Traditionally, healthy workplace competition often involved comparing your career progression with your peers and looking up to your seniors for mentorship. But as Nyumba Group CFO Vishal Soni observes, today's work environment where AI is an inescapable reality, demands a new approach to achieving success.
In the modern workplace, where the primary competitors are not colleagues, but the distractions of social media and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), a new approach to achieving success is required.
Concerns about excessive use of social media platforms are not new. The hypnotising allure of “keeping up with the Joneses” has extended to the world at large, regardless of age. Many seem to complain that only the new generation are caught in this web, but people of all ages continue to be engulfed in the happenings on their screens.
Social media platforms are deliberately designed to capture and retain attention through addictive features and algorithms. Before the advent of publicly usable artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT and Gemini, social media companies had systems that ensured that we would not be able to blink away from their content. Each time, they came up with a mix of new and interesting media curated based on our previous viewing history and predictive technologies trying to understand our preferences.
To know just how much we’re glued to our screens, navigate to the ‘screen time history’ feature on your phone, and you will be blown away. The average screen time, according to an online survey by Backlinko, ranges from 6 to 7 hours across various devices.
The average person now finds themselves struggling to pay attention to any task at hand, and worse even, unable to ward off the procrastination to get on to their routine tasks in the workplace. Constant notifications and the allure of mindless scrolling has significantly reduced workplace productivity and focus on all levels of operations, be it those at beginner levels to those at managerial levels.
Daily overdose
Social media is not inherently harmful, but the daily dose you consume determines its detrimental impacts. Moreover, psychologists are increasingly facing a rise in cases related to social media addiction, requiring them to address the negative impacts and develop effective interventions to promote healthier online behaviours.
For anyone looking to salvage themselves from this quagmire of digital overstimulation and be productive in the workplace, implementing digital detoxes, setting boundaries and managing social media usage is a starting point.
Ever since the public release of large language models like ChatGPT, the technology has continued to rapidly advance and upgrade its intellectual capacity, to the extent that most of us cannot keep up with the advancements. However, in some way or the other, many of us are starting to depend on it, either through freely available chat apps or through our smart phones with built-in AI functionality.
Many organisations have integrated AI in the workplace to enhance efficiency, placing new demands on employees to keep up with technological advancements.
Uncritical thinking
A trend is now emerging where more and more regular tasks, such as drafting emails, project reports and analysing lengthy agreements, are being delegated to AI. This is creating intellectual dependence on the technology, triggering concerns that it could lead to a decline in critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
New research by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University has raised concerns about the impact of generative AI on workplace critical thinking skills. The findings suggest that employees who rely too heavily on AI-generated output may lose opportunities to practice independent problem-solving, potentially leaving them unprepared for situations where AI falls short.
The combined effect of attention drain to social media and reliance on generative AI presents a unique challenge that could lead to unintended cognitive decline among employees. To succeed in the modern workplace, individuals must manage attention drain from social media while effectively utilizing artificial intelligence without compromising cognitive function. Employees and workplaces will need to find ways to balance this challenge to ensure that technological advancement does not negatively impact them.
