Book. A robot named Paro entered a nursing home a few years ago. This high-tech soft toy that looks like a baby seal was meant to encourage interaction with residents while bringing them peace of mind. But a problem quickly arose: his arrival “destabilized the personal and intimate relationship that the caregiver had managed to create with the weakened elderly person”, explains Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon, professor of work psychology at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. The professional “became invisible in this triad” and felt excluded, useless. “I’m not necessarily of much use, in fact”she underlined then, while expressing her rejection for this “competitor”.
The situation shows how difficult it can be to introduce technologies that are considered effective. What are the obstacles to the acceptance of digital changes by employees? What impact do they have on them, but also on their activity? How does the perception they have of their work, of their place in their organization, evolve? M. Bobillier Chaumon has considered these questions in his latest book, Psychology of digitized work (Dunod, 208 pages, 26 euros).
Throughout the pages, the author invites us to see what is happening closer to the field, behind the announcement effects that often accompany the deployment of innovations. In an anthropocentric approach, it “seeks less to measure the acceptability of the technology itself than to assess the acceptance of practices that are effectively enabled, prevented or reconfigured by these new tools”.
Positive repercussions
As in the Ehpad where the robot arrived, the breath of technology can thus profoundly upset the professional daily life of employees and their state of mind, with possible impacts on their health. “It’s not just what you do with the technology that counts, it’s also what you become through its use”, summarizes the author. The feeling of invisibility felt by the caregiver is one of the expressions of this.
Another example: a feeling of downgrading can seize the employee of a logistics platform equipped with a “voice picking”which imposes on him the shortest route and the products to select to compose his palette. “The competence of the professional is totally disavowed”, notes the author. Similarly, some employees caught up in a technological change may wonder about their professional usefulness, struggling to assess their effective contribution to the work they do, while their activity is dematerialized and “distributed in man-machine systems”.
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