Tag Archives: Productivity

This one is for those who think that work environment doesn’t matter

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As a strong proponent of giving people more control over where they work, it was only a short matter of time before I ran up against those who erroneously insist that work environment doesn’t matter. Their claim is that the only thing that matters is that you’re doing what you’re good at and that it doesn’t matter where you are doing this at. They don’t get it. If work environment really doesn’t matter, then the following clip from the popular film Office Space would not register as anything significant. What’s the difference anyway if Milton works on the same floor as everyone else or in the basement if work environment doesn’t matter?

The truth is that, for ages, we’ve relied on environmental cues for information that signal situations in which we should be stressed, anxious, fearful, etc. It is common knowledge that a room in which the predominant color is red whets the appetite moreso than another color would. Why do various colors stir up different reactions? What about acoustic distractions? Odors?

We ARE affected by our work environment though, yes, there are elements of subjectivity and relativity. This reflects our natural individual differences. Some of us perform work in dangerous environments, however people who are able to do so tend to already be naturally predisposed to react to threats with more calm (the trait “neuroticism” on the Big 5 – a measure of emotional stability and tolerance for stress or aversive stimulation). Others may even be pumped up by threatening environments and experience more of a thrill. I have, in fact, performed some work that required workers to have fairly low susceptibility to fear and would happily entertain opportunities to work as an animal field researcher in some less comfortable, outdoor settings (though perhaps not everywhere). At least it’s not boring!

When it comes to work that requires very heavy reading, writing, analyzing, and researching however, nothing beats the home office for me. A number of us, though not all of us, would agree that we are more productive working in our home environment than in a boring, stale office environment. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to say that going from working at home to working at the office is a “step down” much like Milton’s move to the basement. So instead of smacking the whole issue down with a knee-jerk reaction and waving off the importance of work environment across the board, it’s time to take the educated approach. Let’s open up discussion and debate about the ways and extent to which it does and doesn’t. To what extent do boring (or stimulating) environments impact our brains for example?

And for those who still believe that work environment doesn’t matter or, more specifically, that you should be able to do whatever it is you’re good at doing no matter what the work environment…

Uh, we’re gonna need to move your desk downstairs into Storage B… Uh, we have some new people coming in and we need all the space we can get. And if you could go ahead and get a can of pesticide and take care of the roach problem we’ve been having that would be great. (Office Space, 1999)



Finally, more videoconferencing dates have been added for “Innovating the way dispersed teams collaborate!”


Register at the Better Collaboration Meetup page and email contact@BetterCollaboration.org if you have any questions. Better Collaboration is about helping organizations improve collaboration of dispersed teams.


    

  • Wednesday, April 24, 2013
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  • Wednesday, May 8, 2013
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  • Wednesday, May 22, 2013
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  • Wednesday, June 5, 2013
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1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Eastern time (EST)/10:00 AM to 11:30 AM Pacific time (PST)


See details on the Events page.


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Work-Life Detours: Reflections on Yahoo’s Remote Work Policy Change

			
						

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English: Yahoo! headquarters
English: Yahoo! headquarters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


By now many of you have heard the news about Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, requiring all remote workers, regardless of where they live, to become onsite office workers or else quit. Even those who telecommute one or two days a week will no longer be able to do so. If you haven’t heard about this, here’s the story in a nutshell:







I don’t know, of course, the details of the situation and, much less, Mayer’s decision-making process when she chose to steer things in this direction. However I will say that, from an outsider’s perspective, moves like this one will damage the trust and faith of productive remote workers towards organizations that can’t take steps to resolve problems without yanking employees back and forth with changes in policy. Organizational leaders do have the prerogative to change their minds and take things in another direction. However extreme policies requiring hundreds of employees to suddenly uproot their lives and relocate so suddenly will have negative repercussions as a side effect.



