I am very pleased that my recent article "You Have to Know the Territory" was just reprinted on ezinearticles.com:

http://ezinearticles.com/?You-Have-to-Know-the-Territory&id=6869621

Here's a brief excerpt that highlights what the article is about:

As we look ahead to 2012 [ev ery operational manager] is faced with enormous pressure to perform day-in-and-day-out (on multiple dimensions) while simultaneously designing and driving numerous change initiatives. You often feel caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place; it's not easy to split your time, attention, and energy between today and tomorrow, or among all the stakeholders who are competing for that time and attention.

But that's only part of the challenge. Every operational executive I know lives at the center of at least four critical organizational relationships, each of which has its own priorities, its own expectations, and its own challenges.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6869621

If you find the article interesting and useful, be sure to sign up for our free monthly newsletter (at the top of the righthand column right here], and then visit the Newsletter Archives and the "Articles and White Papers" page on this site for more thought pieces on a wide variety of topics that all focus on bringing the future to work.

I would also love to hear from you if you have read the article and found it either helpful, or somehow off-base. Please Comment here!
 

My good friend and colleague Paul Carder recently started a new "Careers & Jobs" discussion group on LinkedIn. In a few short weeks it already have over 1700 members. Need I say more?

It's an open group, and I encourage all FM and CRE professionals to register and follow the discussions, even if you are not currently in the job market. Here's the group link:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Careers-Jobs-Open-CRE-Facilities-4269106?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Paul is also building the group into a wonderful place to "meet" fellow professionals and share work experiences. So hop on over there right away and sign up.

Here's a bit of an overview and commentary from Paul, posted on the Occupiers Journal blog:

http://paulcarder.com/2012/02/10/oj-careers-jobs-2-10th-feb-2012/

Note: in the spirit of full disclosure, we at The Future of Work...unlimited are investors and partners in Occupiers Journal Ltd. (website under construction), about which I'll say more in the near future.

We welcome comments from anyone on any blog post; we want to generate active, meaningful dialogue about issues related to the future of work, the workforce, and the workplace. However, we will not approve blatantly commercial comments, and we reserve the right to edit submitted comments to ensure mutual respect and remove commercial promotions.

Jim continually brings a fresh perspective on the changing nature of work. A passionate collaborator, Jim applies his skills as a futurist with his clients discovering ways for them to better leverage talent.

9 AM Pacific Standard Time

Free, but advance registration is required. 

The February 10, 2012,  one-h0ur “open mike” conference call focused on the changing nature of work, the workforce, and the workplace is already oversubscribed.

So I am pleased to announce that we have scheduled a second conversation on March 8

There is no charge to participate, but the conversation will be open only to the the first 15  people who register to participate. We are limiting the number of participants to ensure that it becomes an active, meaningful conversation rather than a one-way “pontification.”

Jim will begin the session with some very brief comments about how to “take charge” of the future, and then moderate a loosely structured conversation that engages all the participants in a collaborative exchange of ideas and experiences.

Our goals are simple:  to stimulate learning, to develop insights, and to begin building an active community of workplace/workforce futurists.

To register, please send an email directly to Jim Ware. We will reply with a confidential call-in number (regular long-distance rates will apply).

We also offer customized versions of these “on-demand” learning sessions for internal audiences. Contact us to discuss your needs and to explore how we can provide focused learning experiences for your executives, project team leaders, and functional managers.

"Short-Term Growth, Long-Term Hiccups"

Staffing Industry Review

January 2012

by Leslie Stevens-Huffman

This article about employers' growing reliance  on contingent, or contract workers, included the following quote from Jim Ware:

“The migration of applications to the cloud and the growth of information-based jobs make it easy for contractors to telecommute,” says Jim Ware, executive director of The Future of Work Unlimited, based in Berkeley, Calif. “The advent of new software even allows companies to measure the performance of remote call center agents and customer service reps, so staffing firms need to start gearing their services toward the needs of distributed workforces.”

