Jun 8, 2017
Welcome to a special episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast,
where I share with you my main reflections after attending the Work
2.0 conference last May 2017, in London and where I bring in the
thoughts and opinions of other attendees. Don't forget to visit
www.virtualnotdistant.com
Thank you too to everyone who very kindly agreed to taking part in this episode, it means that listeners get a much more varied view of the world of work, and it’s always great to hear different voices.
Work 2.0 consisted of the Future of Work conference and the
Wellbeing conference. I attended mainly sessions on the Future of
Work track – but I also managed to pop into a couple of sessions of
the wellbeing track. I won’t go into the content of everything I
heard, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the main
themes were.
The first thing that I noticed when looking through the programme
was the focus on Activity Based Working. Now, I hadn’t really heard
of this in the context of organisations, but it’s basically about
designing the office so that people can choose where they work from
depending on what they’re doing – the activity they’re doing.
https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/four-cs-teamwork
https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/favourite-tools
I really enjoyed the presentation by Dr Nicola Millard from BT who
talked about people needing to do four types of activities. Those
involving Collaboration, Communication, Concentration and
Contemplation. I love this last one, it really acknowledges that
part of our work is to think.
Dr Millard presented a few numbers, including the percentage of
people at companies who work from the office. Some interesting
differences and I’m very biased in the numbers I took down: UK,
48%; Spain 53% and Germany 61%. This is a similar distribution to
the recent Eurofund study on working from anywhere.
Another interesting number: 82% of high performance companies
provide anytime/anywhere collaboration tools, which also raises the
question, probably for the less high performing companies, do we
know what the tools are for?
And talking of tools, while I was wondering around the exhibition
floor, I came across the team from Sapenta, an ‘All-in-one’
software for getting work done.” , where they are paying attention
to Contextual Communication.
Guest segment: Colm Digby from Sapenta
Other stuff I jotted down in my notebook (thank you Podcast Website for the freebie last year at New Media Europe, by the way) :
Shoulder bag workers
Isolationists in a company,
Echo chambers forming around teams where there is no cognitive diversity.
Getting the balance right of We/Me; yes, we need people who are different, but there also needs to be some commonality, as we tend to gravitate those we can identify with.
The first panel session was around How workplace design can meet
the needs of tomorrow, and because it was in the main hall, it was
difficult to take questions from the audience, the whole audience
was there, so the organisers used Slido, www.sli.do an app where people can post
their questions and they are then shared on the screen, and other
people can vote on the question too. I’ll share some of these
questions with you in a second, but what I found most fun is that
it can quickly become the way in which audience interacts with
organisers or presenters, so at one point someone posted, Hey, we
can’t hear at the back. It was really quick adoption of tech to
suit the user, don’t you think?
Guest Segment: Paula and Eduardo from Schneider Electric
David Fano from wework.com really highlighted how we’re moving away
from the workplace as somewhere where we go to work and start to
focus on the place where we create relationships – this comes very
much from the coworking space point of view, where you go to be
with other people out of choice.
Technology has given us this choice and I’ll bang on another drum to say that Flexible working is not working from home – a lot of the time it is, because some people like that, but sometimes it’s about not working in close proximity with your team, but you might well be with other people. Or you might even be with other people inside your organisation, or with clients, but there is an element of choice in how or where you do that from.
It’s time to share a story with you – I was just going to share it with you myself, but I thought I might as well bring the person who told it into the episode.
Guest segment: Katharine Metters from Posturite
www.posturite.co.uk
I have to say, that’s the most extreme story I’ve heard about not
supporting your employees when you need to work from home. I would
have loved to know more about why on Earth somebody needed a
photocopy in their home to do their job in this day and age, or why
such person was being forced to work from home… Anyway, I hope you
chuckled, or cried…
Ok, let me share now a more thoughtful approach to designing how
people work, and a wonderful example of how tech can be used to
fuel that intrinsic motivation that lurks inside all of us.
Case Study from Heathrow’s Innovation Department on their Enterprise Mobility Programme.
Neil Usher, who was Workplace Director at Sky.
I really enjoyed hearing about taking into consideration the
diversity of the workforce, depending on the type of work they need
to do and how they go about doing it.
There was also a separation between different types of workspaces
that people might need access to: primary workpoints, like desk or
a teamtable; alternative workspaces, I imagine, like a café or a
quiet office from which to make a call; and ancillary spaces, like
amenities, place to eat.
Long are the days when everyone just has a desk at the office. In
Sky, there are 3,600 people but only 2,500 desks.
Guest Segment: Andrew Spence @AndySpence on Twitter
http://www.glassbeadconsulting.com/hr-transformer-blog/
The company we were talking about that does sound insulation and
other stuff is Echophon Saint Gaubin.
http://www.ecophon.com/uk/products/