There are some fairly unusual job titles out there now. Have you ever heard of the word 'placemaker'? [I can't complain as I call myself a 'work strategist'. Come to think of it, I rather like the way the word 'placemaker' is like 'pacemaker', it makes me think of putting the heart into place]. The title placemaker is used in urban planning and it really makes sense when you think of the village square or 'Piazzas' you find in Europe.
Read MoreThe social aspects of work are becoming more and more important to think about when looking at the mental health of people in the workplace. It's basic human nature for people to want to connect to other people. Sad to say, not everyone you want to work with will be working in the same place. And you might not want or need to be with people all of the time. There are different ways in which people talk about the idea of 'place'.
Read MoreThe evidence is out there that sitting too much is bad for our health, and even worse, too much sitting is "killing us", and so with our best interests in mind, we have been asked to get up and move around. But that does mean that those of us who use computers or tablets or our smart phones as a platform for work become power hungry. This is not an easy problem to solve sometimes. I'm looking for evidence that when businesses design or buy things like buildings or 
mobile technology, there is a decent understanding of just how much this influences people's patterns of work.
Often those of us who are professionally mobile as workers, consultants and the like, are hard pressed to find a power point when needed. You might have noticed there's a trend towards quietly removing them in public coffee shops such as Starbucks. I think one of the problems Starbucks were experiencing was that people would come in and stay most of the day and not buy enough coffee. There are people who have made arrangements with the owners of their favourite coffee shops that as long as they buy coffees with sufficient frequency, they are welcome to sit and welcome to plug in, but that doesn't mean all of their other clientele follow the same rules. People even blog where the best coffee-powerpoint combinations are. I've taken to going to small restaurants in the slow periods and having a meal.
There is another trend to make up for this. If you haven't seen the vending machines you can buy a device to fit your iPhone or other mobile to get that much-needed power boost, you soon will. Much like you would buy a snack if hungry after hopping off the plane or bus. Another option I've seen in an airport in the UAE was a pay-to-recharge station near the seating in the airport lounge and better yet, in the street at a 'charge bar' .
Each time I'm involved in a workplace design which seems to have too few power points, I try and negotiate a few extras, perhaps under the front edge of seating or perhaps as a power bay in some nook somewhere. In theory, designers shouldn't need encouragement to install them in buildings where there are formal mobile work patterns such as activity based work (ABW) but sometimes it's little things like the height or placement they get wrong. I spoke with the manager of the Virgin guest lounge in Sydney recently when I discovered that you could only fit the Apple rechargers at either end of the lounge and not in the middle because of the way the power points were set into the work tables. Or the walls. 
I've had the same thing happen on planes, happy that there is power, unhappy that I can't use it. I just switch off and read a book.
Now I don't think that batteries are particularly interesting, but I am aware of just how much influence they have on my ability to work quickly and effectively as I move between different locations. Innovations in the performance of our mobile devices and battery consumption goes will often heard first in the magazines of organisations such as the IEEE, not necessarily information that people from procurement will have when they choose what to buy for mobile work. So while we wait for battery performance to finally match our mobile needs, we become expert in spotting the humble, free power plug tucked away on the side of pillars, behind sofas and next to appliances - and hope for a better mobile future!
More and more, I'm struck by how much you can learn about someone and the way they work merely by watching and asking some simple questions. I can make an interesting comparison between what goes on in our household of two teenage girls when they are asked to create a simple reminder of something, and the "write on my hand" approach which Annabel Crabb, political commentator, takes for simple record-keeping. We worked out early on in the piece that neither of our children were inclined to pick up a pen and paper to to write something down. It's frustrating as a parent to see them forget things, but if everything has to be recorded on a smart phone, and that means having a smart smart phone, an expensive one, that either means paying for the right type of phone and apps, or living with the results of not remembering. Frankly, we are leaving that one up to nature.
Speaking about nature though, Annabel rights literally on her hand. I can remember doing this as a kid, but never consistently as an adult. I can sympathise with her when she talks about "those of us who have experimented widely with loosing every other potential repository for small but crucial pieces of information".
Most of us have experimented a little and found some of the options wanting. The phone with the flat battery, the inkless pen, the scrap of paper that can never be found again or at least not when the scribbled details are required.
There are other options. Voice recording a note, usually on a phone (another flat battery story in the making), sending an email to yourself, getting someone else to write it down for you, asking them to send you an email, the list goes on.
Let's return to Annabel's preferred option. She is after all, a journalist and words are her stock in trade. With the skin compatible pen, she talks about writing notes on her leg at a dinner party. Now this would not work with trousers or wearing stockings, and perhaps it is best suggested as a summer activity. It might also be a little awkward for guys unless they shave regularly. Going back to Annabel's strategy, apparently a hand mirror was not enough to read her script properly, and of course some of the letters rub off on the sheets overnight…
She does raise an interesting point though. How we capture an idea, a phone number, something we have to do on-the-fly says something about the idea of workflow and also our individual work styles. Once you look at the definition of workflow, even a basic one, it becomes obvious that the simple act of writing on your hand is a sign of a much more complex idea. Some of these definitions are really much closer to talking about the whole system of work, not just about recording an idea.
Is writing on your hand a sort of countercultural approach to technology? A bit like the slow-food movement. Or even the idea and have a phone at all movement. I'm not sure that people make this a strategy that they have thought through, or at least not thought deeply about. I do wonder though what the next step is in Annabel's capture system, perhaps she goes straight to paper, her phone or one of those note taking apps.
If you are intrigued by human nature, ask your friends and work colleagues this simple question: how do you write down ideas quickly to remember them later? I've created a simple survey. It's a little bit of fun but I'm sure the results will be interesting!
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.
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.
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?
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!
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 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!
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!).
No two people on the planet are the same. We need all the minds we can get working on issues we face together as humans, yet some people find it difficult to get traction in the workplace - their minds are quirky or a little different. We’re interested in cultural and cognitive diversity. Help us get the conversation going about making room for other minds and bodies in the workplace so we can support many more people to do great work that needs doing.
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