The full article is available online at this link:

http://www.staffingindustry.com/Research-Publications/Publications/Staffing-Industry-Review/January-2012/Long-Term-Growth

Jim Ware

I am frankly getting tired of hearing it:  “How can I manage them if I can’t see them?”

That’s clearly the most common expression of resistance from managers who oppose letting their employees work from home (or from anywhere other than the corporate office).

In fact, I am convinced the fundamental reason that many organizations have not embraced flexible work programs is that middle managers fundamentally mistrust their employees. I continue to see evidence of a pervasive and deep-seated belief that if an employee is “out of sight” his or her work will be out of mind.

For me, there is only one way to overcome that kind of basic mistrust: measure what employees produce, not how much time they spend on the job.

Working remotely and “on the go” is a fact of life in corporate America today, yet most managers simply do not know how to measure and manage the performance of remote workers.

I believe it’s time for managers to catch up with the workforce, and to begin managing remote employees outputs, not their activities. My experience, backed up by hard data, shows over and over again that remote employees are much more productive, and more engaged, than their peers who have to be in the office every day.

There really isn’t any deep, dark secret to managing remote workers. Reward employees for what they accomplish, not for putting in time or just showing up. In the end, what does a manager care about how much time an employee spends getting something done if he or she produces the necessary results on time and on budget?

Let me say it one more time: there is no real need to know what employees are doing on a minute-by-minute basis; what matters is what they produce.

Just think about your own experience as a college student. How often did your professors ever dictate where you should read the homework assignment, or when you should write that term paper? The only times we had to be at a particular place at a specific time was to take an exam.

That’s what I mean by measuring (and rewarding) outcomes, not activities. And whether your professor trusted you or not, your grades were (usually) determined by the quality of your term paper, or your performance on the exams, not by how many hours you spent on the paper or how polite you were, or how nicely you were dressed, when you came to class (if you came at all!).

Developing Outcomes-Based Measures

Developing a results-oriented performance management system is the single most important thing you can do to keep remote employees aligned with company goals and with each other.

Formal performance and productivity measures serve several important functions:

• They establish clear guidelines and common expectations about how each remote employee will be measured and rewarded.
• They help team members stay narrowly focused on their assigned tasks.
• They help create an atmosphere of accountability in both directions and across the organization.
• They provide senior management with clear evidence of how cost-effective (or not) the remote work arrangements are.
• They help shift the dominant management culture from managing time spent on tasks to managing the results produced.

“Managing by walking around,” which was a common rule of thumb in the ‘80s and ‘90s, has some common-sense appeal in that it encourages managers to be visible and to interact regularly with their subordinates. In that context, however, “interact” always meant face-to-face communication (though in practice it also often included peering uninvited over an employee’s shoulder to scrutinize his or her work—and communicating all too clearly that lack of trust that is such a barrier to allowing employees to work remotely).

Clearly, that kind of interaction just can’t happen in a distributed environment. That’s why it is absolutely essential to replace such close monitoring of employees’ actions with a focus on their performance—the results they produce.

The best source of how to do that is the book Why Work Sucks, and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the leaders of the Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) movement (link is to description on Amazon.com).

You may have heard about their work at Best Buy' corporate headquarters several years ago. There, employees at all levels are totally free to come and go as they please, and to work wherever and whenever it makes sense for them—as long as they meet their performance goals.

Measuring Knowledge-Based Work

At one level, outcomes-based performance is easy to understand. But it’s far more difficult to design and implement a workable system.

Certainly some knowledge-based jobs can be measured on the basis of quantitative outcomes, or least appear to lend themselves to relatively simple output indicators. Software development managers have long used “lines of finished code per day” as a surrogate for staff productivity; call center and tech support staff have typically been measured on “calls completed per hour” and “average time to respond to a call.”

Higher-level, more complex knowledge work is much more difficult to measure. How does a manager evaluate the work of an automotive engineer whose car design won’t show up in the marketplace for three or more years, if ever? How do you assess the value of a research chemist in a pharmaceutical lab whose work might (or might not) someday lead to a billion-dollar miracle drug—but not for 15 years? How can you evaluate the performance of a project manager on a 10-year building construction project?

