One of the major areas of benefit from Dynamic Working, along with saving money and helping the environment, is boosting staff welfare. The most direct benefits involve increased satisfaction, work/life balance, and reduced time lost to commuting. All of these benefits should lead to healthier, happier workforce. As it turns out, the UK non-profit research organisation The Cochrane Collaboration recently concluded a study which validated the ‘healthier’ hypothesis with their study titled “Flexible working conditions and their effects on employee health and wellbeing” which was released last month.
“Overall, the findings tentatively suggest that giving workers more choice or control over their working patterns is likely to have positive effects. The researchers found evidence that self-scheduling of shift interventions and employee-controlled partial/early retirement improved health outcomes, including systolic blood pressure and heart rate, tiredness, mental health, sleep duration, sleep quality and alertness and self-rated health status. Improvements were also noted in well-being, such as co-workers' social support and sense of community.”
The rising costs of health care is probably the most prominent issue in American politics at the moment and concerns about the NHS here in the UK are also quite high, especially as both countries face aging populations with increasing incidence of lifestyle health problems. Dynamic Work can be a part of the solution to this intractable and costly problem.
Dynamic Work asserts that how one brings together different people and roles as well as physical assets can be very flexible. But can the actual work content of an individual person be flexible? Or does their role or contribution have to be a constant unit which can then be brought into the mix of the total output in a range of flexible ways?
Katie Ledger talks about ‘Portfolio Working’ and Hugh MacLeod talks about ‘crofting’ which are both examples of how individuals can make their own careers and work content more modular and flexible…
“My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland “crofter”. He lived on a “croft” i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close. Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It’s very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did “just one thing”. Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they’d still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.”
I caught Steve Clayton’s piece on the beta release of the Outlook Social Connector. I had hoped that it would finally bring about the ‘Where We Are Available’ functionality that I have been championing for years now (‘Where We Are Available’, ‘Make Office Better’, ‘Where We Are Available: TripIt’).
It seems to be more focused on info about people’s ‘background’ than their activity and work - “As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name, and title of the sender. A rich, aggregated collection of information about the sender is included”.
It does talk about ‘activity’ but this information is more about their communications (like status updates) than their logistics. - “You’ll see rich information about your colleagues’ activity such as profile updates to their MySite, documents and websites they tag, and changes to their personal status message.”)
It is extensible through an ‘open’ SDK - “The OSC in Outlook 2010 will connect by default to the new social networking experiences in SharePoint 2010. We are happy to announce that connectivity to any network, including SharePoint, is built using our public ‘provider’ extensibility platform”).
And the site LinkedIn has already exploited that interop capability - “The LinkedIn team has built a provider for the OSC using our public SDK, providing you with pictures and activity information for your colleagues directly from their network.”
Ideally, the SDK and LinkedIn work could go that one step further to an integration between TripIt and Outlook Calendar.
The ‘TripIt’ tool has taken off in the past year as a tool to publish and share one’s calendar which does starts to set the foundation for ‘where we are available’ collaboration (‘Where We Are Available’, ‘Make Office Better’). It does require a manual process of checking out the TripIt alerts of connections to see if they are relevant or intersecting with your own plans. The ideal solution will be an alert that hits you when a connection and you are going to be within X miles of each other for a period of at least Y hours.
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It’s not just the businesses that pay a price for commuting with their extended carbon footprint, lost hours and energy for staff, exposure to disruption from travel delays, etc. But, obviously, the workers pay a huge price. It’s not just the idle time spent time sitting on carbon monoxide filled tarmac. But the very financial costs of ‘Transportation’ is now both the fastest growing part of the household budget and the second biggest behind only ‘Housing’. The graph above comes from the Alltop post “Consumer spending changes over 100 years” (thanks again Hugh)
Accenture and Vodafone collaborated on a report titled ‘Carbon Connections’ which looked at a range of business strategies for carbon reduction. Given Vodafone’s mobility focus, the report naturally centred on a number of distributed and remote working scenarios...
