...They’re all great place to work. A least according to a recent study by Microsoft on the productivity impacts of telecommuting (as I happen to be recently speaking of Microsoft and ‘Great Places to Work)’…
“Sixty percent of respondents to the Microsoft Telework survey — conducted among 3,600 employees in 36 cities nationwide — say they are actually more productive and efficient when working remotely. With less time spent commuting and fewer cubicle “drive bys” causing distractions, respondents say, more time can be spent on the task in front of them. The catch? By and large, employers aren’t catching on. Only 41 percent of those surveyed work for companies with established remote-working policies, and just 15 percent believe their company supports flexible work arrangements. Despite a wealth of new technologies that can facilitate collaboration among workers no matter where they are, employers are still concerned about whether they’re getting the most from employees. “
The study also included a list of the Top Ten USA cities for Telecommuting (Boston, Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Richmond, Austin, New York, Sacramento, Portland). But the ‘places’ best suited for telecommuting that intrigued me the most were the types of locales people chose to work in. First, the number one selection was ‘Other’ (43%) which combined with the variety of the other 16 top mentions (eg. laundromat, camping, doctor’s office, salon, movie theatre) underscored just how diverse the possibilities are. Secondly, the next highest selection was ‘Family Vacation’. Especially when combined with so many of the other mentions (eg. funeral, amusement park) undermines the fear of so many employers and bosses (specifically called out in the report...see quote above) that staff working remotely will shirk work. Conversely, it seems like it introduces work into whole new parts of the staffer’s life. Now that might eventually create its own problem, but that problem is ‘too much’ working not ‘too little’. If the employers want to get concerned about ‘too much’ working and focus attentions on addressing that issue, then that is an entirely different matter.
(thanks Chris)
As I have commented a number of times, one of my most profound influences spurring me to set up Dynamic Work Ltd. was my experience working at Microsoft. I not only studied, but I had the privilege of living the ‘New World of Work’ as Microsoft earnestly dogfooded much of the innovative work styles that it preached.
This workplace innovation at Microsoft led its Microsoft Europe division to receive the accolade of #1 Great Place to Work in Europe last year. The innovation is just as relevant today as it was last year and Microsoft Europe has gone on to win the ‘Great Place to Work’ award (Large Companies, ie. over 500 staff) for the second time in a row this past earlier this year in an imposing repeat and strong endorsement of the power of new ways of working.
Sometimes the dream overwhelms the vision. I have long maintained a vision where people worked more flexibly and dynamically. Dynamic Work Ltd. was a great undertaking to translate that vision into a viable business of helping organisations move in that direction. I was delighted with the support, interest and progress which reinforced my vision that this is the direction the world is going. However, the dream opportunity for me professionally and personally has presented itself.
As a result, I have taken the decision to cease offering Dynamic Work consulting services in order to take up the position of General Manager to a company called Piero. In use by 30 sports broadcasters in 20 countries, Piero is a platform for adding graphic effects and even 3D recreations that illuminate live video and highlight commentary.
Sometimes you can have your vision and your dream as well. As it happens, Piero has a heritage linked tightly to BBC who are UK innovators in the field of flexible working through their ‘BBC Flex’ programme and other initiatives. I look forward to working in an environment receptive to innovation where I can continue to live the vision as I follow this dream job.
I plan to continue posting to this blog regularly for those many readers who continue to take an interest in this dynamic topic.
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Dynamic Working can take all forms. It’s not just the digital tools, or human work practices, or work spaces that can be made more flexible and dynamic. The physical tools of desk, chairs, work surfaces, tables and a whole lot more can also be dynamic. Some of the best examples are inspiringly demonstrated in this video tweeted by my entrepreneurial muse and creative inspiration, Hugh Macleod.
WheelerKanik (the Dynamic Work partner in design) has done some outstanding designs for a recent Dynamic Work client which exploit modular desking components.
Not all time is created equal.
This reality is the problem with conventional time-motion productivity analysis. Perhaps in the 20th century Industrial Age of the assembly line manufacturing plant and paperwork factories and even a simpler, more routine home life, hours were more consistent. But the hour one spends getting married, watching a child win their first sports game or watching your favourite team in an international competition is not the same as 60 minutes sitting in traffic, sitting in a routine meeting or ploughing through administrative chores.
