Back in the 1950s, stealing in the workplace was pretty black and white. If your workplace was a production line creating widgets and you took a widget home, you knew very well that you had stolen this physical property. Nowadays however, not everything falls neatly into the category of a product or a service.

Now performance for many is processing information. Workplaces cannot simply put up a metal detector to see if information is leaving in someone’s pocket. Information resides in our minds – invisible to others and not very useful to the organization unless we communicate effectively. 

You probably didn’t mean to steal the information. In fact, you probably never even thought about it this way. But as technology changes, so do our workplaces. Once we understand the true nature of the materials that our jobs involve – be it physical materials, or in many cases information – we can then understand our responsibility to help move ALL those materials along.

Today’s workplace requires effective communication. We must be able to synthesize a tremendous amount of data and then provide it in the right format, at the right time. Sometimes that format is for a meeting with our boss, a report, a presentation, a meeting with a client, or marketing material.

Think about it this way. When you are paid to gather, assimilate, and pass along data, it is the same as if you were paid to gather materials, create a widget, and pass that widget to the next person. In an information age, information and data are now the property that companies are processing and profiting from.

So with new types of work, there also needs to be new boundaries to define an employee’s responsibility. Your performance may be based on your ability to gather data, to give an opinion, to help translate the information so it will be valuable to your colleagues and clients. If you don’t help this data or information progress down the line – the data in your head is not valuable to the organization. It’s as if you took a widget home in your pocket.  

To improve your workplace culture, leading to increased productivity and better employee performance, remind employees that sharing information is the new widget.