Hopefully, the level of attention this news is receiving will open up the necessary discourse to instigate more serious inquiry into how to objectively assess employees’ productivity. As I detailed in a previous post, They need to see you there to know that you are working… Not!, serious investigation has not been happening! Visual confirmation of people arriving and leaving the office at certain, appointed times does not constitute objective assessment of productivity. Visual confirmation that people have spent nearly 8 hours at their workstation does not constitute objective assessment of productivity. Tracking and measuring results however, is the way to objectively assess productivity.



So you think that having employees work side-by-side and interacting face-to-face will enhance collaboration? Yes, a certain amount of that may help some come up with new ideas, although many writers and artists do this very well on their own. Moreover, anyone who’s ever been in a relationship before knows that too much time spent together can also cause friction, fallout, and unnecessary drama. Being forced to share the same physical space for 40 hours a week is a recipe for magnifying all the little, irritating traits and behaviors you find in your fellow coworkers. I’m going to go out on a limb by saying that more studies should be conducted on the impact of forced “togetherness” (according to time duration) on the quality of relationships with coworkers.



Often I have stated that the only way to guarantee that you can dictate when, where, and how you work is through self-employment, tough though it is to become established. I had been a huge supporter for clients who’re trying to launch their small business but, alas, I watched as some of them had to eventually give up and return to the 9-to-5 world. This news comes at a time when I’m also compelled by extenuating circumstances, for the time being, to focus less on self-employment and take up an employment opportunity beginning next week. It’s a good opportunity though, somewhere further down the line, I expect to keep chipping away at establishing a situation in which I can dictate the manner by which I work. I just figure this way I won’t have to be at the mercy of situations such as the one Yahoo’s remote workers are currently facing. For the movement towards accepting remote work options however, I hope that the overwhelming responses to Yahoo’s policy change will help turn this into a case of “one step back, two steps forward.”



Note to readers:



I’ll continue to contribute content 2 or 3 times per week and will soon make available a list of source materials that are readily accessible online. Also, look forward to future posts by guest blogger, Frederick Pilot, on the subject of work system transitional strategy and infrastructure.




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Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix it

			
						

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Conventional wisdom posits that the needs of employees and their employer are at odds with each other, however this assumption is not necessarily true. A mutually symbiotic relationship granting employees freedom and flexibility while increasing engagement and, hence, productivity is achievable! Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix it: A Results-Only Guide to Taking Control of Work, Not People will force you to examine how you think about work as well as how we unknowingly support the current, conventional view of work through the establishment and use of flexible work arrangements. Conventional flexible work arrangements, by the way, can’t achieve what a results-only work environment (ROWE) can.




In this book, authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson make a solid case for prioritizing and measuring results, creating a culture of transparency, trust, and accountability in the process. This means tossing out the misinformed notion that employees’ productivity is somehow correlated with the hours they put in. How is this misinformed? Just think about all the possible ways to stretch out work assignments or subtly fill in some of that time at the office with non-work related activities. Wonder no more about how workers in an entire nation can come to be known for pulling long hours and yet not be all that productive!


Indeed, Ressler and Thompson recount how naturally competition on the basis of being physically present for long hours emerges when managers don’t make results their one and only measure of productivity. The message: Treat employees like the adults that they are and allow them to own the work as well as the process through which they perform it. It doesn’t matter when, where, or how the work is performed as long as the agreed upon outcome is achieved on time.




Ressler and Thompson walk you through real case studies, providing a clear understanding of how their trainers facilitate the necessary culture change within the organization. For example, they explain why it is critical to:




    

  • Rethink and reestablish how everyone in the organization perceives and talks about when and where employees work (i.e, disregard whether an employee is putting in long hours or not, is physically present or absent, and early or late).
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  • Leave it up to employees to decide when they take time off, which means allowing unlimited vacation and sick days (as formal vacation and sick day policies must be managed and having a ROWE means that only the work is managed, not the employees).
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  • Ensure meetings are absolutely necessary as unproductive meetings are one of the biggest time wasters (practical guidelines are provided in the book), and make all meetings optional.
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Finally, Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix it shows how a ROWE is compatible with all kinds of jobs that’re commonly cited as being incompatible with a ROWE. This is my absolute favorite part of the book. For instance, they describe how a ROWE can be established for non-exempt employees (while staying in compliance of regulations that have been considered obstacles). Ressler and Thompson also describe how their trainers facilitated transition to a ROWE for an organization in the field of education as well as a public sector organization.




