Telework from home, or the office?
April 5, 2009
With Telework very much on the agenda again driven by the desire to be a good corporate citizen and reduce commuting carbon footprint, reduce real estate costs and improve general productivity. The only problem is that many home environments are unsuitable for dedicated teleworkers, and in some cases local legislation can be very unfriendly to home offices, insisting that they comply with health and safety regulations applicable to formal office environments.
Home environments can be unsuitable for several reasons:
- A simple lack of space.
The kitchen table may be good for a couple of hours but not as a permanent environment. - A family at home.
The excitement of having a key family member permanently accessible can prove too much of a temptation for some partners, and the discipline involved can cause family strains. - Infrastructure.
Despite massive investments many areas still do not have access to consistently good broadband communications. This can give problems with video conferences, and SaaS environments. - Your home may be fine but neighbours may not be adapted to a working environment. It is surprising how distracting lawnmowers, pumps, drills, barking dogs, pools etc. can be when trying to work.
- An office at home can lead to being always accessible. For many this is not an issue or can easily be controlled, but continual binge working can be dangerous for your health both physical and social.
Now this may sound like I’m rubbishing telework, no far from it, it means that the telework location needs to be carefully thought out. In the early days of the telework movement there was a lot of focus on telecentres or telecottages. These would be centres local to the teleworkers’ homes where they could work, share expensive equipment, high speed internet connections and at the same time have access to shared expertise and training. There were variations on this, satellite offices operated by employers close to where the employees lived, office centres where facilities could be rented by the hour, day, week or whatever period is needed, or more recently individual companies offering to rent out one or more desks in their own underutilised office environment.
For various reason the telecentre has not become a major part of the telework scenario, although in some countries it is stronger than others. The main reason is that technology costs have come down to the level where they do not need to be shared, and the systems and communications are sufficiently reliable not to need a technician at hand all the time. However shared office centres have gained a lot of custom especially for the mobile teleworkers who need to have access to quality facilities in many locations, but in general these facilities can be expensive to justify for many would be teleworkers.
The final category is that of office sharing, and this is gaining increased attention as companies need to cover the costs of unused office space. This may be because it was surplus to requirements anyway, or their own telework programme had liberated space, or because of staff reductions, whatever the reason it makes sense to use it rather than just let it be an overhead. There are quite a few web-sites offering information on these offers, and in many cases the costs involved are similar to the real cost of setting up and maintaining a home office.
If you are putting together a telework program, considering requesting telework from your employer or just setting out on your own business, I suggest you take a look at the sharing option, it overcomes a lot of issues associated with working from home whist retaining many of the advantages.
Here are a couple of sites as an example:
If anyone know of other sites around the world offering similar services, or have experience of using them, do let me know.
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Making Twitter meaningful
February 23, 2009
I first had a look at Twitter a year or so ago, and I must admit that after a couple of weeks dipping in and out, I could not really see the point. At the end of last year I was persuaded by my son to revisit Twitter, but not treat it as a messaging – microblogging environment, but more as a mechanism for searching out new ideas and up to the instant expert reflection. This is of course in addition to the RSS feeds, daily, weekly monthly newsletters, and the occasional bit of serendipity, as mentioned in my previous blog.
For me Twitter has in fact supplanted or at least partially replaced some of these mechanisms, but as usual the main problem is deciding what tweets to examine. Although the people I follow act as a first phase filter of information that might interest me, I still need to examine each link to find that information. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a limited beta test of MicroPlaza a product designed to provide a solution for those who want to use Twitter as the information resource it has the potential to be.
The idea is simple. In the normal timeline (tweets flowing through the network) Web locations are tweeted and retweeted in various compressed formats, along with a short comment.
MicroPlaza pulls this information together and presents a list of sites either by timeline or frequency of occurrence, including the comments made by my network.
This is fine if you have a homogeneous network that is primarily focused on one topic, but most of us are interested in a variety of things. Enterprise 2.0, telework, UK politics, business issues, social issues, folk music, friends, genealogy and direct family, all influence whom I follow. MicroPlaza enables me to arrange my network into tribes (groups), some of them will exist only in one tribe and others in several tribes according to my selection. I can then review each tribal timeline with the most recent information and postings.
