If Anywhere working makes so much sense and has so many benefits, what is stopping every large organisation doing it? Andrew Mawson spells out the steps to overcome the difficulties.

http://www.anywhereworking.org/2012/making-the-journey-to-anywhere/

The Office of National Statistics has collected data on travel times for a number of years and the results show no improvement from 2002 to 2009.  In London during that period the proportion of people whose travel times were less Read the rest of this entry »

Agile working will be demanded…. In all major organisations, Wes McGregor.

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Those of us that seek to promote the benefits of agile working or flexible working see the exploitation of mobile technologies as the main enabler of change. Most of us possess a smart phone or laptop and use them regularly throughout each working day and beyond.

Sales of iPAD’s and similar competitive tablet devices are rocketing and corporates are considering their mobile IT support strategies. There can be little doubt that we are becoming entranced by the immediate access to information and communication. It all looks great as a mean of freeing us from the shackles of working at specific places and at specific times.

But reading a book by MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle drew a different side to the potential impact of these technologies. In her book “Alone Together –Why we expect more from Technology and less from each other” – she draws upon the research she has done over the 40 years of the computer age. She speaks of many of her subjects who have withdrawn into using technology as their main means of communicating with “family and friends”. Throughout that period technologies have replaced what were rich, direct, face to face conversations with a blitz of superficial messages delivered in a way which avoid people from confronting another person directly. Many young people today live their lives around social network sites and would rather text their friends than speak to them on the phone or directly face to face.

Whilst reading her book on my iPad (!) on a commute into London the other day, I glanced up to look at my other travellers and found a good 80% in my carriage were doing something with their Blackberries/iPhones.   Again, this week we saw in an Ofcom report a real concern over addiction to the smart phone. Apparently over a quarter of adults and nearly half of teenagers in Britain own a smart phone, and 81 per cent use it to make calls every day. Not that that is in itself bad, but Ofcom estimates that 37 per cent of adults and 60 per cent of teenagers in the UK say that they are ‘highly addicted’. The mind boggles with the  statistic – 22 per cent of adults use their smart phone in the bathroom.

In China, where there are estimated to be 400m users connected to the internet, the authorities were so concerned over addiction to the internet that in 2005 a residential unit was set up in Beijing – now there are 200 organisations in China offering a variety of therapies from bootcamps to electro-shock treatments.

Internet Addictive Disorder is being considered by psychologists as being now sufficiently serious to add to the official list of mental disorders.

Another symptom of our addiction that we all experience is the email overload problem of which we all suffer and complain, but only add to by our own behaviour.

So how do we manage our addictive behaviours that enslave us in technologies that offer the opportunity for so much freedom? Do we ban their use when in meetings and during meals? Do we have smart phone free zones such as in cinemas? Do we treat excessive use as a mental disorder? Put health warning messages on phones maybe?

Whatever the solution, we need to be mindful of the risks that our own behaviour towards these technologies present and moderate our dependency. Consideration of others and “doing to others what you would wish to be done by” wouldn’t be a bad way of thinking.

Graham Jervis

“Intranets will be replaced by social networking sites”, Leon Benjamin.

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“We will be worrying more about global cooling than warming, as the science will cool and the economics hot-up in a weak economy scenario”, Rob Briner, Professor of Psychology at Bath University speaking at AWA’s 2020 Visions Programme, April 2010.

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I have been following rather active discussions on LinkedIn on a topic called

“What attributes make a workplace FANTASTIC instead of just average?”

Views have ranged from what academic research has been done to scientifically identify design factors and people productivity to rules of thumb based upon experience.

Physical design of form is of course important but I question whether the physical design of workspaces can ever be isolated from other very influential factors such as job motivation that exist in the world of work. There is a body of research work on the effects of: temperature, surrounding colour schemes and the involvement of people in the creation of the design of their surroundings upon their effectiveness in doing simple tasks. However, I feel that it is difficult to apply all those principles directly to the rapidly changing nature of people’s work and it is not surprising that few organisations seem to apply the results of these researches in their current practices.

It seem to me that a more useful thing to do in considering the design of workplaces is to consider those aspects which cause us to waste time, to have to rework things and to cause us aggravation. We all are experts in these things. We know what gets us annoyed; we know what delights us. So why don’t Workplace Managers design OUT things that cause us to waste time or get irritated.

