Work design has to be relevant

Some of the quiet time I have during the day is taken up with a look through the newspapers and, most importantly, the comic strips.  Dilbert is my favourite. Another is Glasbergen.  This is not a ‘time waster’, it is really another version of working ‘on the pause’. There is always an idea that I am tracking about how work is changing. The news articles help me, but not necessarily the people I work with. The jackpot is usually when I find a way to make a complicated idea about how work is changing more real for the people I write for, or for a presentation or workshop.  I’ve found stories and cartoons have the highest success rate, since other people are more likely to ‘get’ the idea more quickly and have a chuckle and remember.

Take the message that work needs to be relevant to the people doing the work AND the people hiring them to work. It makes sense that any design for work should suit both employee and employer, or the set up is not going to last. Something will break sooner or later.

Now the word relevant floats a bit, but this cartoon lands the idea it represents particularly well.  Or at least it’s one of the best ones I have found so far. The cartoon stands up for the idea that an employee has an obligation to their employer to be productive, even when other activities are more attractive. It shows that there is a balancing act and decisions need to be made in a way which leads to reasonable outcomes for both parties. This is an idea which is at the heart of the concept of work design, one which takes work design beyond its application in work health and safety and showing its value for delivering results for the whole business enterprise.

To work or not to work: working “on the pause”

The idea of working “on the pause” is interesting one. It asks us to be efficient in our work. On the other hand, stopping work even for a moment, is important as a way of recovering. Traditionally, advice for health in the office has always included things like walking to the printer to “take a break”. Of course, this will change a bit with the idea of follow me printing in activity based work. 

Knowledge management gurus talk about watercooler conversations, and how this helps people find out what’s going on. In the knowledge economy, just bumping into someone has value. Increasingly, it’s even seem to have commercial value. Many buildings are now even cutting into the floor plate to put in internal staircases so that people can not only see each other, but talk to each other when they’re moving around.

The idea that we work “on the pause” is at odds with the idea of “taking a break”. The right to take a few seconds, a few minutes to win some slack in the work day is a precious thing. Managers and other people who set up work should struggle with this problem a little bit because work is so mobile these days. Being available for work all the time means that we never have downtime. Maybe it’s more about having a choice, knowing how you work best, and choosing to work or not to work in a specific moment. So it comes down to being aware of your personal workstyle, including working at home and being aware of the different options you have for work in the workplace.

Does shifting to the coffee shop work?

People seem to feel rather than know how they want to work and are not great at explaining it. Take away something which is assumed to be a regular and ongoing part of their working world, something which is really needed. All of a sudden that thing becomes more real and more talked about. 

I’ve been working on how to explain how ‘work’s not working’ in presentations, so the concept of failure comes up often. Believe it or not, it’s hard to find good examples of what is working. Lots of hype, little hard, written, formal evidence of what is really going on behind the scenes.

The evidence of work not working is often visual or anecdotal. Take the move away from the humble cubicle for example. Activity based work in theory allows people to choose the place in which they feel they will be most productive for a particular task. They are then encouraged to move through a series of these places over the day.

If you take away ‘ownership’ of a desk, you’ll probably find people colonising a new spot. It might be that the new spot meets their needs better or worse than the old spot (their desk). A manager might want to know more about what that means to keeping the person and their team productive. If it’s a coffee shop that people shift to, then this is a hint that one of the new options is better than some of the others.

In ABW work environments, the kitchen seems to be a popular place to be. It's an 'inside the office' model of the coffee shop out of the office.

People who support working from a coffee shop as a ‘third place’ might something about what is important to keep the work flowing.

Could I have a skim flat white please?

The third space - not work, not home

Like many professionals spending time out of the office means finding places to be productive in between work with clients or when in transit. We all carry our tools of trade around - laptop, chargers, mobile phone are the basics - and then look for somewhere to sit.

'The third space' is a concept named by Ray Oldenburg in his book 'The Great Good Place'. His original concept included locations like the hairdressers, civic square and the coffee shop. Oldenburg gave 8 characteristics of the third place, the idea of it being a home away from home gives a good sense of what Oldenburg felt we want functionally from the spaces we find the fill the gaps in our 'out of the office' days. The ideal third place for the mobile worker is not just a seat near a powerpoint and a decent coffee though. To work well, the third space needs a few of the other ingredients which Oldenburg wrote about.

