Geographic

Co-Working Across the UK

Posted on by DWAdmin

Top 10 UK Co-Working Sites

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”.

  1. THECUBE, London
  2. The Werks, Brighton & Hove
  3. FlyThe.Coop, Manchester
  4. Old Broadcasting House, Leeds
  5. FunkBunk, Leighton Buzzard
  6. screenWORKS, Edinburgh
  7. The Hub, Bristol
  8. IndyCube, Cardiff
  9. Le Bureau, London
  10. Moseley Exchange, Birmingham

Where We Are Available: Twitter

Posted on by DWAdmin

Hugh Macleod Twitter 1

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.

Hugh Macleod Twitter 2 

The Costs of Commuting

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Commuting Modes in UK

The Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford has released a study on “The Costs of Transport on the Environment – The Role of Teleworking in Reducing Carbon Emissions” which looks comprehensively at empirical macro-economic data on workers and commuting. Its conclusions include…

· Empirical studies of teleworking show that it typically results in substantial reductions in car mileage for the day on which teleworking takes place.

· Teleworking can save energy at the worksite – providing working practices change accordingly.

· Teleworkers typically have longer than average commutes but this does not necessarily mean that teleworking encourages more remote living.

· Mobile working has fuelled a recent growth in teleworking.

· The majority of teleworkers are self-employed or unpaid.

· Teleworking has a wide range of benefits for employers, employees and communities. It has been linked with lower absenteeism, improved recruitment and retention, higher productivity, good work-life balance and good quality of life. Teleworkers tend to work longer hours than non-teleworkers, and identify this as one reason for their improved performance, but see reduced stress and better concentration as more important factors. Greater autonomy and flexibility in work planning and performance appears to be a key reason for improved work-life balance. Teleworking has also been linked to better health. There is evidence that teleworkers become more involved in their own communities and spend more on local services.

An example of the research cited is Microsoft’s own Tickbox.net survey (April 2007) on the benefits and profile of remote and flexible working. The study is really a comprehensive review of latest thinking and research in the UK which underscores the imperative and increasingly critical economic benefits to reforming the conventional modes of work and stripping out much of the synchronous commute to our knowledge worker factories.

Where We Are Available

Posted on by DWAdmin

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.