Visibility of Work: How Digitalization Changes the Workplace

Abstract

Digitalization is rapidly reshaping our workplaces, as digital technologies often change individual’s work and collective work practices in significant but unpredictable ways. In this paper, we look at how digitalization changes the nature of work regarding work visibility, and examine this in the context of business-to-business (B2B) sales work. We report on a single case study using a practice approach to examine B2B sales work in a small SaaS company. Our findings show how the visibility of B2B sales work changes due to digitalization, increasing the visibility of work in relation to co-workers while decreasing it in relation to customers. Based on these findings, we discuss the complex tradeoffs in making work visible to different audiences and the gradual and constructed nature of work visibility.