Innovation is notoriously difficult to achieve, with the success rate of any attempt to take an idea from a figment of our imagination through testing, development, prototyping and scaling pretty low.  The very nature of the aforementioned activities should alert us to the amount of time needed to be committed to an unpredictable endeavor.

Alas, time is something of a scarce resource for most employees, meaning that even if they want to innovate, and indeed their employers want them to innovate, there is simply no time to do so.  That was the finding of a recent report from workplace software company Workfront.

The report reveals that most employees are asked to be innovative by their employer, but most are so overwhelmed by their normal work that they simply have no time or capacity to be creative about the future.

Illusory superiority

This may not actually be a bad thing of course, as the study also finds that workers typically regard themselves in much higher esteem than their colleagues.  They rate their own productivity much higher than their peers, and significantly higher than their leaders.  Indeed, were they to rate their colleagues in an Uber style rating scheme, they would only give them an average of 3.65 out of 5.

With any innovation work likely to require collaboration across teams and departments, this apparent breakdown in trust and communication between workers is a worry.

Things were more positive when workers were asked about the potential for technology to help their work however.  Far from seeing AI and associated technologies as a threat to their work, many thought it would help free them from the administrative tasks that sucked up so much of their time that just 39% of their day is spent on their primary tasks.

“As companies race to digitize across every aspect of their business, from human resources to finance to sales, people and the work they do each day has been left behind in legacy productivity solutions and antiquated tools, trapping innovation. Today’s workforce wants and needs a new platform for collaboration and digital work, one that connects people to get things done and enables leaders to see, support, and measure their entire enterprise. These results demonstrate how much the modern workforce wants and needs a new approach,” the authors say.

Of course, the question must surely be, will the arrival of more automation into the workplace help to free up that time for innovation, or will we simply fill our day with other meaningless tasks instead?