Author: DWAdmin

Home is Just the Job for Workers

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Home is just the job workers

A little while back The Sunday Times did great piece on remote and flexible working: “Home is just the job for workers” (subtitled ‘A growing number of companies are adopting more flexible employment practices for their staff”)

It highlighted the aggressive strides that companies like BT, My Travel, Lloyds TSB and HSBC were making to exploit this new approach to working.

As head of BT Workstyle, the division of the telecoms group that sells equipment and technology to other large corporations wanting to get their own employees geared up for home working, Dunbar is something of a zealot. Since 1988, he has worked from a purpose-built shed in his back garden, and likes to joke that his daily commute is about ten seconds – two when it’s raining. It might sound eccentric, but Dunbar’s working practices are becoming the norm for thousands of British workers attempting to achieve a far healthier balance between their careers and their home lives than they might have otherwise enjoyed…[A] number of big British companies are shifting more staff over to home working. At BT, for example, a little over 13,000 of the group’s staff have decided to take this option.”

And echoing my post ‘First Kill All the Office Buildings’…

“Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, threw his weight firmly behind a drive to remove 4,000 of his London-based staff from the group’s Canary Wharf headquarters and get them working from home instead. Speaking at a conference in Lisbon, Geoghegan said: “I’ve challenged us within seven years to have 50% of that building empty, to sublet to someone else. I don’t think we’re a really progressive, perceptive company if 8,000 people have to get up every day at an unearthly hour and go back again. Technology should change our thought process.”

Saving the Collapse of the Middle Class

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Elizabeth Warren Jefferson Memorial Lecture 

With $140/barrel crude oil and melting ice caps, the focal justifications for increased flexibility in the workplace have centred on the economic and environmental benefits. But a critical third resource is just as pivotal in the business case for dynamic work – people. While inexpensive energy and technological advances have been pillars of productivity growth, one of the greatest drivers to post-war growth has been new entrants into the labour force. Rosie the Riveter and a range of new occupations pulled the fairer sex into its ranks in the demands of wartime and the workforce never looked back.

The rise of women in the workplace has brought new freedoms and opportunities, but it has also brought with it new stresses and challenges. One of the best explorations of these challenges is Elizabeth Warren’s Jefferson Memorial Lecture at University California Berkeley “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class” (see above).

Families are in essence now saying that they are largely content to provide two economic units in the workplace to continue to provide resources for growth and productivity, but with so much of the family human resource so engaged, something has to give on the business side. Without the resilience of a ‘homemaker’ to attend to the critical needs of ‘Family Incorporated,’ the businesses need to enable the flexibility for either of the adults to either (a) shift the timing of work, or (b) shift the location of work.

For example, if one needs to go home early to attend to a sick child/parent/boiler, they want to either be able to make it up in the evening or weekend or just shift the location of their work. This example is just one of many scenarios where the downside of having everyone of the adults in a given household working – either dual income or increasingly the rise of the single parent household – which are leading to increasing demands by these workers for a new mode of workstyle which is increasingly flexible and dynamic. The companies who exercise the vision and innovation to operate in these new modes will attract the best human capital at the most competitive prices.

Where We Are Available

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Outlook Scheduling Assistant

Microsoft Outlook needs an enhanced ‘location’ capability in the Calendar capability. Right now Outlook Calendar is the first and most used ‘collaboration’ by customers, but its focus is on coordinating *when* people are available.  A critical second dimension of collaboration is and will become increasingly *where* people are available.

Outlook implicitly assumes the traditional context of ‘office work’ where all parties converge to work in geographic proximity at a ‘knowledge worker factory’.  Increasingly, knowledge work will be as modular, distributed and flexible as web services.  Think kanban/JIT/integrated-supply-chain for knowledge work.  In this environment, bringing together knowledge worker resources geographically will be as important as chronological coordination.

Furthermore, Microsoft has an exceptional asset to which to apply to this area:  Live Maps.  Through the integration of LiveMap GIS capability, Outlook will be able to help people arrange meetings that don’t just optimise schedules, but also optimise location to minimise travel which will come at an increasing cost in future years.  Specifically, when people book a meeting, they would be able to specify a LiveMaps coordinate in the ‘Location’ field of the Appointment.  One could configure Outlook to default to ‘Desk’ location during work hours, and ‘Home’ location during non-work hours.  The ‘Scheduling Assistant’ would then be enhanced to allow parameters which specify to propose meeting times not just ‘when’ parties are free, but also when they are already within an X mile radius of each other. Such an enhancement to Outlook would help to avoid the Long Drives that I recounted last week.

