Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
I've been exploring the role of deliverables in understanding and improving knowledge work for a while. In January, I took another shot at articulating the link in a column in the Enterprise Systems Journal putting deliverables at the center of the challenge of improving knowledge work.
Knowledge work does not produce standardized, well-defined outputs. Instead, the value of its outputs depends on how well they match the unique needs of their users. No one is interested in a spreadsheet full of someone else's data; no teacher is likely to value a copy of a paper you've submitted to another class. Understanding what aspects and features of a knowledge work product are most valuable to its intended user is key to focusing efforts on producing the desired deliverable. [The Fundamental Secret to Improving Knowledge Work - ESJ].
Our experience in industrial settings encourages us to look at the output as something that is already well-defined and well-understood. We focus on process changes that will produce the output more quickly or more cost-effectively. When we are doing knowledge work, we do better to focus on the deliverable longer and more mindfully. At a minimum we need to understand the user's definition of quality, the balance between uniqueness and uniformity that will meet this level of quality, and the conditions that must be met to declare the work done.
I just posted this note over at my own Future of Work weblog but wanted to share it with FutureTense devotees as well.
I am very pleased that several of the Future of Work corporate members (Forest City Covington, Agilent, Boeing, and IBM) and the Business Community Centertm concept that Charlie Grantham and I are promoting are mentioned in the December 12 issue of Business Week ("The Easiest Commute of All" - paid subscription required to access), now available online and scheduled to be in print on newsstands everywhere on Monday, December 5.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle carries an important story by technology writer Tom Abate ("Tech engineers fear U.S. is falling behind"). It reports on a recent survey by EE Times magazine showing that only 10% of American engineers are confident the U.S. will maintain its technological edge over time. The survey results are available online, at http://www.mcbru.com/news/insight2005.php. This isn't just about offshoring, however. It's also about the U.S. education system, which is falling way behind the rest of the developed world. And even if you live outside the U.S. and don't care that much about U.S. competitiveness, you have to be concerned about the state of technology innovation in the global economy.
I have been noodling quite a bit lately on the needed transition to action that online community building demands. Whether it be online communities of practice (associations, alliances, ventures), interest-based communities (dogs, Vioxx, Treos) or distributed work for one organization, I hear a lot about "listening" and "conversations" and "emergence" -- many of these discussions exhibiting a rather utopian bent. While there is still much to learn about those three topics, and many other related ones, it seems there is a lack of widespread debate about transforming all that listening and conversation into action in the real, physical world.
Now, clearly, in the case of distributed work for an organization, the people involved by definition need to produce something in the real world. But are they truly efficient in doing so? In the case of communities of practice (or the perhaps not-so-aptly-designated activist communities), how many of them have really made something happen? A change in behavior, a change in legislation, a person elected, a product designed and delivered, and so on. How many times have we seen a failure of expected result (ineffectiveness or impact failure) despite all of the buzz? Are interest-communities actually convincing people to do something? Do they need to?
I have observed and participated in online communities of practice, for example, where members spent a lot of time happily, kindly, politely debating ideas, but stumbled when it came time to step forward to take action. The activity of getting to action kept running up against strong roadblocks in the form of differing philosophies, reluctance or fear of leadership, the lack of time or commitment to take action, and so forth. Getting to action was (and is) often hideously painful.
I think one key is the design of a community. When action (and the rules that need to be put in place to facilitate this) is an afterthought, you can't hammer it onto a community that has only vaguely addressed it. When action has to happen, all of the hidden biases, struggles, vanities, egos, weaknesses etc. that have been glossed over during the listening/conversing phase jump into heavy relief. And the result can be disheartening and discouraging.
I am going to be digging into this subject over the coming months. If you have comments, examples, sources, and/or ideas please let me know. If you want to write about it in this space, please propose that to me as a guest author. I think it is a truly important subject that needs more attention as ever more of us work, collaborate and communicate online.
Charlie Grantham and I are are featured in a short interview column in the November issue of Fast Company. Our conversation with writer Chris Collier focused on the changing nature of distributed work.
