future of work – Change Meme

20 April, 202117 April, 2021 Louise McGregor future of work

We All Work from Home Now

Like most people with an office job, which is most people working in digital, I’ve been working at home for year. At first I didn’t realise quite how long term this would be, and I definitely didn’t think it would be permanent – and it could be.

Late last year we were asked what our preferred work pattern would be, and I chose a “mostly work-from-home” pattern. My company has been very good about employees wanting to continue to work from home, but other companies are taking a different route.

Google is limiting its work at home option to 14 days a year, and wants everyone back in the office by September. Twitter is happy for people to work at home. Facebook is re-opening offices at lower capacity, with a plan to reach full capacity by about September. Barclay’s chief executive pointed out that it becomes harder to maintain collaboration and company culture if people are working from home. I hear people talk of being “zoomed out”, and it’s true that after a year of working from home and dealing with a lot of uncertainty we’re all tired.

I’ve been 100% work-from-home for more than a year, I had lunch with some colleagues last September but I haven’t had a face to face meeting with colleagues since 5 March 2020. It is, as the kids say, a bit extra. When I made the decision to be on a mostly work-from-home pattern I thought hard about what would work best.

Almost of my meetings are multi-location
I work with people with good digital skills
My direct colleagues and my boss are in three other countries so they don’t know where I am
I like to flex my work day to be available for calls to the US, so generally work to 7pm my time
No commute = more time for me
Location, I’m closer to good coffee when I work from home

The one downside, I’m isolated, I miss talking to colleagues face to face once in a while so I am looking forward to being together. And my real office is close to Schiphol, so extra convenient for emergency city breaks once we can have those again.

Lessons So Far

This has been a year of forced experimentation so what have we learnt?

Asynchronous for the Win

The in office meeting culture forces a certain structure to our day. But if you’re in an internationally distributed team (4 locations, 4 time zones) you learn to make that time difference work for you. My US colleagues now know that they can work on something to the end of their work day and hand it off to me to pick up while they’re asleep. We’ve got better at agreeing on a structure of a project, or a content outline, and working independently. We’ll email or message each other frequently, and come together only towards the end to workshop the final product.

This requires knowing your colleagues strengths and being able to trust them to do their work. It’s meant that in some teams I’ve been able to halve the time to launch. It allows us to focus on the work to be done, rather than fit the tasks into snatches of 20 minutes between meetings. It’s taken a lot of the urgency out of projects, and yet the work is getting done faster than before. Long may it last.

Meeting Skills Matter

I suspect that the “zoomed out” feeling is a consequence of poorly designed meetings, and a lot of it would go away if we had better meeting skills
– make your meetings shorter
– specify the purpose of the meeting in the invite
– enable people to decline if they judge they don’t need to be there
– if the meeting is more than ten people designate someone to manage questions via chat while the meeting leader or presenter continues. The idea that anyone can interrupt with a question at any time sounds great – but it can be really destructive on productivity when 29 people have to listen a question they didn’t have.

One concern I have about continuing to work from home when others don’t is that hybrid meetings when most people are in the room and just one or two are online will become unbalanced – something to watch for.

Work Patterns are Individual

I’ve been calling my work pattern “work from home”, but the reality is that it will become “work from anywhere”. I’m fully planning to take advantage of cafes as they open up to get a different view of the world – and coffee. I hear there is wi-fi at the beach these days.

The debate how “work from home” vs “work at office location” is a false dichotomy. I think we can be more flexible than that in many jobs. We should be talking about work patterns for individuals rather than a single rule for everyone. It takes more focus from managers, more planning for individual work, but it could be a great step to a happier, more inclusive workforce.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

13 March, 202018 March, 2020 Louise McGregor future of work, Leadership

So We’re Working from Home Now.

With the COVID19 virus pandemic many companies have moved to more of their teams working from home. My company was encouraging it last week, then we got a message to take laptops home every night, and this morning it’s official; work from home.

This is in line with the Dutch government’s new policy of restricting almost all meetings of more than 100 people, which means all the museums, theatres and fun stuff is cancelled. My friends in the UK, Norway and Denmark report similar measures. So this is it for March, at least.

Productivity

Set up your workspace, not all of us have home offices that we can use, and with schools closing as well in some areas you might be sharing your workspace with kids, partners, and pets. Try to set up a work space in a quiet corner. Ideally somewhere where you don’t have to pack up everything at night and unpack it the next morning.

Get the gear, we’ll be doing more virtual meetings, make sure you’ve got the connections for virtual meetings and get a good headset. I just upgraded from the work issued option and now everyone seems so LOUD – kidding – I know where the volume button is. It’s also a set that is over both ears and reduces distractions from outside noise. My colleague is getting an extra screen to make working at home easier – we’re in this for the long haul.

