And so the flexible working fight hits the ring: in the red corner, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, banning home working, in the blue corner (amongst others) Richard Branson, extolling the virtues of flexibility in work. Ding! Ding! Round one…
There are an interesting number of paradoxes in this whole debate: the extent to which a home working agenda has been pushed on primarily a business cost-saving agenda rather than a business effectiveness agenda; how some of us are paid to work, others more fundamentally to be at work (for example, a paramedic doesn’t really have much option for being exclusively home-based); that the Taylorist thinking that has led to process-centric knowledge working that can be performed anywhere is unable to effectively quantify the serendipity value of people being in the same physical space.
That last point was brought home to me vividly last week. I was meeting with a colleague to discuss a particular piece of work I’m currently planning; in the coffee queue the colleague introduced me to someone else who, co-incidentally, was an expert in a product that I’d recently received some questions about from a customer and had been unable to find someone who could give me some direction. Serendipitous connections made like this in the physical office are terribly difficult to recreate in a virtual world.
The former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center John Seely Brown wrote in the past about the experiences at Xerox of moving their field engineers from being depot based to being completely remote. In the depot-based model, there was greatly perceived inefficiency as engineers sat around, waiting for jobs, chatting about what was on TV last night or the next football match. When they were moved to being roaming, increasing the efficiency in which they could be deployed to fix customer issues, their effectiveness dropped as it was found that as well as TV and football, they were also sharing war stories about particular customers’ issues. Without a home base, those stories were no longer shared.
The response to this has traditionally been to deploy “knowledge management” systems to address such information sharing challenges. I worry, though, that that misses the importance of the TV and football chat too; affiliation and sense of belonging is a fairly fundamental psychological need for humans, and a totally home-working world where we never have contact with one another leads to, I’m sure, huge inefficiency and misinterpretation as the technology to communicate becomes a barrier not a conduit.
In the same way, though, that technological advances seem to have left us with some significant gaps in our understanding of etiquette in the modern world, we also have some significant gaps in how managers are expected to lead, cajole and motivate in organisations in which the workforce is significantly dispersed. Ultimately, whilst having everyone in the office more often is probably a good thing, in global organisations where teams are geographically spread, the flip side is that if people can only work effectively face-to-face then global focus becomes extremely challenged.
So – it seems to me – we need a bit of both. And we need to provide better insight and training to managers and their staff in how to work effectively face-to-face and at the end of a wire. Very simple things like meeting structure, how to use conferencing systems effectively, and good ground rules for which collaboration tools to use when would be a good start on the latter.
mmitII 