But that doesn’t mean we’re jousting with windmills. To be successful, be willing to develop customized outcome targets for each individual employee.

There are two basic questions to ask about every job:

1. Why does this job exist? What value should it produce for the company, or for external stakeholders? Can we identify a specific quantity, or an important indicator of quality for the job?

2. How will we know the job is being done well? No matter what quantitative or qualitative dimensions have been identified, an employee is only performing well if his or her customer (whether an internal or an external stakeholder) is satisfied that the job has solved the problem or met a need.

Ask yourself, “How will we know that Sheila has done a good job? If she is a claims adjuster, the right measure would probably be something like “complete a minimum of 40 claims applications per day”—or whatever number is reasonable in that company’s experience. For an in-house attorney addressing more complex issues, an appropriate measure might be “respond to 85% of customer legal claims within two weeks of receipt.”

Note that one reason individual measures are so important is that different jobs (and different organizations) have differing levels of complexity, interactivity, and time frames. Those differences, and the expectations that both individuals and their managers have about what constitutes success, are critical.

What do you think? Please send your comments directly to me or post a comment here. I look forward to learning from you.

© Copyright 2012 by The Future of Work...unlimited. All rights reserved

The Agile Workforce and Workplace: Flex Primer for the New Future of Work
By Karol Rose and Lori Sokol, Ph.D.
Working Mother Media, New York, NY (2011)

Reviewed by Jim Ware

There have been thousands of books, articles, speeches, and blog posts in recent years on how to implement flexible work. Some of those sources have even been useful. But The Agile Workforce and Workplace, by Karol Rose and Lori Sokol, is by far the most comprehensive, and the most practical, guide I have found to date.

As readers of this newsletter know, I have spent much of my career campaigning for flexible work. In recent years my focus has been on Alternative Workplace Strategies (AWS) and managing remote workers, but that is only because I believe there are very practical physical, social, and technological challenges that must be addressed to make flexible work a reality.

I have a deep passion about making flexible work a reality for millions of people around the world. Most organizations make terrible use of human talent. All too often they still treat people like interchangeable parts in some grand machine, and fail completely to take individual differences, and personal needs, into account. The result is a tragic waste of human capital and loss of potential productivity, to say nothing of the poor treatment of people and the prevention of work/life integration. It’s simply got to change, both for the good of society and for the health of the economy.

And that is why I recommend this book.

Rose and Sokol have compiled a very practical guide that is full of real-world stories, hands-on tips, and tangible checklists and worksheets. If you want to build the case for flexible work in your own organization, and then make it happen, you need to make The Agile Workforce and Workplace your daily companion.

The book was prepared for the Working Mother Research Institute, with active sponsorship from Cardinal Health, Merck, State Street Bank, and Novartis. It includes detailed stories about flexible work programs at Royal Dutch Shell, Pitney Bowes, Pepsico, McKesson, Proctor & Gamble, and many other familiar organizations.

Here’s what Ted Childs, Retired Vice President of Global Workforce Diversity at IBM and a long-time friend of the authors, had to say about the book and the importance of flexible work programs:

We need our leaders—business, government, and institutional—to be innovative in both their thinking, and their execution, in addressing the flexibility needs of their people. They must be driven by pursuit of the “What is possible?” question, and not satisfied with “what was, or is.”

This book is about helping them to have the mindset today to pursue the “What is possible?” question to facilitate tomorrow’s behavior—not because they are curious, but because they understand that doing so is a strategic, survival necessity, and because they realize that we have only scratched the surface in our flexibility dialog….Karol [and Lori] [do] it masterfully in this discussion of yesterday’s and today’s workplace, and marketplace, and in so doing tomorrow’s everyplace.

The book addresses flexibility from a wide variety of perspectives, including talent attraction and retention, technology, business continuity, facilities planning, employee wellness, legal and compliance issues, and assessing flexibility’s business value. In short, it’s a comprehensive guide that tells you not just why flexible work is so important, and so beneficial, but how to make it a reality in your own organization.