Some years ago we were asked by a large city based client to carry out an office walk-a-round taking the role of an office worker or visitor and we sought to identify all the things in the course of a day that would result in us having to waste time or to redo things. It was interesting to find that most of the things that impacted our effectiveness were down to the soft services that were provided. The practices of meeting and greeting visitors after the trials and tribulations of our journey there; the queues at printers and photocopiers; running out of paper; waiting for lifts; the bureaucracy of arranging wireless access – all these cause wasted time and rising blood pressure. Furthermore, what also became evident was that it wasn’t any single thing going wrong that mattered that much, but the accumulated effect of many things. I have yet to find any services SLA that puts a measure on the accumulated effect of multiple apparently disconnected services.

So why not look at trying to design out the failures and the bureaucratic irritations when you next consider your SLA’s and design of services?

And one more appeal! Most people in open plan offices regard distraction through noise and interruption the most adverse impact upon their work. Our researches with clients show that they estimate the costs of this to be 10-15% of their effectiveness.

An unusual possible predictor of the UK public interest in home-working appears in a recent analysis of internet consumer search results for computer desks, filing cabinets and writing desks.

As Britain moves closer to superfast broadband for all, Twenga has observed a corresponding rise in searches for home office products. Brits have also been checking the best prices for filing cabinets, up 151%, and office chairs, up 46%. The remote office may not be a paperless office, however, as searches for shelf cubes have also risen, by 163%.

 Twenga a new shopping search engine, has found that we Brits are preparing our homes for the expected rise in remote working in 2011: searches for desks increased by 138%,computer desks increased by 130% and writing desks by 122%.

These results compare the first 2 weeks of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010.

Graham Jervis

Try asking someone where they would like go to get on with their outstanding work. My guess is that they would respond by saying they get it done at home, or on the train to work, or whilst travelling on business, or in a coffee shop. Many would not say that they go to their office.

 So why is the office, equipped as it is with all the systems and equipment to support people at work, not seen by so many as a place for highly productive work.

 Recent surveys we have done with clients have consistently shown that people in offices find interruptions and noisy distractions one of the most problematic factors in preventing them working productively.

 Jason Fried, co-author of Rework, thinks that work and sleep share similarities in that deep sleep requires the brain to pass through 5 stages and that if interrupted in that process has to begin again that process from the start. Similarly, he argues that, work if interrupted has to backtrack several stages to resume its progress. So the very nature of the workplace can thwart the very processes that it is designed to support, if unplanned interruptions by management, staff or environment is common.

 Very often people who haven’t experienced working from home cite interruptions from TV or shopping or non-work activities as impacting productivity – but there is a difference. Most of these are voluntary and research has shown that it is the unplanned interruptions that are so detrimental to work.

 Why then do business managers worry over concerns that their staff will waste time on Facebook and Twitter, which staff will access when they are not engaged, and completely disregard the impact of some of their own actions in disrupting peoples’ work?

 When was the last time you had 4 hours uninterrupted work in the office?

What about 2 hours?……..or even 1 hour?

 We live in an office world that is full of meetings (some completely unnecessary, often too long and frequently insufficently focussed); people dropping into talk to us, or phoning us when we are in the middle of something we need to do.

 So why not resolve this year to think before you call that meeting at short notice, or phone, or even wander over to speak to someone who looks busy?

 Is it really necessary, or could you email that question to allow people to deal with it when they are not engaged on something else?

 Perhaps even the answer is to allow people to choose where they work at times and places which allow them to achieve their best and provide great supporting environments appropriate for all their work tasks.

Graham Jervis

Last month Dell produced a marketing brochure called “Agile Working Solution Blueprint – The Challenge for Public Sector IT”. Dell now joins an increasing list of IT suppliers who are now reacting to the opportunities that downsizing property portfolios will create for new IT investments to support agile forms of working.

Up until now, the main initiators for agile working changes have been Property and FM executives, but could we now be seeing the start of a strong drive by CIO and IT executives to take the initiative for agile working programmes in order to safeguard their IT budgets? We have long called for the need for agile working programmes to be a collaborative initiative involving CRE/FM/IT and HR and now could be the time to get such programmes underway.

Technology is an important enabler but a well established Change programme involving closely the people subjected to the change will make or break such initatives. Tools and processes also need to be developed and become part of  “business as usual” to ensure that the changes made become the norm and do not regress when financial pressures reduce.

Perhaps a few discussions with your IT and HR peers may be in order….. and with AWA as well!