In a truly ‘free market’ of hours, staff and employers would have the ability to trade hours according to their value. A staffer might trade 2 hours of conventional work for 1 hour off to watch the World Cup. A company might trade 2 hours of conventional work for 1 hour of crisis handling on the weekend. In fact, the employer sort of has this kind of ‘marketplace’ in wage workplace where they can pay time-and-a-half and double-time for highly valued time periods.
Unfortunately, most workers usually do not have a corresponding ability to bid for time off. The problem is more difficult with exempt workers. They are paid a fixed salary and can be almost an implicit assumption that ‘all time’ is the company’s time (depending on the culture).
While the grand spectacle of the World Cup has given rise to a bunch of reports of ‘lost productivity’ fear mongering amongst the chattering fourth estate. “World Cup Could Cost UK £4 Billion” Most of these attention grabbing articles are based on out-dated logic that an hour is an hour. That people will find ways to watch the games, the games are during conventional work hours, ergo time is lost and time is money so money is lost.
More enlightened and innovative companies are using the World Cup to introduce some special work practices and bonuses to its workers like Asda and Screwfix. One of Microsoft’s leading partners and winner of the UK Best Place to Work 2010, Softcat, is showing how it is done by hosting World Cup viewing parties in their offices. No one is skiving off work today at Softcat! (and probably hardly ever do with that kind of enlightened approach).
Businesses should be looking at the World Cup as the least expensive staff morale opportunity to come along. Because fans will highly value their time watching the games above all else, they will value the hour given to them much more than the hour of elapsed clock time actually costs the company.
A classic win-win. Just like the England-USA 1-1 result for me as a UK-USA dual citizen. Perfect.
While Dynamic Work can entail flexibility of many forms, one of the most prevalent is ‘Geographic’ mobility. One of the major constraints to such mobility is simply lugging stuff. If you have heavy tools you depend on, it is sometimes easier for you to go to the tools than for the tools to go with you. The electronics miniaturisation revolution (laptops, notebooks, PDAs, phones) has obviously been the primary enabler to greater mobility. But now workers are moving from carpal tunnel syndrome to sore backs carting heaving backpacks and computer bags.
For this challenge and others (eg. tighter restrictions on what travellers can carry on planes), I had always thought that a great business proposition would be somewhere that just sold the smallest versions of everything. To me, ‘small’ and ‘lightweight’ are increasingly critical USPs in an increasingly mobile world. As I investigated the area, I came upon an outfit that was inspired by the same vision and have executed it brilliantly – Minimus. While a number of online e-tailers carry some travel sized items and dabble in this concept, Minimus is the world leader by far with over 2000 products on offer and a range of services.
So impressed was I over Minimus that I got in touch with their founder and CEO Paul Shrater to learn more about the business. We shared similar visions and business approaches and the conversation has evolved into a partnership. While Minimus is strong in the US market, it has not really done much overseas especially due to the high costs of logistics and shipping. As a result, Dynamic Work has signed on to be Minimus’ agent and representative overseas to assist with a number of opportunities that have been presented to them.
If hauling your bag around is one of the considerations keeping you office bound, then have a look at www.minimus.biz for some great fixes to that problem.
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With all of the UK election and coalition mayhem sorted, the UK government can now get down to the business. The official starting pistol is the opening of Parliament quite literally crowned by a “Queen’s Speech” which sets out the new government’s challenges and agenda. The text included the expected subjects of foreign policy priorities, various proposed reforms and attention to the economic issues. But right up in the first ten initiatives stated was...
“My Government will remove barriers to flexible working...”
In my introduction to Dynamic Work, I speak of the surging business mega-trend towards flexibility in the current years...
“Dynamic Work is becoming as much of a business imperative for the new millennium as was embracing the PC in the 80s and embracing the Internet in the 90s.”
An organisation which shares my assessment of this trend is one I have supported for a number of years now, Working Families. They focus their lens on the trends in business around how businesses approach family issues which they distilled into...
- 1980s – ‘Movement Begins’ – “Work-life balance was primarily a ‘mother’s issue’ championed by women who wished to return to work. Interest from organisation centred on childcare as they sought to recruit and retain women.”
- 1990s – ‘Family Friendly Years’ – “Flexible working of all kinds evolved as a way for employers to enable women to reconcile work and family life.”