In a previous post, I’ve acknowledged individuals who stated their preference for the conventional, Industrial Age system of work and accepted their own self-assessment about their abilities and desire not to work under a new system. However, it is my hope that even some of the most reluctant among us will, at some point, choose to take the plunge and find out that the water is just fine! Ressler and Thompson’s thoughts on the human need for self-determination as well as their optimistic view that so many of us can come to enjoy working under a ROWE inspires this hope. Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix it is a refreshing, practical guide that will show you how all of this is possible.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
They need to see you there to know that you are working… Not!

			
						

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Any knowledge workers here ever pretend to work? Perhaps you’ve squinted your eyes to feign concentration as you gaze at that document you’re working on and, all the while, thought about what you’re going to have for dinner. People around you just tended to assume you’re working right? If pretending to work is new to you, head on over to Google and search “how to pretend to work” or “how to look busy at work” and you will find that some people have it down to a science. How did we ever get here? You can gain an understanding about the problem of measuring knowledge work productivity by reading GSA Enterprise Transformation’s Knowledge Worker Productivity: Challenges, Issues, Solutions (click to download).  As of the year 2011, the author explains (pp. 2-3):


… there is little movement in the research or application field of how to measure knowledge worker productivity and from there improve it. This gap arises partly because knowledge work is intangible and difficult to categorize in subgroups and partly because the existing productivity measures and performance review systems are rooted in ‘machine age’ organizations that are much more product and service oriented.


So, for example, it is easy to quantitatively measure the number of cookies that are boxed on a production line by a particular worker, or whether salespeople meet their sales targets, and in many of these instances the objective quantitative measure can be backed up by a subjective quantitative measure for example customer satisfaction scores.


It is much less easy to measure productivity that may have a quantitative output but which depends on knowledge worker input – a policy paper is a case in point. In this instance the process for getting to the policy paper is not reliably measurable in quantitative terms. It would be difficult to know whether a policy paper that took ten weeks to write was ‘better’ that[sic] one that took five weeks to write because the speed of the writing depends on the skills, knowledge, and experience of the writer.


… Looking for organizational best practice in measuring knowledge worker productivity does not yield much. There are surprisingly few studies on measuring productivity in the administrative knowledge-intensive services of large public organizations.


When I first encountered this paper I was shocked and outraged at how little has been accomplished to establish appropriate protocol for accurately assessing knowledge worker productivity. The next time I heard the words, “They need to see you there to know that you are working,” I responded, “During all my years of post-secondary schooling I’ve gone home from class without any professors coming home with me to make sure I’m working on my assignments. I’ve completed my assignments on my own, turned them in, and earned my A’s. Why does someone now need to see me in order to know that I’m working?” A long pause followed, and then he answered, “I don’t know.” Why indeed?


That’s not all. Allow me to also draw your attention to their findings on manager effectiveness (p. 4):


Managers who do not have the capability to performance manage remote workers are not likely to have the capability to performance manage on-site workers. Indeed, as the graphic [on page 4] shows manager effectiveness at performance review delivery is, across the board, rather weak.


What this means is that a manager who is not able to measure performance by results (which management of remote workers demands) will similarly not be able to objectively assess the performance of on-site employees. In this case, such managers rely upon subjective interpretations of what it means to be working (e.g., arriving to work on time and not leaving until the work-shift has ended). Thoughts on any of this?


See my follow-up post, A Looking Busy Coach! Plus, Who Pretends to Work and Why?.