Telework and other flexible working methods can help a young company avoid painful and sometimes fatal growing pains. I have seen many a successful micro-enterprise founder as it tries to grow, most often this is either due to the founder being unable to adapt to managing a larger organisation or the cumulative effects of infrastructure changes imposing constraints on company resources.

In the latter case the growth pattern is not governed by sales or staffing, but by infrastructure. The point is that moving offices is time and resource consuming, expensive, and generally intensely irritating for all involved. Although good planning and project management can significantly reduce the disruption of a move, don’t forget that the person responsible will be using their time and resources, probably to the detriment of other activities.

Some of the issues that commonly arise when the business premises are nearing capacity:

• Postpone recruitment until new premises are available.

A lack of office space means that it is difficult to recruit the people you want, when you need them. Trying to pack people into an already crowded environment is not a great incentive, and generally impacts the productivity of all concerned. Postponing essential recruitment until space is available can mean lost opportunities in markets and recruiting talent.

• Recruit too many new staff because space is available

The aftermath of the first issue. Having moved into a larger office, there is a temptation to be too lax in recruitment criteria which can result  in underemployed and unsuitable staff.

• Moving office can result in a 5% reduction in annual productivity.

Just consider the process of moving, even using professional movers. Preparing key papers and documents, securing key electronic data, finding lost items, resolving unforeseen infrastructure problems, and re-establishing a workable comfort zone. If something can go wrong it will, and if disruption lasts for less than 5 days you will have done well.

I have known fast growing companies that have been forced to move 4 times in two years, and the cumulative strain on business has been significant.

• Opening a branch office causes management crises

To exploit new geographic opportunities some organisations feel it necessary to open a branch office. This can often result in duplication not only of infrastructure but administration as well. The challenge of suddenly having to manage a team remotely can be catastrophic due to lack of experience with remote management.

Flexible working methods offer remedies

Cramped conditions are not conducive to productivity, so why not use hot-desking and telework for established employees and free up some real estate to enable the new recruits to spend their induction in less cramped surroundings. At minimum it will provide time to find the best possible accommodation for the future, at best it will enable a seamless path for expansion without the need for new premises.

]]> http://blog.worknouveau.com/2010/06/06/why-telework-can-be-a-lifesaver-for-growing-smes/feed/ 0 iculpin http://blog.worknouveau.com/2009/04/22/more-on-the-death-of-the-knowledge-society/ http://blog.worknouveau.com/2009/04/22/more-on-the-death-of-the-knowledge-society/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:45:24 +0000 Ian Culpin http://blog.worknouveau.com/?p=342 ]]> For those readers interested in this topic, I notice a new article on the topic on the BBC news site, Simulated brain closer to thought and the source project Blue Brain Project referrred to in my original posting.

The quote from Prof Markram is very telling

“It’s not a question of years, it’s one of dollars. The psychology is there today and the technology is there today. It’s a matter of if society wants this. If they want it in 10 years, they’ll have it in 10 years. If they want it in 1000 years, we can wait.”

Home environments can be unsuitable for several reasons:

1. A simple lack of space.
   The kitchen table may be good for a couple of hours but not as a permanent environment.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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:

• http://www.sharemyspace.co.uk/

• http://www.deskspacegenie.co.uk/

• http://www.sharemyoffice.co.uk/

• http://www.shareyouroffice.com/ – USA

If anyone know of other sites around the world offering similar services, or have experience of using them,  do let me know.

Perhaps it is just me and the fact that I am fond of British humour and recognise them more easily than I would American, French or Dutch humorists. On the other side I don’t notice that many performers from other genres, theatre or music. No sign of Bowie or Jagger, and most of the rock heavyweights are missing, or perhaps they are  just lurking. So why so many heavyweight Brit comedic entities?

Perhaps it the nature of the comedy profession and that of twitter that match each other so well. The comedy professionals are probably involved in a wider range of professional activities than most (real portfolio workers), ranging from performances in clubs, major tours, celeb shows (quizes etc), sitcoms, writing, interviews, documentaries, movies, etc. Much of this is done solo, unlike rock bands that need a large crew to support them, so perhaps this means more time to research and communicate whilst on the move. The final possibility is of course that these individuals are more aware of their own “brand” and have greater control over it than the equivalent rock or movie star.

Of course personal branding has become a key feature of the social media environment, and is set to become more important as more of us move towards portfolio working, where a reputation is not built around a single profession, but rather around a personal brand encompassing multiple activities.

It is quite possible that my view may be totally biased by my interest in comedy. I’d certainly be interested in any observations or comments on this.

Click here for an access code to Microplaza (limited number).

Turning to Artificial Intelligence which has long been a favourite theme of Science Fiction, futurologists and technologists alike, we can add some spice. Ray Kurzweil is probably the best known of those suggesting that desktop computing power (if it continues to follow Moore’s law) will have the equivalent processing power of the human brain by 2029, although the ability to transform that power into true intelligence may lag behind. Nonetheless the last few months have seemed to be particularly active in this field with Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom publishing a credible  Whole Brain Emulation – A Roadmap, and IBM’s Dharmendra S Modha’s project to emulate a rat’s brain, suggested to the Singularity Summit that the project was positioned halfway along that roadmap, (Next Big Future) – with the rat-scale model being 3.5 larger than the previous work on mouse brain emulation.

It was estimated that a system 400 times larger than the rat model would be needed to emulate the human brain, with the most powerful machines currently available being able to handle models 10 times larger than those of the rat. With DARPA contributing  $4.9 million to the project, it is clear that this research is leading somewhere, and possibly faster than we expect, even taking into account the probable need for quantum computing to reach full human brain emulation.

This of course takes us towards Kurzweil’s singularity where machine intelligence will start evolving more rapidly by itself, and I question  what will happen to the knowledge society/economy when machines can accumulate and generate and create knowledge more rapidly and more cheaply than a human counterpart.

Will these knowledge machines be creative? Intuitive? Empathetic? Will they become the wealth generating engines replacing talented humans.  Will our values change, with personal knowledge being no longer being a key success factor?

We are talking of potential changes over the next 25 years, and remember that 25 years ago few believed the impact that the Internet and mobile technology would have on our lives and the way we do business. My guess is that these sentient technologies will start having an impact on defence applications much sooner than that.

Given that many policy makers and leaders still do not understand the implications of a networked society, what will they make of the post knowledge society, assuming they are still in charge.

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.

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.

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.

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.