I am confident you will find The Agile Workforce and Workplace a sound investment, and a valuable companion as you create the future of work in your own organization.

What do you think? Please send your comments directly to me or post a comment online. I want to help you and your organization make flexible work a reality (and that includes an offer to introduce you to Karol Rose and to Flexpaths, her firm).

© Copyright 2012 by The Future of Work...unlimited. All rights reserved
 

Pushing the Limits on Workplace Design

Jay Momet of Leapfrog recently sent me a couple of links to some very “far out” workplaces.

The first, Davison International in Pittsburgh, is a series of “fantasy” environments that seem perfect workplaces for product designers (and that's the company's business). One area, called “Inventalot” is a medieval castle. Another is a pirate ship; yet another is a treehouse, and a fourth is a racetrack. The story was originally published in the Wall Street Journal. It was then picked up and reported by Yahoo!.

In this case a picture is definitely worth a whole lot more than words; take a look at those workplaces at this link:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/workplace-wonderland.html

I also posted a short note about Davison on the Future of Work blog, at this link (which also points you to the Yahoo story):

http://thefutureofwork.net/a-really-really-different-workplace/

The other place that Jay found is the corporate offices of Vocus, a software development company located in Beltsville, Maryland. Like Davison, this workplace is also a series of discrete enclosures built inside a large “warehouse” that provides shelter from the elements.

“Vocus Town” was inspired by New Urbanism; it is essentially a small "town," with a town square, a gym, a library, firehouse, a bookstore, and more. Take this short YouTube video guided tour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANEbkdVEHc

These two innovative workplaces may not be for you, but they work for Davison and Vocus. And while I don’t have cost data, I have to believe they were less expensive to construct and operate than you might think. Both are built inside large, open “boxes” that certainly cost far less than a traditional corporate facility would. And they must be fun places to work.

Orangutans given iPads, start Skyping each other

I’m not sure if this story is about technology, organgutans, or a warning to human beings about the dangers of technology addiction. And I’m not sure it has anything at all to do with the future of work. But it’s mighty interesting!

Does the Future of Work Depend Too Much on Technology Sweatshops?

This link actually takes you to a post on the Future of Work blog. I wrote there about a recent "This American Life" program that focused on the Chinese factories where most Apple iPad and iPhones are made—under abysmal working conditions.

Then on January 26 the New York Times ran a story about the human costs of technology, focusing on the Apple factories but including other high-tech manufacturers as well. Both are very compelling, and disturbing, stories. You’ll find links to the original sources at the blog. Please take a little time to acquaint yourself with what’s going on. It’s terribly important.

How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work

Those of you who know me know how much I detest bureaucracy. In fact, as I commented in my review, above, of The Agile Workforce and Workplace, my passion for improving the future of work comes from my belief that most organizations make very poor use of human talent.

It turns out I’m not the only one who believes that (actually I’ve known for years that I’m not a lone voice crying in the wilderness). A recent book by two senior McKinsey researchers, The Progress Principle (published by Harvard Business Press), lays out the way managers discourage and dis-engage employees, and offers some relatively simple guidelines for getting more out of individuals and teams (and offering them meaningful opportunities for achievement at the same time).

There is also a brief summary of the book and its underlying ideas on the current McKinsey Quarterly website (free registration required to access the full summary).

New Human Capital Issues Report

The Institute for Corporate Productivity has just issued a new report on current issues in human capital management. Among the findings are:

• The best companies are consistently increasing critical human capital capabilities while low performers are stalled.
• High-performance organizations are up to 7x as effective as low performers at managing some human capital issues.
• High-performance organizations claim effectiveness in some areas of leadership that are up to 5x that of low performers. High performers are also continuing to make further strides in the struggle for effective leadership, while low performers continue spinning their wheels.
• High performers are getting a handle on social media, human capital measurement and the changing nature of the role of HR ... issues that get completely overshadowed among low performers.

You can also download a free version of the Institute’s report on high-performing organizations at this link:

http://www.i4cp.com/file/media/the-five-domains-of-high-performance-organizations-2011/download