Check it out - it's not the most profound thing we've ever said, but it's nice to see the stuff we all care about getting more recognition in such a great publication.
As readers of this blog know, Charlie Grantham and I (aka The Work Design Collaborative, or Future of Work) have been commissioned to conduct an exploratory study of the feasibility of launching a new industry association focused on distributed work.
We're well along in conducting our first round of interviews with interested and experienced thought leaders and leading practitioners. It would be premature to report findings, but I've picked up an interesting pattern that I thought might provoke some useful conversation.
One of the questions we ask each interviewee is, "What resources do you depend on for information about developments in distributed work?"
The answers have been all over the map, from naming specific market research firms and industry analysts to relying on personal networks of friends and colleagues. But what struck me this week is how many people have answered "Google" or "my RSS newsfeed."
Maybe that's not surprising, given today's technology and our increasing reliance on the Net, but I found it interesting that there don't appear to be any definitive or consensus sources (other than Future of Work and FutureTense, of course!)
So, other than Google, where do you go? What websites, blogs, analysts, or professional associations do you find helpful in sorting out trends, data, and conflicting perspectives on the future of work? I'm seriously interested in hearing from you. Where do you go? And Why?
Some interesting point-counterpoint on the relative merits of organizational scale, but I can't help but smile at the notion the 80+ employees constitutes "big." To me the more interesting question here is how low we've been able to drive the scale of micro-businesses such as 37Signals who are able to have impact and presence far beyond their size because they are able to operate within the largely open ecosystem that is the internet.
Clearly annoyed by all the attention on small teams, Mena Trott goes on the record to defend big (relatively speaking). I especially enjoyed her comments because she’s in a unique situation — she’s seen Six Apart go from 2 in a bedroom to 80+ spread all over the world. Her perspective is valuable and respectable. And her passion is clear.
Several weeks ago I posted some thoughts on what Charlie Grantham and I call the “ReFormation of Work” (Parts One, Two, and Three are available here, here, and here). I was pleased to see the reactions and comments that our admittedly “far out” thoughts stimulated. Not everyone agreed with us but we clearly touched some raw nerves.
In fact, we really do believe that nothing short of a reformation in management practice is required to cope with the changes that face virtually every organization and the entire economy these days.
Specifically, our experience suggests that your future business success depends directly on your ability to understand the shifts that are occurring and to redefine your workforce, workplace, technology, and business strategies accordingly.
The Work Design Collaborative (WDC) announced yesterday that it has received a grant from the Gaines Family Foundation to create a new industry and professional association, to be called the “Distributed Work Industry Association” (DWIA).
The new association will focus on developing industry standard productivity measurements, provide professional development programs for industry leaders, and seek to influence state and federal regulations that help or hinder the growth of distributed work.
The full story is available at the Future of Work blog (which is sponsored and maintained by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham, co-founders and Executive Producers of the Work Design Collaborative).
One of the most profoundly important (and disturbing) things about the Internet is that fundamentally no one is in charge. One of the individuals responsible for that design is David Reed, a computer scientist from MIT.
As far back as Jethro and Moses in Exodus, we've applied hierarchy to bring complexity under control. Many have characterized Jethro as the world's first management consultant. One of the reasons that hierarchy works so well in organizational settings is that is addresses the problem of information overload on managers, where middle managers serve to consolidate and route information through the hierarchy.
However, computers are not people and hierarchy is not the only, or necessarily the best, solution to information management problems. Reed, along with J.H.Salzer and D.D. Clark, wrote a seminal paper in the early days of the design of ARPANET and TCP/IP called "End-to-End Arguments in System Design" that laid out the reasons that hierarchical solutions were a bad idea in designing a network of the scale and complexity envisioned for the ARPANET. Those design insights were baked into the basic architecture of TCP/IP and are one of the core reasons that the Internet has grown as widely and rapidly as it has. If you hope to understand how the net and network thinking in general will continue to impact the future of work, this had better be one of your starting points. "End-to-End Arguments" is a pretty technical paper, although it is manageable; you might find "The end of End-to-End?," also by Reed, a better starting point.