- Dematerialisation – replacing physical goods, processes or travel with ‘virtual’ alternatives, such as video-conferencing or e-commerce (online shopping):
- Mobile telepresence – connecting ‘virtual meeting rooms’ to mobile devices would allow workers to join conferences from anywhere
- Virtual office – using wireless telecommunications products means people can work remotely or from home
- Mobile delivery notifications for e-commerce – businesses can use mobile communications to contact customers for more efficient order placement and delivery.
The last three are pretty conventional and the report has lots of good material on these topics. But what really caught my fancy was the concept dubbed ‘dematerialisation’. What a great poly-syllabic buzzword for the ‘anti-neutron bomb’ approach to downsizing.
When I worked at Microsoft, some of the more cynical managers tutted some of the work-from-home practices as ‘shirk from home.’ Curiously, the sincere sentiment among the staff was that home was often the only place where quality work got done. Staff came into the office to show face and attend internal meetings which chopped up the day so only slices of time were left for the most basic transactional activity like batting back urgent emails. But everyone knew that come performance review time no one was going to get a high rating for great meeting attendance and email responding. At the heart of every job was a role that required serious thought, insight and creative output. And the consensus seemed to be that this often got done when one was able to clear a day of distractions, steer clear of the office chock full of distractions and sit down and concentrate.
This week, Dilbert author Scott Adams reflected on this creative dynamic...
“People often ask how I get into the writing frame of mind. To me, it feels like being the night watchman in a museum. My job is to make sure all the doors are locked, and the blinds are pulled, and the lights are out. As a writer, you need to shut out all of the distractions from your other senses. I make sure I'm not hungry, tired, uncomfortable, or listening to anything. Then, like the night watchman, I go room by room with my flashlight until something scares me, surprises me, or makes me laugh. I have to feel something. And when I do, that's the part I keep. Then I wrap up the inspiring words in ordinary words, to form sentences. That part is more craft than art. Writers tend to work early in the morning, or late at night, when brains are naturally able to focus deeply on one thought. In the middle of the day, distractions are unavoidable. I wonder if anything worthwhile has ever been written in the afternoon.”
I shared this reflection with friend and creativity guru Hugh MacLeod and he concurred with the sentiment completely. His comment on Adams’ insight was, “I know this one.... Explains why Hemingway always got sloshed in the afternoons...”
Dynamic Work is a way for staff to align the right work environment with the work at hand. For most roles in modern business, this work is quite diverse and a conventional one-size-fits-all office space simply can’t serve all needs best.
Ever more terms keep cropping up to describe the new workstyles of the digital age. Steve Clayton’s post a while back referred “Co-working.”
“I am increasingly a "digital nomad"...Increasingly I find myself working from home or a hotel room in my current job. Sometimes I like the solitude but more often than not, I find myself hankering after a coffee or lunch out of the house. This may have something to do with my poor cooking skills but I think it has more to do with my need to have other folks around. I don't necessarily need to talk to them, I just like the buzz.”
Co-working starts to address the question of ‘what exactly do we need an office for?’ and ‘what would we miss?’ There is a camaraderie, energy, serendipity to people assembling together even if working quite independently together. The rise of formal (www.coworking.pbwiki.com, business centres) and informal (cafes, libraries, Wifi enabled pubs) collectives.
This week’s Boston Globe featured as big piece called “The end of the office... and the future of work” which naturally caught the eye of many of my colleagues and friends (thanks Aidan, Jim, Katie and Mom). Dynamic Work breaks down the 4 basic dimensions of ‘flexibility’ in the workplace to place, time, role and contract. The Globe piece really focuses in on the ‘contract’ dimension. How the relationship between employers and employee is changing to be more flexible...
“The United States Government Accountability Office has estimated that so-called contingent workers - everything from temps to day laborers to the self-employed to independent contractors - make up nearly a third of the workforce. And forecasters believe that proportion will rise. The growth is being driven partly by economic factors, with the uncertain economic climate making short-term contract workers more attractive to firms than full-time employees, but of course broader technological changes are at work as well – cell phones, PDAs, and broadband make it easy to farm out work, even complex, interactive tasks that previously only made sense to do in-house.”
A lot of the messages echo the notions of ‘Portfolio Working’ that my friends Barrie Hopson and Katie Ledger.
