kind of tech without necessarily knowing enough about it. Christian business leaders need to recognise that one of the key components of their roles will be to be able to have informed conversations around how to approach the increased use of technology in our businesses. Businesses need to be able to know enough to make decisions about what we choose to adopt, what works for our organisation, and why it makes sense to pursue that particular line. For example, we can take a look at the likes of Netflix who chose to build their own streaming technology infrastructure instead of adopting the dominant cloud offering from Amazon AWS. Why did they make that decision? Because their choice was seen as a viable alternative that didn’t compromise customer experience by sacrificing quality and speed. They saw the investment and took that decision because they felt it worked for them. Equally, so many organisations have made the decision to embrace flexible and hybrid working because they feel the tradeoff works for their businesses. Doing this allows them to attract and retain the best talent. In short, Christian business leaders need to understand how these decisions are made to then apply it to our own businesses.
The use of technology must always be approached from a place of knowing our own purpose and mission. If our aim is to ensure that we serve God through our business then the decisions we make have to be informed by the fact that we exist to achieve that goal. We exist as a business to serve God through what we do. Yes, we are called to serve others through what we do as businesses. This applies whether we are selling a product or service. Equally, we want to be able to have healthy conversations around the topic of new technology innovation and implementation. Business owners need to know why and how they should implement innovation. We need to be informed as to whether it fits with our own beliefs and values. We need to know if it’s aligned with our organisational mission. We need to have those conversations around, what does this do to enable us to better serve God as a business. How does it aid us as a business? How do we evaluate the use of technology? How does it enable our business to achieve its aims, and does that align with our own belief systems? As a Christian business leader, I want to be able to ensure that we are making the best decisions that serve the business. How does that decision align with my own views as a follower of Jesus? Is it something that we agree to use, or would we say to ourselves, “We’re not going to do that because we don’t agree with it.” We want to ensure that what we are doing doesn’t harm anyone, doesn’t hurt anyone, and doesn’t violate anyone. When we start to consider using technology in our business, we want to make sure that we are using it in a way that serves us. One thing we need to remember is that none of this has to be scary. We don’t need to be scared, we don’t need to be afraid of change and what it is going to bring into our businesses. We are living in an age that provides us with incredible opportunities to serve people in ways that we never could before. If we want to serve more people, get greater reach, and increase our impact then we need to be willing to embrace technology that helps us do just that.
For Christian Business Leaders and aspiring Christian Business Leaders, it’s really important to pay attention to the subject of how your business operates because of the tech you’re using. What is it enabling you to do? We can only do things that God has called us to do and aligns with our business mission and purpose if the technology enables us to do that. We should always begin with our purpose and mission when considering to use or not to use various forms of technology. We need to begin by asking ourselves: “Does it fit with what we’re here to do?” Then we can ask ourselves a couple of other questions. We can ask ourselves about the impact of using tech in this way. This gives us the option to weigh up the pros and cons. It’ll give us the option to inform our decisions and lead us to be able to be prepared to state our views and stand by them.
Some of us might feel like technology is being forced upon us by other members of staff, or for that matter, our customers. We don’t necessarily feel like we have control over the technology because we feel like it’s outside of our influence. Many of the decisions of how to use tech isn’t within our control, for exmaple, the introduction of social media. Look at how Facebook has forced users to change the terms and conditions of their use. Ultimately, they changed things for our use of Facebook as consumers. The point is that we cannot control that aspect or dimension of technology. Therefore, as Christian business leaders, we need to decide if and how we should use technology for the benefit of those we are serving.
Sometimes the use of technology can help us achieve our goals more quickly. In those times, we should be thinking “Hallelujah” and celebrating these new advances. However, sometimes tech can stop us from being the businesses that we are meant to be. In those instances we shouldn’t use it, or at least limit our use of it. Jesus taught us how to approach difficult circumstances and difficult problems. It’s taught us a lot about how to approach difficult challenges. He said, “To whom much is given much is expected, but to whom little is given, little is expected.” In some contexts tech is given to us as a blessing. It’s a blessing in our lives, it enables us to connect with people, it enables us to do things faster and more efficiently. In some contexts, tech is a curse, whereby it distracts us and stops us from achieving or contributing to what God is calling us to do. The first step is to understand whether what we are facing is a blessing or a curse, is it a gift or an impediment? From there, we can then decide to use it or not to use it. We have a decision to make, are we going to go with it or are we going to step back and push back against the pressure? In the end, we get to make the final call in the decisions we make when it comes to the tech we use in our businesses.