| Fantastic post by Harold Jarche (one of the people involved here at Work Literacy) entitled A dysfunctional workplace. He cites a recent survey by Jay Cross: a survey report is here and a presentation is here.
Harold summarizes part of the results:
The survey had 237 respondents from various sized organizations and from several continents. My impressions are that about one-third to one-half of respondents feel that things are not good in today’s workplace, stating:
- a lack of cooperation;
- no time for reflection;
- no ability to create DIY tools for work;
- no communities of practice for support;
- lack of professional development;
- poor training; and
- working in organizations that are slow to change.
Harold correctly points out that this implies structural, organizational barriers that will make efforts to improve knowledge worker effectiveness much harder or maybe impossible, especially within those organizations.
The survey details tell us:
- Can access in-house Yellow Pages that lists expertise - 22%
- Use blogs, wikis and/or project blogs for sharing information - 22%
- Receive information via RSS feeds - 23%
It’s easy and within policy to set up an in-house blog or wiki:
- Agree - 39%
- Disagree - 46%
People are growing and learning fast enough with our current programs to keep up with the needs of our business:
- Agree - 19%
- Disagree - 53%
There’s more in there, but what a great last question!
That’s kind of it in a nutshell. People are not (currently) growing and learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of the business. Current programs are not sufficient to change this and will likely fall farther and farther behind.
This Cognitive Age Illiteracy is a problem. | 