On top of this I can “become” one of the people I follow, and see their timeline based on tweets to them.
This is great. Prior to my day’s activities I can look at those items that were of greatest impact to my network on a certain topic. If I have a meeting on sustainability coming up, I can quickly inform myself of topical items. If I know their is going to be a focus on a certain aspect, I can put myself in the shoes of my favourite expert and see it through their eyes.
MicroPlaza is not the finished item yet, search facilities are being added, and various suggestions will be taken on board based on feedback from the public Beta. As a recent convert to Twitter – I realise the potential usefulness of it but also the overwhelming impact it can have as a time consumer. MicroPlaza gives me an instant view of what is of interest to me on a given topic. For a lot of users this may be the only tool they will ever need to take advantage of the potential of Twitter.
Information Addiction
February 20, 2009
Like an addiction to speed, dangerous pursuits, gambling etc., the current trend for sharing seems quite self destructive. Not that sharing in itself is a bad thing, far from it; but the processes and mechanisms needed are present in such abundance as to make recovery across the many channels needed, a real chore, like finding a soul-mate at a party where everyone is blindly reciting their life story.
In fact I would suggest we are perilously close to meltdown, with the real benefits of sharing being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails, feeds, blogs, postings, twitters etc.; like an indecisive man starving to death in a restaurant, or a decisive one having a Monty Python moment (Mr. Creosote in the Meaning of Life).
At various times in the past analogous situations have arisen. Originally the postal service carried real and meaningful communications and information. Friends, family, customers, suppliers, and the volume just grew to the point where a moderately busy individual could not find time, and finally junk mail (yes it did originally apply to snail mail), killed it. The secretary or PA was entrusted with the job of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making sure only the important stuff got through.
Many people used to ridicule the managers who had their secretaries read their emails for them and were labelled technophobes. In fact they were just applying good information filtering as applied to letters and telephone calls. The PA wasn’t just a filter, they were a search engine too.
“Contact John Smith and find out who is the best expert to evaluate this, then get his cv and contract conditions, by tomorrow morning” -
Next morning “John Smith is away on vacation, but his PA said he uses Bill Jones – so I contacted him, and by the way he a weekend package that might be appropriate for your anniversary next month, when you have the time to look” etc.
Problem solved and a bit of serendipity thrown in.
If we substitute John Smith with all the different ways that information can be imparted, the size of the problem becomes apparent.
Someone somewhere has probably just discovered the piece of information I need, in a website somewhere. What are the chances of me finding it? I need it in the next couple of hours. Well let’s hit the traditional search engines. I find 2000 potential items, and the tenth one I open appears to have what I need, except the source is dated 2003 and I need a very recent source. Well lets look at my feeds, time is running out. I can check Delicious, Digg, and Twitter. I could spend time searching the tweets, following the links, searching the articles etc., but unless I was very lucky it would be a couple of hours wasted. I already spend almost 50% of my work time searching for information, if it goes much higher then my productive time will dimish rapidly.
What I want is the immediacy of Twitter, the depth of the search engine, the accumulated experiences within Delicious, the topicality of Digg, and a twist of serendipity.
In fact what I really want is a PA with a PhD in Business practice, a Masters in social sciences , and an Engineering degree in IT, the willingness to be paid a pittance and be able to make great coffee. Failing that a single interface that can handle my favourite topics, my favourite people, their favourite people, whilst providing me with element of discovery provided by social platforms.
Then perhaps I can get some work done, or just handle even more information.
Am I asking for too much?
Perhaps not.
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Portfolio Workers on the march
February 17, 2009
Portfolio Worker (Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason, McGraw-Hill, December 1990 ) , whereby independent workers serve multiple clients using their skills in different areas of expertise, indeed in many cases just out of necessity to make ends meet.
A portfolio worker might make 30% of his income from consultancy, 20% from writing, 30% from selling via eBay, and 20% singing round folk clubs. I remember bumping into an IBMer in the early 90s who worked as a consultant some of the time, but also as a landscape gardener which exercised a completely different side of his interests and physique. He exalted the virtues of such a balance in life, and indeed managed to preserve his health and sanity well beyond that of some of his peers.
