Adventures in home working

A couple of weeks ago I heard a manager say that employee morale was not a management issue, I hope I heard wrong, but I don’t think I did. 

To be fair though I don’t think the manager concerned really meant what he said and was in fact referring to an employees response to his remuneration was a personal issue.  Morale in contrast is much more than a response to remuneration and is very much a management issue.

I am not a great manager, however in my years I have learnt a couple of lessons about morale and the most significant being that individuals often tend to keep their morale troubles to themselves, sometimes grumbling to friends but not always.  I always found this really worrying because I know for sure that a persons peer group and manager can do a lot improve morale, if they know about it.

Over a couple of years my team leaders and I came up with a pretty good approach, which is worth sharing:

1. Each week everyone in the team (including the team leads and I) posted a highlight report to a shared folder
2. At the end of the highlight report they scored their overall satisfaction in the following areas:  frustration, too much work, too little work, skills, training, overall happiness
3. Our wonderful admin consolidated all the cores into a spreadsheet so that we could spot trends across the 30+ people in the team

I noticed some great benefits:

1. Everyone seemed much happier being honest in providing these happiness scores than they were with explicitly going to their team leaders directly, because they were concerned they might be seen as moaning
2. The team leads and I found that everyone understood us a bit better and the “what does he do all day” question never seemed to arise!
3. We explicitly defined the scores so that a person could indicate that their level of satisfaction required some intervention and how urgent that was
4. All the team leaders and myself scanned every highlight report each week and were very proactive and imaginative in addressing the issues, we were also much more relaxed about management because we had a great way of tracking team “health” overall
5. Very often we didn’t need to do much because when a person indicated an issue their team mates almost always rallied round and helped resolve it before team leaders got a chance
6. Team leaders shared the responsibility for everyone in the team, we often found that the best person to help address a persons motivation issue was not their direct team leader

I’m sure this approach isn’t in any management handbooks but it worked for us so I thought I would pass it on,  one point worth noting is that the issue was almost never money!

I recently found out that my company is paying roughly $6000/year per person for a desk at one of our regional offices, in one of the cheapest areas of the UK.  I was a bit surprised although on reflection I am sure its typical.  What really amazed me is that a company can spend so much on the fabric of the building and its basic services and then so little of the equipping of the workstations and shared spaces and design.

Given that the building fabric provides no differentiating value to the business, but that well placed investment in design and equipment can have a major effect on culture, productivity, retention, recruitment and basic happiness at work it seems almost criminal to me the level of neglect.

I have ranted about workspace design in several previous posts, but I was promoted into this post by a great article on the Joel on software blog that discussed how his attention to workplace design and culture impacts on the success of his business and as I have read about his approach over the years I definitely believe it has a huge impact.

One not so trivial example illustrates the point, buying your employees the best chair in the world probably costs less than $1/week but impacts every one of the 8 hours a day a person spend sitting on it.  The case for 3 monitors is even stronger.

My favourite approach though, when it comes to personal workplace investment is to give employees a generous allowance and let them supplement it if they want,  some people will really want a Blackberry and a Tablet PC,  others the best Workstation money can buy etc,  providing a supplementable allowance (with a few guidelines) allows employees to invest in accordance with their perception of need and in my experience everyone perceives this differently.

As a home worker I am eagerly anticipating my allowance being supplemented by the $6000 that my company is saving my not providing me with a desk

When my Arthritis is flaring I really struggle to concentrate,  I have tried a wide range of things to improve it including:

1. Meditation
2. Exercise
3. Work Variety
4. Stimulating work locations
5. Music
6. A couple of supplements that were recommended in “Making a good brain great“

I have made some progress, but not enough.  Just by chance last week I was listening to music set to random and some meditation music started playing, I rapidly noticed that my concentration improved, particularly the time I could concentrate for increased any my typing speed nearly doubled.  I was pretty shocked that music could have such a significant effect so I tried again a couple of days later and it worked.  I am now planning to build it into my normal working practice.