The main one is conversation. A good third place allows adds some creature comfort to the working day, but also allows us to reconnect with other people, at least as far as we want to.

Designers are including the idea of the third place into activity based work, a concept which is taking off in office design at the moment.

Which means if you are interested in how people work, knowing more about this idea of the third space might just be a good thing!

Ergonomics of new OS & screens a touchy subject in the office?

We've seen it coming and it's happening in an office near you. There is research about health outcomes where laptops are used as the only base for work in children and adults, we now also have touch screens on those laptops set to become more common with the launch of Windows 8. I bought a new laptop yesterday with Windows 8 and had a play. The salesman suggested that if I stayed with a model that didn't have a touch screen, I would regret it as the interaction is really designed around touch. Joe was right. The immediate experience was fun using touch and not so fun using the touchpad. If this is the experience others have, we are in for an interesting time as far as understanding the implications for work health and safety. Not only are the health outcomes of using a laptop full time poorly understood in the wider business community, the implications of adding a touch screen to the mix are still being investigated. I went to a seminar on gesture based input run for developers of Kinect and where the need for a bit of caution re reaching out for longer periods was at least mentioned. We have the opportunity for a whole new world of options for work design and a whole new world of discomfort from ways of work which we don't yet fully understand and can't measure well. Should be interesting times ahead!

Do I confidently understand?…. pick yes or no

Do I confidently understand the risks and hazards of the business or undertaking? Trick question. This appears on an article on due diligence and it should cause you come up with some of those uncomfortable issues you come up with when a consultant asks you ‘what keeps you awake at night?’

It’s only an occasional thing, but sometimes I play around with search terms on the web to see how many hits I get for terms common in an area but conceptually different. Let’s go old school and stay with OHS (occ health and safety), and combine it with complexity then compare that with OHS / management. I get roughly double the number of hits when the term management is used instead of complexity. Occasionally you do get management and complexity together and it makes for interesting reading.

Take a quick scroll through a presentation by Dunmire for NASA. Now these guys really are rocket scientists, and Dunmire says upfront that responsibilities need to ‘be real’. Looked at retrospectively, bad outcomes often make sense, but looking at the situation before the event, the interaction of all those factors cannot be predicted. That’s complexity. Dunmire also looks to incremental change, something which Dekker writes about in his book Drift into failure. Some of these incremental changes are not going to even be recognizable as each business day rolls by. Over time, yes, but not in the moment.

It’s going to be an interesting day when in a court of law, someone shows how difficult it is for an individual (person in control of a business undertaking or PCBU) to ‘predict’ an incident using the standard tools at their disposal. When money is getting tighter and tighter, the tools needed to ‘manage complexity’ are often thought too expensive. And THAT might just be why we lose the smart managers with a bit of foresight, because they can see the writing on the wall!

Good better best?

I have a love of quotations and sayings and am curious to see what people have hanging up on the wall in the office cubicle, on the fridge or even in a decorative frame for those who are really inspired. Go Dilbert!. One favourite of mine is by Samuel Butler 'Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises'. Perhaps the language is a little old world, but I think it still rings true today.

I was talking to an interior designer this morning who said that there are huge time pressures on fitout projects that really limit the amount of time they can hold back before committing to different parts of the design. That particular team had had positive experience on a recent project we had worked on together where the managers were good decision makers. The idea of 'Safety in Design' asks us to be risk averse, but as the risk of poor consequences of bad decisions becomes greater, the result can be analysis paralysis which may be bad for business.

The legislation now puts more even more onus on anticipating issues and managing them ahead of time. The problem is that it there is so much going on that you can only make sense of it often after the issue has occurred. We seem to be well past the point where the test of the 'reasonable person' serves us well as there is simply too much information to put together in a design scenario to make sure that all possible issues are anticipated and accounted for. 'Reasonable' works when looking backwards, but not so well when looking forwards. Taking a 'prospective' view is a complex challenge. There are some interesting discussions on the idea of enoughness which are worth a read. Food for thought for those of us who have tendencies to perfectionism (which my GP labels as an illness!).