One of the first issues I faced over a year ago is what to call this ‘thing’. This trend, this approach. Certainly, there is no shortage of buzzwords being coined regularly to capture different dimensions to ‘Dynamic Work’.
CNN has done a piece which captures a much of the distributed, indeterminate, flexible nature of ‘where’ side of working. The article ‘Working in Wi-Fi Limbo’ (thanks again Dr. Bret)
“If you ask Adrian Miller where she works, her answer may depend on where she happens to be standing. Miller calls her messenger bag ‘global headquarters.’ She calls a New York City lobby her ‘satellite office.’ ‘My office is my briefcase,’ says Miller, who offers sales training to companies and networking advice to individuals. Miller is a member of a new breed of worker who doesn't work at home or an office. They work in limbo, somewhere in between. They are the urban nomads who drift from one Wi-Fi watering hole to another with their laptops -- working alone while surrounded by people.”
When I first speak to people about ‘Dynamic Working’, often the response is ‘Oh, you mean ‘home working.’ To which I respond, ‘Well, that is one alternative place people can work, but there are also cafes, business centres, hubs, libraries, park benches...just about anywhere...’
MSNBC featured a fine piece titled “Chatty Workers Are Best Telecommuters” (thanks Dr. Bret) with a delightfully colourful introduction...
“For years the workplace commentariat has been nattering about the no-collar workplace. Companies will hire brains, not bodies. Work will go to the talent — instead of the talent extreme-commuting to the work. Teams will go transnational, warming the undersea cables with their space-and-time shifting video meetings. The workplace of the future, they've said, will be no workplace at all. Technology will turn the globe into one giant Wi-Fi-enabled kibbutz. A post-face-time world where everybody can Tivo their work. This is one of those dreams that has actually panned out. The office — in our pocket! (Or pocketbook!) But for every miraculous solution, there's another problem created. And so it is with the wonder of wireless work.”
The article makes a number of key points that Dynamic Work endorses completely...
- New characteristics to productivity - Often, the most difficult hurdle to implementing Dynamic Work are the managers, the management skills and the management practices. All of these usually need a complete overhaul in the new approach to getting things done. That change includes identifying, assessing and enhancing someone’s productivity. In the past, conventional wisdom would cite ‘chattiness’ as a sign of distraction and lack of focus, actually correlates strongly with someone able to maintain and support the increased opportunities and demands in a distributed environment.
- No one size fits all – Dynamic Work is no more of a panacea than any other innovation. Each member of staff and the role they serve is its unique blend of skills, personality, preferences and demands that will embrace some of the potential changes and balk at other. A hallmark of Dynamic Work’s engagements is identifying the various clusters of roles and ‘psychographics’ to figure out tailored approaches and tools for different groups.
- Shirk from home’ – A persistent myth is that without direct supervision, workers will fritter away hours unproductively. Obviously, a central part of the solution is to strengthen ‘management by outcome’. But, the article highlights that the tendencies are actually quite the opposite to the fear - " ‘Mobile workers are far more organized, personally, than their office-bound counterparts,’ says a researcher. ‘They have to be on top of their game the whole time.’"
Microsoft has long pioneered innovations in the workplace through the use of technology and the current trend of ‘Dynamic Work’ is no exception. It was my personal work in this area during the most recent years of my tenure at Microsoft where I got an up close perspective on the accelerating changes happening in the workplace typically enabled by technology.
One of the ways Microsoft’s helps companies to exploit new technology is through its Enterprise Agreements (EA) and Software Assurance (SA) programmes. These licensing services not only provide easy and discount price access to the latest technologies from the Microsoft stable, but also include a range of services and extras to assist companies in their adoption and best use of those technologies.
One of the services available is ‘Business Value Planning Services’ (BVPS). EA and SA holders can use vouchers included in those agreements to get up to 15 day consulting engagements free of charge. The services are provided by specially certified Microsoft partners.
“BVPS is designed to help customer Business Decision Makers (BDMs) develop a plan to leverage the strategic value of the Microsoft Information Worker (IW) platform by improving an impactful business process, working with the customer to document, analyze, optimize, justify, sequence, and propose a plan to improve their business using Office System. We provide a reliable, repeatable process for certified BVPS partners to conduct, and be compensated for 3, 5, 10 or 15-day engagements according to the level of their customers’ Software Assurance benefits.”
