At my current job the whole “brain” of the entire process is our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Another widely used digital tool is our Health, Safety, Environment, and Quality (HSEQ) system. The company marketing team uses every social media to advertise our business. I personally use WhatsApp to slot working shifts for myself. We use Excel for making shift lists (työvuorolista).

The positive side with advertising on social media is that you can be very specific with who you want to target. You also get all the data you want with views, clicks and such. It is also affordable compared to advertising on television or with billboards on the streets. The downside is that you fund companies like Meta and X and help solidify their power and monopolies.

I’m sure a bunch of office workers in my company use chat-GPT for work even though no one admits to it. I used it to help structure this text. There are also the applications we use at work but not for work such as Spotify. It can get a bit boring and repetitive to put parcels in cages for decades, which is why many employees listen to music or podcasts while doing it. Our rival has banned it and I am 100% sure that it has affected working morale there in a negative way.

New digital tools for work

Youtube is a video hosting service that could be used for training staff with videos. It is very easy to use and everyone with a computer or smartphone has access to it. There are instructional videos about almost everything in most languages. You can also upload your own training videos here and select that they are only visible to people with a direct link. The downside is that you are wasting everyone’s time with ads.

Asana could be used for be used for planning and executing projects. It is a project management tool. It’s useful for organizing, tracking and managing a teams schedule and work. Projects can be split into different sections with individual assignments and tracked in a visually simple way. The downside is that people will need to constantly update their progression on the tool, and it was very confusing to open up and use the first time. This would also not really be useful for the average worker, only the people in the office.

LinkedIn is at the same time the best and worst social media (or “networking platform”). It is kind of free publicity for your company if you decide to be active there. None of my “Higher-ups” have profiles there, so it might be a lost opportunity for the company. It is good for connecting with people and finding jobs, but reading posts by anyone on the platform makes me cringe hard. It’s full of made up stories for clicks and non-existent jobs posted for phishing purposes, which also makes it risky to use.

Teams is Microsoft’s take on a tool to have video meetings and share files and messages quickly. It is kind of like a hybrid between the no longer existing Skype and the most popular similar tool, Discord. You can create groups for different users and have lectures and meetings online. It also allows you to make randomized groups for breakout rooms, which is a great function when having lectures. The downside in my opinion is the phone application, which is a bit tricky to use.

DeepL is an AI-powered translation service. It was a lot more accurate than Google translate in my opinion after testing it a bit. This was my first time even hearing about the tool. A big part of our staff doesn’t speak Finnish as their first or second language and it can sometimes create confusion when something gets lost in translation. We have a dozen of different native languages spoken at our building alone. The downside is that it currently has a limited amount of languages supported.

Successful use of digital tools

Using tools such as these successfully means you are either saving money, doing you work more efficiently or making more money. Or a combination of all three. Some key factors which make a good digital tool are the following:

1 User experience
The tool should be accessible, consistent, bugless and have a “small” learning curve. I feel like multiple of the new tools I tried for these assignments had steep learning curves.

2 Functional
The tool should be reliable, scalable and compatible with other systems. The Apple ecosystem is a good example on how everything is integrated and works together flawlessly.

3 Secure
It needs to be compliant with things like GDPR and have its data encrypted. I think this is the most important one these days when data breaches are common.

Self-evaluation and reflection

It was kind of hard to think of how to use those social media tools for my work. Especially since most of the work is physical labor instead of doing things on the computer. But I learned about some new digital tools as this was the first time that I had ever heard about Asana and DeepL. The market is very saturated and it can be a bit hard to learn about new services or sites when they get lost in big lists like the one for this assignment. At some point they start adding up and you spend more time on updating apps and statuses than actually doing your job.

During this course my use and knowledge of WordPress has gone from zero to now knowing a bit on how to operate it. I think it is a good tool to know how to use as well if you ever want to make a blog or work in the marketing industry. I will start using DeepL from now on, since that quality of its translations was great. Some of the other blogs had some interesting thoughts that I had not considered before. Especially about how these new tools often clash with regulations such as the GDPR.