The Long Drive

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Warwick to Bristol route

My Microsoft colleague Terry Smith recounts a humorous tale about superfluous travel. He had a meeting in Bristol with a customer which he struggled to get to driving from his home in Warwick about 3 hours away. He finally arrived in a rush and quite stressed, but the reception told him that he could relax as the person he was meeting had not yet arrived to the office. A short while later, the customer came rushing through the doors, saw Terry and quick apologised, ‘I so sorry…I hit so much traffic coming down from Warwick.” It turns out both of them lived a few miles away from each other, but had arranged for the meeting at the customer’s ‘office’ by default and as a result both had driven for 3 hours (and lots of stress further aggravating already snarled traffic) when they could have had a pint at the local pub saving nearly two days worth of driving and a proportionate amount of petrol consumption and CO2 emission.

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Tech Savvy Heavy Hitters

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Trading Floor

I presented at a senior management board for a major investment bank on mobile technology a few years back. Part way through, the CIO interrupted and started my critique for being out of touch with the realities of their business and the requirements of the trading floor. Thinking I had totally missed the mark, I was saved by someone who jumped in and started confronting the CIO. He said, ‘where do you think our top traders work out of? Our City offices?? Not a chance. They are in Monaco, Jersey, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar. I can’t remember the last time I saw them in the office.’ ‘And it not just the big guys either,’ he continued, ‘more and more if we want to attract the very best and brightest out of schools, these hot shot kids are demanding these fancy new technologies that they have grown accustomed to in university. If we don’t offer them, then they question if we really all that sophisticated and ‘world leading’ as we claim and they opt to go work some place else more dynamic.” The interloper was the Head of Trading who had invited me to speak and set up the topic in the first place to shake things up and drive more innovation in the business on new ways of working.

First Kill All the Office Buildings

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A while back I met with our Victoria Melville of PR firm Inferno (now setting up her own firm Melville Communications) who told me about their plans to move offices from their currently White City location. My first question was, ‘Why have offices at all?’ She was a little surprised by such a straightforward question. The ensuing conversation went something like this…

“Why do you need offices. Half the time you are on the road meeting with customers and press and other times you do work from home anyway.”

“Well, I like to go into the office to see other people I work with.”

“Okay, when is the last time you went into the office?”

“About bit over a week ago.”

“And, when you were there, how many people were there for you to see or were they all out with customers, etc.?”

She just smiled in response and acknowledged that the office was mostly empty on the day she went in. So, Inferno, like so many companies, were paying expensive London rates and ongoing running costs for empty office space that occasionally drew people in for a gratuitous car journey to meet with people who weren’t there.  Ironically, when Victoria did visit the office, she ended up not spending much time with or even sitting near other colleagues that were there because their desks were scattered and everyone gravitated to their own, fixed desk to do their work.

My argument is not that people shouldn’t come together to see one another face to face. My argument was to put all of the money currently spent on rent, rates, lighting, air conditioning into setting up periodic gatherings that are (a) focused on the coming together piece, and (b) are not mundane experiences in conventional offices, but with all the money saved could be exceptional experiences. Comfortable chairs in an elegant room of a museum rented out for a few hours with some tasty catering brought in. Now that’s a day at the office. That’s a great environment for interacting with colleagues. And that’s a lot cheaper than the commuting and space renting of the current mode.

Virtual Parallels

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Organisation Charts

Curiously, and perhaps not coincidentally, the same dynamics moving towards distributed working in the flesh-and-blood, bricks-and-mortar workplaces is also taking place in the bits-and-bytes of digital world.

One of the hottest concepts or trends in computing right now is ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ (SOA). At its heart, SOA is a collection of principles, guidelines and concepts (ie. the ‘architecture’ bit) that one needs to consider or adopt in order to exploit the flexibility that ‘service’ delivered software introduces. Traditional or conventional software implies a more centralised command-and-control structure where the computing is installed on the device where it is going to be consumed (sort of like a worker who is going to do work in the workplace where they are based) A ‘service’ orientation implies a results-delivery structure where the results of the computing are delivered to the user but the computing itself might be done on some computer where the use as not installed anything, the user just consumes the output of the computation.