One of the firs things Dynamic Work Limited did when it set up this year was to get its BVPS certification so businesses with EA and SA benefits can use them to engage Dynamic Work to explore new ways of changing their business and how technology can pave the way.
I was describing the concepts behind ‘Dynamic Work’ at an event last week and one of the attendees described it as an ‘anti-neutron bomb.’
The ‘neutron bomb’ was a concept floated in the seventies as a military weapon which killed people, but left buildings and structures standing. The term was quickly characterised as a paragon of the inhumanity of war and mankind’s values. The term was most prominently popularised applied to ‘Jack Welch’ whose aggressive manpower reductions and layoffs led to the nickname ‘Neutron Jack’.
By contrast, ‘Dynamic Work’ gets rid of buildings and structures and leaves the people. As my friend Lindsay Hamilton described, ‘you help companies layoff building instead of people.’
‘People-friendly’ downsizing if you will. Just the ticket for a difficult economic times where production often needs to be scaled back, but unemployment is already enough of a problem and one we don’t want to aggravate further. I guess if Jack Welch’s moniker was ‘Neutron Jack’, then my aspiration would be to earn the name ‘Anti-Neutron Bruce’ (curiously, the ‘anti-neutron’ particle was discovered by a guy named ‘Bruce’).
One of my first posts was on the topic of ‘Where We Are Available’. It focused on the ‘geographic’ side of flexibility and the tools needed to bring people together for collaborating in an efficient manner. In the little over a year since that post, the principles of ‘where we are available’ have risen in prominence across a number of social media.
The Twitter ‘status update’ is one of the most popular uses for Twitter. Updates on where people are delivered with the immediacy of the Twitter medium entails a chance for connected (‘following’, ‘friends’) individuals to connect geographically. What it lacks in integration (with standard collaboration and calendaring like Outlook and Exchange) it gains in immediacy and convenience. People like Hugh MacLeod are actively exploiting which quality to prompt impromptu real-world connections and face-to-face meetings. One of the big criticisms of distributed working is that one loses out on the ‘serendipity’ of people bumping into each other in the hallway or at the water cooler. But exploiting Twitter in this fashion demonstrates how new tools can actually expand ones potential for serendipity and actively foster it in distributed working mode.
The most logical question after encouraging one to abandon one’s fixed office space, if the public venues like cafes and libraries don’t suit one’s taste and maybe ‘home working’ doesn’t quite suit, then ‘Where can I work?’
The fact is that business centres and clubs are cropping up all over the UK and especially London is a variety of designs and packages to suit almost any work style or budget. Here are just a few to come to my attention in recent weeks...
- The Arts Club – A charming ambiance with lovely appointed rooms and an eclectic membership. The focus is supporting artists, but one does not need to be Equity or anything to join. Membership for the year is about £750. Wifi in a comfy chair in the centre of London surrounded by colourful creatives (thanks Mike)
- One Alfred Place – Their website describes it best, “If you live and work outside London, but need a place to meet or entertain clients and catch up with emails and phone calls between meetings - Welcome to One Alfred Place, a unique working space in the heart of the West End that combines the best of a private members’ club with the facilities and support you’d expect from your own London office.” (thanks Katie)
- DIFC Global – An unsung gem in the business centre collection. The crème de la crème of office space and yet available for short terms (including single days), small areas (hotdesks) and reasonable prices. Absolutely first-class service in space as prestigiously appointed as its St. James Square address.
- Argyll – Argyll offers a cross between a members club package and a prestige business centre like DIFC (in fact, in the very same St. James Square as well as three other prestige addresses).
One useful resource for navigating and locating an appropriate business centre is the Business Centre Association. Quotes the website, “There are around 860 bca flexible managed space member locations across the UK, providing over 40 million sq ft of office space to 40,000 SME-sized business occupiers making use of 500,000 workstations.” In particular, their Map View centre finder is a great tool for finding a business centre near where you happen to be.
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