If you don’t already know about the tools for working online now’s the time. Spend time learning the tools for online meetings and online collaboration. Look for innovative ways to engage people online, and think about the group dynamics if you are running meetings, so that everyone is active in a meeting.

Set your hours start work and end work at your usual time, or at an adjusted schedule that suits you. Stick to it. Publish it on your work profile. You’ll be back at your desk tomorrow to start all over again.

Comfort

Make your workspace as comfortable as possible, think about light and temperature. Think about the chair you use. I’ve got a simple desk in a corner that has a window but doesn’t get too much direct light, being able to raise my head and look out is good for my eyes and my mood.

Make sure your desk is set up as ergonomically as possible, that will increase your comfort level. This could last some weeks – no need to injure myself!

Put all your tools within reach, I’ve put an old fashioned tray on the windowsill which holds scrap paper, pens, my headset when not in use, screen cleaner and charger cables. It’s all on hand.

Something to look at, if you’ve got a dedicated workspace add something to look at. A plant, a photo from a holiday, something inspiring. I’ve got a piece of artwork done by a friend and a small plant.

Sanity

Work is social, so chat to your colleagues. Use IMs, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams whatever tool your company is good with and keep in touch with your colleagues. Try having a virtual lunch break or virtual coffee break. This goes double for managers – check in with your team daily.

Shut down at the end of the day. I work later hours to fit in with my colleagues in the US and there is a temptation to keep working on their time zone. I’m lucky to have a dedicated space to work in so I don’t have to pack everything away, but it’s important to shut down my work computer, close the office and step away from my desk. If your work table is also the dining table put everything away and out of sight to make a psychological separation from work.

Move, ideally by going outside but that might not be possible in all places. Close the curtains, turn up the music and dance. Find yoga videos on YouTube. Pull that Wii out of the attic and set it up again. Whatever it takes, moving will improve your mood.

Make Jokes, it seems really ridiculous but it’s really important. This semi-quarantine situation is stressful and people can feel afraid or isolated. Maintaining a sense of humour about it is a way to relieve some of that stress. Added bonus, the jokes don’t even have to be good.

If setting this up seems like a lot of work, all I can say is we could be doing this for a while, and we spend a lot of our awake time at work so we should make the experience as good as possible.

Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

6 September, 20185 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Digital, future of work

Who’s paying for remote working

By 2020 72% of workers will be working remotely according to Microsoft, which explains the motivation for the partnership they’ve entered with Spaces to create a new workspace at Schiphol in their old office building. Many of us already do work remotely for at least part of our week. I can work from one of two offices or from home, I just need my laptop and wifi, in fact we have such good tools available that no-one would even know which location I was working from.

Remote working has been on the rise for at least the last decade, as tools have improved it’s even become a more productive option. But who is it good for?

Proponents of remote working schemes often promote the benefits to the employee, and they do exist.

saves on commuting time
more flexibility to manage personal appointments (eg deliveries)
fewer interruptions which boosts productivity
some report a boost to morale, or in HR terms, high engagement

There are also significant benefits to the employer,

a productivity boost
shrinking office space – for example companies calculate desk space at 0.7 desks per FTE

But work is social, and we’ve learnt how to work and manage teams in a social context, so what happens when some of that social context is removed? Is this whole hot desking thing really good for everyone? Not necessarily.

Anyone who has worked in a flex-desk office will recognise some of those issues, but smart design and good tools solves at least some of them. In my current company we tend to sit in teams of colleagues so finding each other isn’t hard.

So what about the real costs? Well there’s a financial saving for companies but are there extra costs for employees?

In a recent Buffer survey of people working remotely around the world employees bear the cost for internet connection and workspace if a co-working space is needed. So the financial burden of office space has been passed to employees, given that 28% of the respondents report earning less than $25,000 per annum this seems exploitative.

If we’re all working remotely when will companies recognise this cost to employees and start finding ways to compensate? Perhaps that will become the deciding factor for remote workers looking for a new job. After all if location isn’t a factor in a job search we can be hired by anyone, anywhere.

Image : money via pixabay

23 January, 20189 February, 2018 Louise McGregor future of work, Leadership

Collaboration

Wikipedia gives a long winded definition of collaboration, Google’s dictionary comes up with something simple; the action of working with someone to produce something. Its use has grown in our lifetime.

That upward blip in the use of the word at the end of the 1940s is due to the second meaning of the word; traitorous cooperation with an enemy. Some of the recent growth is due to the rise of social media and the experiments in new ways of working.

What is the benefit of collaborating in a team?

Better solutions.

In the theory of the wisdom of the crowds, the more people contributing to an answer the more likely you are to get the right answer. In effective collaboration a team of diverse experts bring their perspectives to decision-making.

