Dynamic Employment

Posted on 5th November 201230th November -0001 by DWAdmin

What is Obama’s Achilles Heel in the current election? What is the one issue and statistic that Romney keeps returning to with the most effectiveness? Employment. It’s an equally big issue weighing over just about every world leader from Greece to Egypt. People want jobs. And young people – with energy, vigour and dreams – are disproportionately anxious for them.

Dynamic Work holds great promise as a tool for increasing employment. By allowing companies to make more productive use of workers, their ROI and business case justification becomes easier. By introducing greater flexibility in commercial terms, companies can take o more workers at less longer term risk.

These assertions were underscored by a recent statistics released by the UK’s Office for National Statistics. Kevin Green, CEO of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation commented…

“More people in work than ever before and the lowest unemployment in over a year is another significant step on the road to recovery. The truly amazing thing is that during the past year of a technical recession, and in spite of austerity and public sector cuts, the UK has created half a million jobs. The job numbers are being driven by flexible working – the number of full time posts has grown but the increase in temps and part-time workers has been even greater. Too many people talk down the value of part-time work, but it’s here in black and white – over 80 per cent of part-time employees chose to work that way.

The counter claim to these promising numbers is that such ‘part time’ work is really offers less pay and less security. But, the higher pay and higher quality may come in the total ‘portfolio’ of employment rather than in a specific job. The bartending actor whose glass washing enables his dream pursuing.

A US Census Bureau report “Higher-income workers have more work-at-home flexibility” provided further evidence of standard of living quality for flexible workers in both monetary and non-monetary terms…

“’Mixed’ workers who work both at home and in an office are generally affluent, with median household income of $96,300, according to census data. That compares with median household income of $74,000 for people who always work at home and $65,600 for people who always work onsite, the researchers reported. Nearly half of the people who worked at home exclusively were self-employed, but experts say there are other explanations for why those who work from home make less. Some employers are finding that especially among younger workers, the ability to work at home and forgo a gruelling commute is such a beneficial perk that they are willing to accept a lower starting salary in exchange for it.”

The morale of the story is that countries need ‘Dynamic’ leadership now more than ever before.

Endangered Species in the Dynamic Office Jungle

Posted on 21st October 201230th November -0001 by DWAdmin

TechCrunch’s piece “10 Office Tools And Workplace Norms That Are Going Extinct” with an endangered species list for the “new work world” habitat. (thanks Geoff). Half are obsolescing technologies, but the other half are victims of surging Dynamic Work…

Tape recorders (79 percent)
Fax machines (71 percent)
The Rolodex (58 percent)
Standard working hours (57 percent)
Desk phones (35 percent)
Desktop computers (34 percent)
Formal business attire like suits, ties, pantyhose, etc. (27 percent)
The corner office for managers/executives (21 percent)
Cubicles (19 percent)
USB thumb drives (17 percent)

I would add a few more to the list…

Network cables – Put your money into wireless infrastructure and don’t be put off by the nervous nellies who are convinced that performance and security won’t be adequate.
Assigned desks – An extension of the ‘corner office’, ‘desk phone’ and ‘desk computer’ items above.
Briefcases – This one was proposed by Geoff and highlights the shift from the ‘paperwork’ office (that briefcases are designed to carry and protect). This item is the most nostalgic for me as I carried a briefcase for many years of my life. They evoke something more solid, aesthetic, and professional that the black nylon computer sacks of today.

BYOD

Posted on 26th July 201230th November -0001 by DWAdmin

No, not ‘Bring Your Own Dynamic-ness’. But, ‘Bring Your Own Device’. A surging concept in the ethos of Dynamic Work.

Susanne Dansey’s ‘Cowshed’ explores this growing concept in a recent post…

“BYOD is an acronym for “Bring Your Own Device”, in other words – using your own technology for work purposes. The workplace is changing and the tools we use to work are changing. Gone are the days when employees will quietly accept whatever hardware the IT department has provided. Many of us are now using our own smart phones and tablets for work purposes making BYOD commonplace. People are working more of the time, at times that suit them and with devices they like. Boundaries between work and home life are becoming more blurred and many welcome the flexibility this brings (e.g. working parents).”

For many years, I lugged double. My personal laptop and my office laptop. My personal phone and my office phone. Why? Because the IT departments had very specific notions of the devices that they wanted me to use (namely cheap and consistent). I invested in my own devices because I wanted something more powerful and individual. Once again, the power of virtualisation enables a have-your-cake-and-eat-it win. IT departments don’t really care about the nuts and bolts or the form factor and style of your device. They just want (a) computer power, and (b) secure, controlled policies (as in system management profiles). Today, they can provide a sandbox virtual environment either remotely in a virtual environment or locally in a virtual machine. If your kit meets the specifications to run these environments tightly controlled by IT, then their view can be ‘knock yourself out and get whatever device you want and feel free to use it for whatever you want outside that corporate ringfence’.

At the heart of Dynamic Work is the spirit of flexibility to the right approach and right tool for the right job. Electronic productivity tools have too long been a one-size-fits-all standardization that imposed to many burdens and limitations on the users both professionally and personally. But BYOD looks to unshackle all of that.

Dynamic Accountability

Posted on 23rd May 201230th November -0001 by DWAdmin

I was drawn to Tim Harford’s book ’Adapt’ by its theme and subtitle “Why Success Always Starts With Failure” which lies at the heart of my other online exploration. The author, Harford examines a range of failure dynamics and how to manage them. You can never really avoid them so the best prescription to acknowledge and embrace them and then cope with, if not exploit, the consequences.