- 2000s – ‘The Flexi Decade’ – “Technology starts to have a more significant impact in changing how and where work is done, and employment regulations help support this change. Increasingly flexible working is seen as making ‘business sense; and linked into employee engagement and heightened performance”
Management By Walking Around’ (MBWO) has been meandering through the corridors of management gurudom for at least as long as I have been in the business these past two decades. Supposedly, it was first introduced by HP founders Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett and later popularised by management guru Tom Peters. The notion was that a manager who did not sit in his corner office, but instead came out and mingled with his team got two benefits. First, the staff would be inspired by a more regular, more direct relationship with their leader. Second, the manager would have a more direct, more spontaneous, more immediate understanding of the business and its issues.
In the world of Dynamic Work, the imperative to get out of the expensive, space-inefficient dedicated office is even more acute. But the prescribed alternative...’walking around’...might not be the best approach. Perhaps in an environment with hustle and bustle and toing and froing, the manager could slip stream right into the eddies of activity. But modern knowledge work is a bit more sedentary grounded around the central tool of the PC. The PC anchors the knowledge worker who then pivots to phone, to other tasks and to chatting with colleagues.
When I run Business Value Productivity Services workshops with companies, the spontaneous and serendipitous interaction between team members is often raised as an extremely critical ‘shadow’ business process. In the open plan environments that predominate in many UK companies, the low partition desk units facilitate this casual interchange and collaboration. To take this principle of MBWO into the modern office, however, I propose that one changes from ‘Management By Walking Around’ (MBWO) to ‘Management By Sitting Around’ (MBSA).
Managers can take their PC work (emails, spreadsheets, documents, online resources) anywhere (save a few exceptions for some confidential stuff). And that includes smack down in the middle of their team. I practiced this approach as a senior manager at Microsoft and the dividends were massive.
- More Relaxed Sharing - By my mere proximity and involvement in trivial banter, the staff felt more comfortable in raising small issues on the fly. For many issues, they would otherwise not have wanted to make a ‘big deal’ out of by getting up, coming over to an office and making a pronounced interruption. But often, these small issues served as considerable obstacles to them moving forward. The one minute, quick, casual answer from me saved them many minutes of wrestling with it for no purpose. Also, keeping close to these ‘small’ issues gave me a much better sense of the bigger issues in the team as I had many more data points of real instances of things that were actually impeding progress.
- Passive Mentoring - My location allowed for a degree of casual and indirect mentoring. Many team members sat in ear shot. They could hear me on routine phone calls which allowed them to see how I dealt with and articulated a range of subjects. They could overhear the answers I gave to the people who shouted out their quick questions (it was not unusual after I responded to a team member’s question for someone to shout out, ‘what was that you said?...I’m having the same problem...’).
- More Natural - I have seen some of the more ‘pointy-hair’ breed of managers try MBWO (see Dilbert above), and often it is awkward, contrived and sometimes downright creepy. These managers have read their guru articles, but just aren’t sure what to do next once they start their pathetic peripatetics. The ‘Sitting Around’ approach is much more natural. If push comes to shove, the manager just goes ahead and does what they would have done at their desk.
One of the core objectives of Dynamic Work is to reduce expensive office space. This objective is not because ‘offices’ are inherently ‘bad’...just expensive and often ineffectively used. A simple way to reduce both is to simply get rid of the offices. But the fact remains that ‘office space’ is actually a useful business tool for some critical business functions. The most prominent of which is collaboration. People come to the office not to do email, not to work on spreadsheets, not to write copy, not to cut code. People come to the office to work with other people.
The office is a central meeting ground for staff and team members to come together for joint effort. The issue often becomes ‘if collaboration is the main purpose for paying for expensive office space, then why is that space configured so poorly for collaboration.’ Most office space is designed as a desk/employee parking lot with rows upon row of individual (not group) work spaces. The primary ‘collaboration’ resource is florescent-lit cookie-cutter conference rooms with a great big table in the centre creating a great, big separation between everyone in the room.
One of the areas that Dynamic Work focuses on, often in collaboration with its design partner Wheeler Kanik, is how to enhance the utility of the office space you do choose to use. A great piece on the potential a truly effective space can have is illustrated in FastCompany’s recent piece ‘11 Ways You Can Make Your Space as Collaborative as the Stanford d.school” (thanks Tessy).
My piece ‘Dynamic Business Centres’ highlighted the surge in availability and diversity of places for people to go and work in and around London. But the innovation and trend doesn’t stop at the M25. Creative workspaces are opening up all around the UK. Creative Boom has recently assembled its own Top Ten list of the very best in the country: “10 of the Best Co-Working Spaces in the UK”.