More recently, David has been exploring other notions about how markets and technology interact in ways that don't necessarily mesh with our default assumptions. In particular he's done interesting work on why eBay and other internet companies have thrived but handing significant power over to their customers with the notion of Group Forming Networks.
Like other thinkers, the value of looking at what David is up to is twofold. First, the ideas themselves are powerful. Second, watching how someone smart tackles problems can give you insights into how you might tackle other problems more productively.
My last entry talked about the difficulty in trying to come up with a "one size fits all" productivity measure. I also promised to address how we measure "productivity" at Sun to know whether the company's getting more bang for its buck by enabling people to work from multiple locations. And isn't that really the point? It seems as if all the talk about measuring productivity improvements that result from a distrubuted work program is really just a surrogate for wanting to figure out whether the program is successful or not. So here's how we know:
1. We conduct surveys on the affected group(s) both before implementing a workplace change and 6 months after the change. We ask the survey respondents what tasks they typically perform and how long it takes them to do those tasks. The self-reported improvements are startling for both those that use drop-in or satellite offices and those that work from home:
- Drop-in/satellite office users report an average 26% productivity gain. In this case, the "productivity gain" is how much less time it now takes to accomplish the same task than prior to the workplace change. The number one reason for the ability to do the same task in less time: less distractions than in the primary office. Also, the people report increasing their work time by contributing 62% of the saved commute time back to Sun. So... the people are more productive with their time and they give more time to the company.
- Work from home users report an average 54% productivity gain compared to working in the office. Admittedly, this may be a bit skewed by the fact that a good chunk of the work involved writing reports or documentation, and this type of work is more quickly done when able to concentrate. The number one reason for the ability to do the same task in less time: less distractions than in the primary office. Oh, and the work from homers "gave back" 58% of their saved commute time (while a lesser percentage than the satellite office users, it's actually more time as the home worker commute time was typically far greater to start with).
So I promised in my last entry to give my 2 cents on how to measure productivity of knowledge workers. Wouldn't it be great if we had some magic metric that we could apply to see if it actually improves when people are allowed to leave the cubicle farm and work from anywhere? I'll tell you the bottom line right now: I don't have the answer. But I have learned a few things, and I can tell you about that.
1. Gil Gordon wrote a great summary 8 years ago called The Last Word on Productivity and Telecommuting and I think it's just as relevant today. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, be sure to at least read Section 3 on using Effectiveness instead of Productivity.
2. We've tried to find an answer at Sun, too - both to convince ourselves that the investment was worth it and to be able to show our customers what it could do for them (especially as we offer a consulting practice designed to help other companies learn from Sun's scar tissue in establishing its internal iWork program and to more quickly establish their own alternative workplace program with the help of our knowledge, processes, and tools). The tough part is: for knowledge workers, there is no standard measure that can be applied to everyone, so you end up wanting to measure something that's relevant to certain job functions. Sounds great in theory - let's measure all the software engineers the same way or all the sales people in a same but different way. In reality, though, there is no agreement on whether those metrics are even valid. A couple good examples of functions and metrics that we have looked at:
There's a great story in today's San Francisco Chronicle about telework, shared workspaces, and the power of technology to provide business continuity "insurance" ("Work is Where You Hang Your Coat"). The story, by Carolyn Said, features Sun's iWork program and uses Sun's support of a distributed work pilot at the City of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors being led by our friend Gloria Young. - jim ware [Tag: distributedwork]
After being on vacation for the July 4th week, I'm still catching up on my inbox. In between deleting spam and responding to folks, I read this Network World article about why every business should have a formal telework program, rather than an informal one, and must say I am in violent agreement. Of course, I may be a bit biased on this topic, as we have a formal program at Sun that does all these same things.