Who Is Driving

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Given these drivers (energy, climate, social, intellectual), there are a number core constituencies who have an acute interest in these considerations and who will be on the vanguard to driving for change.

Energy/Climate: Public Policy is increasingly re-examining the rules and assumptions of the 21st century economy with energy supply and climate change in mind. Tax incentives and penalties are being introduced to reduce carbon footprints especially from motor vehicles.

Social: Women/Families – Pressures at breaking points are driving people to demand greater flexibility in working practices (eg. hours, locations) in order to juggle it all. One organisation at the forefront of these reforms is Working Families.

Knowledge work: Top Talent – The constituency with the most to gain by reducing brain dead commute time are those for whose hour of concentrated knowledge work has the highest valuation, ie. professionals with scarce skills. More specifically it is the highest performers. Not only is their domain expertise scare, but their exceptional competency is even more scarce.

The New Tools

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Toolkit

It’s not just a range of pressures that are driving people to these new modes of work, but it is also a wealth of enablers that have emerged to unleash the potential for resolving these pressures in unprecedented and innovative ways.

Asynchronicity – The operative production model of the 20th Century was the serial, synchronous ‘assembly line.’ All of the resources for production lined up in one space and one shift. As knowledge work developed, this model continued to predominate with processes for planning, approving, assessing, etc. moving from mail tray to mail tray in just as methodical a fashion as a Model-T trundling down the line. The operative production model of the 21st Century is asynchronous parallelism. Email communication that can be read and responded to today, tomorrow or next week. Collaborative documents where multiple parties contribute.

Communications – A pervasive, increasingly flexible and capable communications network becomes the hub that unites the diverse pieces. It is not just the digital network that it the Internet, but it is also the increasingly sophisticated capabilities developed on top of it, the increasingly varied devices attached to it and the increasingly diverse contexts to which it has been applied.

Modern Management Principles – Knowledge work predominant in the service economy of the 21st century is much more results based than its manufacturing, production-line focus on activity. Modern management concepts like Peter Drucker’s ‘Management By Objective’ (MBO) harnesses approaches critical to the new modes of flexible working.

Preserving the World’s Assets

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World

A number of megatrends are all converging to drive this move out of concentrated workplaces towards more distributed work. All of these drivers are centred on preserving key and increasingly precious assets to the global economy.

Energy Assets: Peak Oil – Concern is growing to new levels about world oil supply. While eternal optimism abounds in the world’s ability to out innovate and out discover the depletion of existing sources, recent evidence is that the new finds are smaller and fewer, the existing supplies are less accessible and less productive (eg. more energy input is required extract and refine). The commodity of oil is not just a unique energy source in its combination of power and safe transportability, but it is also a critical substance in plastics, construction materials and range of everyday substances and its increasing scarcity represents a major pinch point to global economic health.

Ecology Assets: Climate Change – If the economic costs of oil-supply and demand don’t hit us in the wallet, then the environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions will hit us there and elsewhere. Not much comment needed on the profile and intensity of this issue. But in terms of what we can do about it one of the most prominent sources of emissions is automobile commuting. 54% of US petroleum used is consumed by automobiles and in commuting to work, the average number of passengers-per-vehicle is 1.1.

Social Assets: Dual Income Social Pressures – One of the most significant contributors to post-war growth in the Western world has been new entrants to the labour force, especially women. While this infusion of economic muscle has been a boon to the second half of the twentieth century, the social consequences of this mass rise of two income families combined with longer and longer commuting to places of work (fewer people live and work in the same city or town), means less parental time to manage the household and intensifying demands to juggle work and home life responsibilities.

Intellectual Assets: Rise of Knowledge Work – Assuming we have enough power to continue running the machines we have invented and propagated to handle brute force and routine tasks, the value-add work that human beings do gravitates increasingly to creative pursuits employing intellectual capital. Increasingly people are recognizing the intellectual waste from sitting in a car and the upsides of each person finding places and environments most suited to their own individual inspiration (a library, a quiet den, a retreat, a café, etc.). MSNBC recently reported (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20829879) people lose on average 1 week per year ‘sitting in traffic…and it is getting worse’ costing the USA $78 billion.