- THECUBE, London
- The Werks, Brighton & Hove
- FlyThe.Coop, Manchester
- Old Broadcasting House, Leeds
- FunkBunk, Leighton Buzzard
- screenWORKS, Edinburgh
- The Hub, Bristol
- IndyCube, Cardiff
- Le Bureau, London
- Moseley Exchange, Birmingham
Fellow UK work innovation evangelist Katie Ledger forwarded me another gem, this time a piece on ‘The Future of Offices’ by Paul Warner, Chair of the British Council for Offices Urban Affairs Committee and Research Director at 3D Reid. A well composed and authoritative piece supporting pretty much all of the tenets and principles of Dynamic Work. Here are a few choice excerpts...
“The future workplace will be the opposite [of] the ‘city as office’. Companies will downsize their property footprints and make use of city-centre facilities that are publicly available – coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, city parks, library reading rooms. Why add millions to the cost of your office scheme to build a boardroom used once a month when you can simply book a private room in a grand hotel every month two years in advance? Why worry about the limits of technology when the city is itself covered by a wireless network? The most amenable, attractive and convenient place for people to meet is usually the centre of the city, so we can look forward to an urban consolidation of office property after decades of out-of-town developments and suburban hubs.”
“Flexibility is the key to future office development and a move away from the tailor-made shell to a more robust and generous building type that can sit within a ‘spatial plan’ (that includes transport, density and mix parameters). As people work in patterns that are more flexible and fluid, serendipity within the city and the chance encounter seem hopeful and exciting.”
When you start to talk to people about Dynamic Work, people tend to jump to thinking about it as either ‘home working’ or maybe ‘flexi-time’ which are relatively familiar concepts. But actually, those examples only illustrate 2 of the 4 ‘Flexibility’ dimensions to Dynamic Work, namely Geography and Time. The other two – Role and Commercials are less familiar. The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece on ‘Furlough Fridays’ is a great example of Commercial (ie. terms of remuneration and reward) flexibility that can be a win-win for staff and organisations alike.
“This is ‘Furlough Friday’ and it's becoming a staple around the country as state governments force workers to take a weekly day off—usually Friday—to help bridge budget gaps. The loss of a day's work, and as much as 15% of a worker's pay, is forcing families to tighten their belts. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put state workers on Friday furloughs since February 2009 and most furloughs are expected to persist as long as July.”
“Friday furloughs are producing an unexpected dividend for many of these workers: Marketers have discovered them. The Boreal ski area near Lake Tahoe offers a ‘Frickin' Friday’ $15 ticket for furloughed California employees; the normal adult lift price is $47. Don Hutchens, a state highway contractor, said it cost only $30 for him and his wife to snowboard all day while their young son and a friend did so for free. ‘It's the best deal in town,’ said a smiling Mr. Hutchens, as he toted his board to the parking lot. ‘You can't beat it.’ “
The danger with ‘Furlough Fridays’ is that when combined with Friday becoming a day of choice for ‘Work From Home’, bosses (and staff themselves) could confuse those with the day truly off and those who are supposed to be getting in productive work. Already many bosses consider ‘Work From Home’ Fridays as ‘Shirk From Home’ and lots of people on the ski slopes could mistakenly reinforce that perception.
As Dynamic Work evangelises jettisoning fixed office spaces to save money, carbon and productivity, I get two very typical responses...
- Where do my people go to work then?
- What do I do with my office space I have then?
London New Enterprise has created a portal that helps to answer both of those questions...
Business space on terms specifically for new enterprise. View a range of units on favourable terms for new enterprise such as:
- Stepped rents
- Short term lets
- Pop up shops
- Units with zero deposit
- Space for social enterprises and charities
The website not only provides helpful information, but primarily serves as a matchmaking service for companies shedding space (perhaps inspired by Dynamic Work cost cutting) with people looking for space. One major constituency for the latter would be the increasingly mobile and distributed workforces on the landscape. While business centres are cropping up rapidly, London New Enterprise could be the linchpin for even more expansion in this type of commercial space.
A recent poll in the UK by SimplyHired showed that more staff wanted ‘work/life balance’ (36%) over a ‘competitive salary’ (31%). Also, the #1 vote getter was a ‘a job they love’ at 81% while a ‘pay raise or promotion’ only garnered 10%. The findings reinforce the business benefits of Dynamic Working in containing payroll costs while keeping staff productive and happy by introducing new ways of working that make their jobs more satisfying and flexible.
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