One thing briefly mentioned in the article as a business opportunity of a formal program, that I think deserves much more attention: the ability for companies to reduce the amount of office space they lease. How do you do that? Collect data on the work habits of the folks that occupy the space. If it's a normal office environment (meaning that the building has a good mix of several different job functions represented), I'd bet the people already aren't there 25-33% of the time. So if the individual spaces are empty at least 25% of the time, why not get rid of 20% of the floor space and furniture? And what do you do with the savings? Well, you fund the formal program, so it can, among other things:
- Implement the technology enablers for the remote workers, including an office reservation tool for when people are in the office
- Redo the remaining floor space to create more informal group spaces
- Develop remote management training for both managers and employees
- Make sure HR systems are measuring what people do, not where they do it
In essence, the real estate savings are the primary basis for the program ROI. Some of the savings fund the program office and the technology - the rest go right to the company bottom line. And this doesn't even take into account the productivity gains that will come from allowing and equiping people to work the way they want to work anyway.
Half Sigma commented on my last post to say that remote work is not a good idea, as client meetings should always be face-to-face and:
Work is not about doing the work, it’s about marketing the work. After all, we are moving to a marketing economy. People simply don’t pay attention to a voice over the telephone as much as they do to a person in front of them. If no one you work for is paying attention to you, don’t expect to get promoted. Don’t expect to accomplish anything that requires you to get other people to help you.
I don't believe working remotely, doing a good job, and making sure others know you're good are mutually exclusive. Even if you're in sales or direct customer support, you don't have client meetings all day, every day. And unless all those clients happen to be located right next to the office, wouldn't your time between meetings be more productively spent reading email over a cup of coffee at a WIFI hotspot than driving back and forth to the office? You can spend the face-time where and when required, but it doesn't mean you can't work remotely as well.
As for marketing time in the office when you ARE there - good luck finding others, because they're likely not there either. People working remotely (at least part of the time) is the norm today in most workplaces. Your boss may not even be located where you are (mine is 3000 miles away). Yes, it's much easier to work with others once you've met in person. Yes, you need to market yourself and your work. Yes, people need to be aware of what you do and the value you bring. The difference today is: we all need to learn to do it differently than in the past. It's not going to be a hallway conversation that gets spread by other hallway conversations. Maybe, instead, it needs to be an email to the entire team explaining this great new thing you developed, so they all know what you've been doing for the last few weeks. Being part of geographically separated teams is not going away any time soon. I figure it's in my interest to understand how to make that work best for me, and hopefully provide useful advice to everyone else along the way.
Well, according to Federal Computer Weekly, it's "employees who:
* Need little supervision and don't mind working alone.
* Have good organizational skills and self-discipline.
* Can be available, if necessary, to communicate with co-workers and customers via e-mail or phone.
* Have a place to work that is free of interruptions and offers a safe environment for government property.
* Live within commuting distance because they will probably continue to perform some of their work at the office.
* Are required to write or perform computer-related tasks."
I think they're right about every one except living within commuting distance. There's only 2 reasons why that would be necessary:
1. The right collaboration tools don't exist to permit effective remote meetings, or
2. Management still isn't comfortable with the fact that they would have to manage differently if they can't see you regularly.
And when you get right down to it, both of these reasons are false too. Unless you are part of a workgroup where everyone is located in the same place (and how many of those still exist today?), then chances are remote meetings and management are already happening. Maybe not perfectly, but well enough to allow people some degree of choice in their work location.
According to Office of the Future: 2020 there are 6 skills professionals will need to prepare for success in a future of increasing ability to work from anywhere:
- Analysis: Analyzing information and exercising good judgment
- Collaboration: Establishing rapport and facilitating team building
- Technical aptitude: Selecting the best technical tools and using them effectively
- Intuition: Identifying and adapting to the needs and work styles of others
- Ongoing education: Engaging in continual learning
- Negotiation: Participating in business discussions that produce positive results
While I find this to be interesting, I don't know that I'd call these skills, but categories of skills. To me, we need to much more concrete about the specific skills people need to have (or develop), in order to be as objective as possible when determining how much flexibility employees should or should not be allowed in choosing their work environment. We've done some reasearch on this topic in Sun's iWork program which I'll write about in a future post.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