This also connects back to my post “Too old to rock n’ roll too young to retire” where typically those making the 3rd age switch from employment become portfolio workers, reliant on their clients and contacts rather than employers.
Just as many people will have two part-time jobs to provide full employment, the portfolio worker makes his from a variety of skills. There is nothing new about this, but what is beginning to draw attention is the extent to which this is beginning to happen. The New American Job Newsweek, they refer to it as the Gig Economy. It seems to consider it a passing phase but I am less sure.
In reality many find this portfolio existence more satisfying than the normal employment situation, with the main challenge being finding clients and the evident lack of security in that scenario.With a single employer/customer you are reliant on that source, but spreading the load means spreading the risk.
With the current lay-offs occurring across the board, many people are trying the portfolio approach for the first time and employers are looking to fill gaps in their internal skills inventory with external sources. Of course they have used freelancers and agency staff for ages, but now cash-strapped managers are looking for skills on an individual project basis, sometimes for only a few hours here or there.
How to find them? Independent registers of consultants and professionals have existed on the internet for years, or an open market place such as Bobex now operating in Western Europe, however traditionally these have been price oriented and have no real mechanism for factoring-in trust. This is where the social media plays an important part. Networks such as LinkedIn play an important role, and the recommendation feature is fine up to a point, but it somehow does not convey trust, any more than a reference letter does. More frequently these days the portfolio skills are being recruited via personal recommendation of a friend or an employee, hence the increased value of the social network in maintaining these relationships.
Many new entrants to the portfolio working arena will lack some critical skills to enable them to function totally as an independent entity, if you did all your own accounting, web work, marketing, ongoing skill maintenance, and strategic thinking you would soon find there was not much time to generate revenues – let alone have a familly life. Hence a renewed interest in localised skill sharing. The telecottage or telecentre was touted for years as a technical solution for teleworkers and portfolio workers, giving access to high speed internet and expensive local IT resources. They were successful in some European environments, Sweden, UK, Central Europe (where the community and educational aspect is strong), but in general they did not catch on, partly because the needs to share costly IT infrastructure largely disappeared. However the explosion in virtual contact has also highlighted the benefits of cooperation and sharing physically.
This is leading to renewed interest in places where virtual collaborators can get together on a regular basis to exchange skills, market intelligence, and get help etc. Some of these may be purely informal like a coffee shop or bar, others may resemble a shared office facility. Some SMEs are even considering hosting such facilities during these troubled times, partly to help micro start-ups, partly to use excess office capacity.
The recent success of the Twestival (Twitter users getting together and raising money for charity) highlights the power of ad hoc cooperation at a local level, largely driven bya real desire to share and participate.
The Portfolio Worker is on the march, and social networks are an integral part of maintaining knowledge, contacts, and the very necessary human relationships to build trust and ensure opportunities for their skills are generated.
I’d be interested in hearing about any mutual help activities you know of for independents and new portfolio workers active on a local basis, working with social networks especially Twitter.
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Prejudice and Social Networks
February 15, 2009
The price of prejudice Jan 15th 2009 From The Economist print edition “It’s what you do that counts-not what you say you’d do”, got me thinking about the effect of prejudice in the workplace and the potential role of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking.
Finding an genuinely unprejudiced person is going to be pretty hard. We all have prejudices about things forcing us to make judgements on people before we know them, or misinterpreting their actions when we do. Prejudice can apply to so many areas, gender, age, religion, race, education, social background, sexuality, nationality, lifestyle, stereotypes, etc….. Here I don’t want to examine the prejudices fuelled by mindless xenophobia, or homophobia, but those which most of us keep under control intellectually but which may subtly undermine an organisation whilst not actually leading to active discrimination.
Most of us gain our first impressions of people via the primary senses, mostly visual and aural, but others come into play as well especially those that infringe our personal space ie touch and smell. Appearance, level of education, cultural background (e.g. regional accents) all influence the weight we give to an unfamiliar collaborator. We are also affected by what others say, and most of us are able to some degree to separate gossip from objective comment, but prejudice will affect this ability.