One of the case studies he examines is the retail chain Timpsons. The progressive leadership by John Timpson has resulted in a number of organisational innovations as you might expect with a company that embraces risk taking, but the one that caught my eye in the context of Dynamic Work is ‘peer monitoring’. The walls that Dynamic Work breaks down are not just geographical and chronological, but also potentially organizational. Peer Monitoring is a powerful concept provides an alternative to conventional Command and Control hierarchies. People are becoming more familiar with the fundamental concept as it is a common one in the digital world of online communities…

“Peer monitoring is closely associated with the virtual world: it’s the fundamental building block of Google’s search algorithm (giving weight to how popular a site is with other sites), phenomena like eBay (which relies on buyers and sellers rating each other’s reliability) and Wikipedia (in which anyone can edit anyone’s else articles), and the open-source software movement which has delivered such successes as Firefox and Apache. But as Timpson shows, it’s applicable far behind the cutting edge of crowd-sourced technology…I witnessed [another] striking example of peer monitoring on my visit to the Hinkley B nuclear power station…Just as [our group of senior executives] were about to leave the meeting room, a portly middle-aged lady in a hard hat walked in pushing a trolley laden with sandwiches. She took one look at us and politely but firmly admonished our host that we’d left our shoes in a place where they constituted a tripping hazard, and asked us to move them…The instant correction of a problem, no matter how small and no matter what the hierarchical relationship might be between the head of safety and the tea lady.”

Whatever Timpson are doing it works for me as I am a regular and delighted customer at my local branch in Marlow

Policies Without Practice

Posted on 21st April 201230th November -0001 by DWAdmin

Microsoft is back investing in Dynamic Work which seemed like a reasonable enough prod for me to dust of this blog with an updated post. Specifically, Microsoft Europe has sponsored a study of flexible working, “Attitudes Towards Flexible Working” with the research firm Vanson Bourne. Some of the findings, as reported in HR Magazine, include…

“The majority of business leaders across 15 Western European countries are 'very optimistic' about the business and employee benefits of flexible working practices, but have yet to implement a strategy for making new ways of working a reality, according to Microsoft and research firm, Vanson Bourne. Although businesses increasingly grant employees flexibility about when and where to work, the biggest barriers for employees include the right technology access and managerial guidance. Full flexible working is a reality for only a minority of knowledge workers in European businesses. The study among business leaders found the Western European countries in which businesses are most likely to allow their employees to work flexibly are Germany, the UK and Norway; the countries in which businesses are least open to flexible working are Belgium, Portugal and Italy….Most significantly, a majority of employees have not been made aware of the flexible working policies and guidelines in their organisation: 63% of business leaders (53% in the UK) say they provide their organisations with flexible working policies, but only a third of employees responded that their business has a policy in place (32% in the UK). Furthermore, a quarter of businesses (9% in the UK) measure the impact of flexible working (on employee satisfaction, productivity and customer satisfaction, for example).”

Office Worker Factories

Posted on 29th December 201130th November -0001 by DWAdmin

‘Office Worker Factories’ are on their own deathbed. .

The ‘Industrial Age’ of the 20^th century was defined by factories that produced goods at scale. When you mention ‘Industrial’, people think Rust Belt, smokestack, blue-collar engines of manufacturing. But just as prominent to the Industrial Age (probably more so in the final decades) were the ‘Office Worker Factories’. Behemoths of assembly-line processing by white-collared, college educated ‘knowledge workers’. But just as automation and globalisation has displaced most of the Rosie the Riveters, the same forces have now made redundant the legions of Peter the Paper Pushers. Documented in William Whyte’s classic ‘Organization Man’, regimented In and Out Trays worked on synchronised 9-to-5 shifts managed by overseers.

The ‘Service’ economy (eg. finance, information technology, logistics) has long looked down its nose at ‘Manufacturing’ sector as outdated and obsolete. Little did it realise that the Service sector is just Manufacturing’s younger sibling. Now it too has hit its dotage in the Industrial family.

Seth Godin recently penned a post “The forever recession (and the coming revolution)” which dramatically dissected the decline of the staid, fixed, old infrastructure across all sectors of the economy. Clearing the way is the Dynamic new approaches to business…

There are actually two recessions: The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes…The other recession, though, the one with the loss of ‘good factory jobs’ and systemic unemployment–I fear that this recession is here forever. Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created…The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities…Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway. When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.”

Skype-mas

Posted on 26th December 201130th November -0001 by DWAdmin

Dilbert steps up the incisive wit on the techno-laggards whose outdated approaches are the #1 impediment to the growth of Dynamic Work. Seemed appropriate today having just gotten off a video call with family across the Atlantic for an extended video chat, including a couple of video ‘tours’ of new things to show off, sharing our Christmas Day together. Oh, and the total cost of this space age technology…zero. Ho, ho, ho.

Education Factories

Posted on 10th September 201130th November -0001 by DWAdmin

Yes, it is back to school season. But Seth Godin’s incisive plea for such restructuring of education suggests that it may be ‘Back to (the wrong) school’ season.

Education factories fill Office Worker factories. Part of many Dynamic Work transformations includes a range of re-skilling and education around new tools, new ways of working, new ways of communicating. But as the world moves inexorably to Dynamic Working (and those not so moving get left behind at their peril), we can start the readiness much earlier. Back in school, for example.

“Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told… Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor… As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.”

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Author: DWAdmin