In every major project I’ve worked in the contributions of experts from different fields has been critical to the solution’s success. I will never know as much as the collective knowledge across the company; here are a few examples.

Implementing an enterprise social media platform; its use as a service channel by a business investment team became the best use case collaboration to provide a service. I was looking for use cases, but didn’t even know the team existed.
Developing social media guidelines; we had legal and risk experts in the room, they had the deep expertise we needed to get it right, but it was a new hire from a non-digital team who pushed us to simplify the guidelines and the language.
Social Media Publication Platform; we had experts from IT, business, legal, and digital involved in evaluating possible tools. It sounds a bit like that old trope of six blind men describing an elephant, but in fact we had good discussions and agreed on the solution to be chosen, while understanding the limits and compromises we were making.
Translation; we translated some internal messaging via the enterprise social network, with contributors all using their native language and delivering the translated versions back within 3 days.

Collaboration can also provide additional capacity, if you work collaboratively you can share resources and even provide coverage in the absence of a colleague. Non-profits have been finding ways to collaborate under cost cutting pressure for years, but it can work within organisations as well.

How can you make collaboration effective?

Collaboration isn’t easy, and there is a lot in current workplaces that goes against collaboration. A HBR study reports that when teams get above 20 members, have high levels of expertise, are highly diverse, virtual, or are addressing complex tasks, the chances of effective collaboration drop. Collaboration requires trust across a team and a willingness to share knowledge, it’s easy to see that virtual teams might struggle, but the high expertise seems counter-intuitive.

Here are some factors to consider when building a collaborative team.

Executives model collaborative behaviour
When executives a visible and demonstrating a particular behaviour they will be copied.
Relationship focus in the company’s culture
Company cultures often emphasise a task focus, but in companies that emphasise a relationship focus teams find it easier to collaborate along the lines created in the company’s human network.
Clearly defined roles
Collaborative teams work better with defined roles and responsibilities, usually the roles can be derived from the person’s expertise, but it pays to specify the responsibilities. You can use a form of a RACI to document responsibilities.
Team results rewarded and celebrated
When teams have a strong joint purpose and are rewarded for the results of the team’s work their motivation to collaborate rises, yet most companies focus on individual performance and results. If you can’t re-organise your company’s formal reward system look for other ways to reward and celebrate teams that have genuinely collaborated.
Skills to collaborate
We’re used to working as individuals, we need to learn new ways of working for the collaborative era. Two techniques that are worth checking are Work Out Loud (WOL) and appreciative enquiry.
Tools to collaborate
Whether you use a company enterprise social network, a project tool such as basecamp, or a SharePoint team site, you will need some way for a collaborating team to share their work. If the team is dispersed across locations the tools become vital.

I’ve discussed the benefits of collaboration to the company, there are also benefits for individual contributors. For many people working collaboratively is more engaging and more rewarding. It’s also an appealing way of working for tech-savvy employees and millennials. Two groups your company should be trying to attract and retain. It’s a win for everyone.

Image: Together | geralt via pixaay | CC0 1.0

28 July, 20169 September, 2018 Louise McGregor future of work

Productivity in 10 Minutes

Here are some things that you can do to improve your productivity, each step will take 10 minutes or less.

(1) Find out where you waste time

RescueTime is an application that tracks which sites and apps you go to. You can set it up on all your devices and really track your distractions. Initial set up takes five minutes, but you’re probably going to need to fine tune the settings later.

Quick and Dirty solution; check the sites you visit the most from your browsers default page. If these aren’t your most productive sites you need to change your behaviour.

(2) Avoid distractions

StayFocused is a Chrome extension that will block your distraction websites for a set period of time. Wordpress offers a distraction free writing mode, and there are lots of other tools out there to create a distraction free work screen.

Quick and Dirty Solution; I use two browsers, I have all my work stuff set up in Chrome (across multiple devices) and all my “fun stuff” set up in Firefox. In work time I stay in Chrome.

(3) Plan and monitor tasks

There are loads of diaries on the market, and this range of free tools. There are as many theories as there are tools. I’ve tried lots of different online options, but I come back to a paper-based checklist. I break the checklist up by project, and then add tasks to my (online) calendar as timed appointments. It’s the planning the tasks into my calendar that is key.

Quick and Dirty Solution; I use a chrome add on that can time activities and add it back into the calendar – you can see it in more detail in an earlier post.

(4) Use the small moments

When you’re really busy there always feels like so much to do and any time spent waiting feels wasteful. Here are seven ways to use those gaps of a few minutes to improve your productivity. The article offers long term and short term fixes – spoiler alert I’m working on the long term solution for #7 in the coming weeks.

(5) Evaluate the value of what you do.

As Peter Drucker said.