When using a social network the first impressions are usually generated by the content of the contact, although some of us may not be able to look past spelling and grammar.
I recently looked for a review on a particular smart phone, and after reading several unhelpful reviews, I watched a couple of video reviews. These were equally superficial, however the last one was in depth, factual and informative. However I had to watch it twice as the first time I was overly focussed o the fact that the presenter looked and sounded like a gangster rap artist, however that prejudice being quickly overcome I was able to focus on the content quality. In a face to face environment the chances are that we would never have reached the stage of a meaningful information exchange.
Even going back to the forums on Compuserve, I encountered and exchanged posts with people for some time, and upon meeting them for the first time immediately felt as though they were friends or close colleagues. That doesn’t mean there were not some surprises. One fellow who projected an image of an enthusiastic teenage geek actually turned out to be a rather elderly enthusiastic expert. Others however were instantly identifiable across a crowded room without having even seen a photograph.
The point is that prejudice puts barriers in the way of effective communication at all levels within an organisation, or with suppliers and customers. Social networks have some potential in bypassing some of our natural prejudices helping information to flow.
There have certainly been cases of employers or potential employers using social networks as a form of pre employment vetting, and some where employees have been discriminated against because of their online activities outside of work, but in general the call to common sense from all involved could be enabling the openness of social networks to have a favourable impact on the way in which we work together.
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Global Knowledge Society needs a G8 initiative.
January 21, 2009
In July 1994 in Naples the G7 leaders emphasized on the necessity of encouraging the development of a world-wide Information Society. To my mind this was quite an astonishing bit of vision from an organisation that normally produces a lot of fog but not much clarity, although one has to admit the reduction in 3rd world debt program was quite effective. (Notice quite – not very, or extremely just quite, but so much better than ineffective).
The G7 members and European Commission used the the Ministerial Conference held in Brussels on 25-26 February 1995 to select 11 international pilot projects to demonstrate the potential of the Information Society and stimulate its development internationally.
Don’t forget this was before Amazon first opened on-line (July 16, 1995) and there were significant doubts at that time as to whether the Internet could support robust eCommerce activity. I remember that even at Telecom Inter@active ’97 in Geneva, a presentation from an eCommerce proponent admitted that he could not see how anyone would consider buying a high value item like a Mercedes through the Internet.
The idea was to involve countries beyond the G7, and a wide variety of organisations and projects.
The key objectives of these Pilot Projects were to:
- support international consensus on common principles governing the need of access to networks and applications and their interoperability,
- establish the groundwork for productive forms of co-operation amongst the G-7 partners in order to create a critical mass to address this global issue,
- create an opportunity for information exchange leading towards the further development of the Information Society,
- identify and select projects of an exemplary nature having tangible and clearly understandable social, economic and cultural benefits which would demonstrate to the public the potential of the Information Society,
- identify obstacles related to the implementation of practical applications serving the creation of a global Information Society,
- help to create markets for new products and services, where appropriate.
The projects chosen were to adhere to the following criteria and should
- add value for the development of the information society,
- be relevant to citizens,
- stimulate cooperation,
- bring in other countries and encourage open access.
- avoid creating new bureaucracies or institutions
- and finally they should only be financed by existing programmes. (Which meant no cash from the G7).
The G7 Ministers identified 11 pilot project areas at the Brussels meeting:
- Global Inventory project (led by the European Commission and Japan)
- Global Interoperability for Broadband Networks (Canada and Japan)
- Cross-Cultural Training and Education (France and Germany)
- Electronic Libraries / Bibliotheca Universalis (France and Japan)
- Multimedia Access to Word Cultural Heritage /Electronic museums (Italy and France)
- Environment and Natural Resources Management (USA)
- Global Emergency Management (Canada)
- Global Healthcare Applications (European Commission)
- Government On-line (UK)
- Global Marketplace for SMEs (European Commission, Japan, USA)
- Maritime Information Systems (European Commission, Canada)
Admittedly some of these projects did not make much of an impact, but others such as the Global Marketplace for SMEs did contribute in raising the visibility of eCommerce and the required infrastructures. In fact the project continued in various guises until 2003 when the Deeds project finished. Interestingly one of the conclusions of that project was that Knowledge Management was the next major hurdle to be surmounted by small businesses.
So after that lengthy introduction I cut to the point. Those G7 (later G8) pilot projects successfully acted as catalysts for various aspects of the Information Society that today we take for granted. I’m sure a valid argument could be made to say these developments would have happened anyway, however these projects did provide focus and, as a true catalyst should, facilitated and speeded up the process.
I firmly believe that we need another global initiative that will help focus the attention of administrations and the other key actors on stimulating the knowledge economy rather than just throwing billions of Dollars/Euros/Pounds on short term initiatives that might alleviate some short term pain, but that will do little to promote much needed long term change.
An early initiative from the new and enlightened President of the U.S.A. would be favourite.
Why not make suggestions for 10-15 projects of a global nature that would contribute to the ongoing development of the Knowledge Society.
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Telework? Forget it and think again.
January 11, 2009
From the coining of the term in 1972 by Jack Nilles, until the mid 90s, Telework was always an idea whose time had not yet come. Management styles were too inflexible, technology and telecommunications costs generally too high, and the unions too suspicious. Of course there were exceptions, but the advocacy that went on during that period paved the way for acceptance when the prevailing conditions were right. The advent of readily available broadband connections provided those conditions.
Within a few years the market for home PCs had outstripped the corporate market, and internet access is now on the agenda for universal access, putting it on a par with utilities such as water, electricity & telephone, as a citizen’s right.
It is hardly surprising that for most knowledge workers, telework has become a non-issue. PDAs, Portable PCs, GSMs (cell phones), mean working on the move is a natural part of daily life, and yes, either working at home for at least a couple of days a week or working really flexible hours has become common-place. In the event of poor weather, transport disruption, security alerts, hangovers, and other inexplicable ailments etc., telework has become the norm.
You must have noticed that the traditional rush hour, has now expanded to almost 4 hours in the morning (6:30 – 10:30) and another 4 hours in the evening (15:00 – 19:00) sometimes longer.That’s because a lot people engage in flexible work practices, either doing tasks at home prior to going in to the office, or leaving early and finishing off tasks at home.
Whilst a lot of companies now support flexible working, a lot of teleworking is still carried out ad-hoc without any formal recognition or much support, either logistically or financially.
Essentially telework involves removing distance as a barrier to work, and it has some great benefits that are well documented. The danger is that by successfully implementing telework within an organisation and getting good results, management will consider the job done without looking at the even greater potential for restructuring work patterns.
You can certainly see the trend in younger and those more dynamic environments, where formal structures are disintegrating in favour of ad-hoc structures based around the needs of the task in hand. The company does not need to be that small. In ’98 I had the good fortune to be invited by Cisco to a small gathering of 30-40 consultants in Nice. The information day was topped off by John Chambers flying in to share his vision. Much of his vision and the processes under way in Cisco then, are now being reflected in Enterprise 2.0. I was impressed at the time and continue to be impressed by the approach of Cisco.
These days any organisation can follow a similar path.
With a minimum amount of guidance and control, teams can self select and self organise. The emerging Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms support individuals and teams in a variety of ways that are inherently flexible and adaptable to new circumstances.
Although collaborative platforms have been around for some time it is only recently that they began to make a serious impact being able not only facilitate task sharing effectively, but also enabling the sharing and retention of knowledge. These integrated platforms that go way beyond sharing are still young and have a long way to go, but they are proving more user friendly and flexible than their predecessors thus gaining greater acceptance from the user.
It is not unusual to find a project team working together from several different continents, so that processes flow in such a way as to permit continuous advancement rather than just a single 8 hour slice, like a factory working on a full 3 shift system but with each shift in a different time zone. Such teams may be working on engineering developments, proposal developments, software development and testing, etc. The platform not only enables the current project, but also benefits other projects with the knowledge accumulated.
If your organisation has not yet come to grips with telework, perhaps you should think about leapfrogging that stage and looking at new work structures and methods from which the benefits of telework will naturally flow. You may never have a better opportunity to restructure working methods.
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