The strange thing is that my Sister in Law bought me this music last Christmas because she knew I had started meditating, but at the time I didn’t meditate to music and in fact still don’t use this music so it had just languished on my hard drive and it certainly isn’t the sort of music I normally enjoy.  However while I am working it seems to have a sort of hypnotic effect.

I had a quick look for the music online but failed to find it, however it sounds pretty much like this.

I have been running Vista RTM on my TC1100 since Sunday and it has been working very well,  I had one issue with the Smart Fetch process stopping, but this would have been transparent to me if Vista hadn’t brought it to my attention.

A lot of drivers are downloaded via Windows Update including:

1. Wireless network driver (So down try and do the install over a wireless network)
2. Wacom driver (so don’t get worried when your touch screen doesn’t work)
3. NVIDIA display driver

However there have been a few annoyances that are driver related:

1. No Qmenu
2. No hardware buttons
3. Sound is not muted when you insert headphones or headset, i.e. it keeps playing out of the speakers as well as the headset
4. No SD card support (no fix for this that I can find)

you need to download the following drivers:

1. Sound http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22542.html
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22582.html
2. hardware buttons
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/19713.html
3. Q menu
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22141.html

Extract them all, normally to c:\swsetup, and then right click on each setup program, pick properties and pick Windows XP SP2 from the compatibility tab.  I think one of the sound drivers will fail, but don’t worry it seems to get far enough to fix the problem (actually I suspect only one of the sound drivers is needed, but I didn’t have time to experiment).

I also found I had to do the following tweaks:

1. Some of the buttons didn’t work until I did the following, 
   1. Control panel
   2. Tablet PC settings
   3. Buttons tab
   4. Select each button in turn
   5. Click change
   6. Click OK  (this seems to assign the action, even though it appears correct already)
2. In my case my screen would rotate from portrait to landscape but not from landscape to portrait, I fixed this as follows:
   1. Control panel
   2. Tablet PC settings
   3. Display tab
   4. Sequence – change
   5. I just swapped the sequence round and saved it and it then worked fine

The final issue that I had was that Foxit Reader (an alternative PDF reader which is much faster and reliable than Adobes version) wouldn’t open in the browser.  Which I fixed as follows:

Using your favourite registry editor Navigate to

My Computer
|___HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
…….|___MIME
……………|___DATABASE
…………………..|___Content Type (thx for the headsup)
………………………..|___application/pdf <- click this key once

and then look in the right pane if there is an entry with the name
‘CLSID’ and its data set to {14E8BBD8-1D1C-4D56-A4DA-D20B75EB814E}
might as well make sure there is also an entry ‘Extension’ with .pdf as data

Hacking around trying to fix this problem I also got very frustrated by the fact that the file types dialog in Vista is over simplified but I managed to find the wonderful Creative Element Power Tools which adds back an even better file type associations editor but also some other amazing utilities.

I have been running Vista Ultimate RTM on my aging Thinkpad T40 and its running reasonably well, although it’s my third machine (After my Desktop and Tablet) so I am not a demanding user.  I had to do a bare metal install though as I didn’t have enough disk space for an upgrade.

The main issue I had was lack of power management which was caused by the lack of a driver for the ATI embedded graphics chip set.  The correct driver was delivered automatically by Windows update for Vista RC1 but was nowhere to be seen in RTM. 

To fix this:

1. Go here http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-41918 and download and unpack the driver
2. Go to control panel and pick “update device drivers”
3. Open up display adapters in the list and pick your card, right click and select properties
4. Pick the driver tab, select update drivers and then select browse by computer for driver software
5. Browse to c:\drivers
6. make sure you check the subfolders check box

This should install the XP driver, which seems to work for me, although I don’t play games, but importantly you can now suspend your Thinkpad!

Last night I tried to upgrade from Office 2007 tech refresh, to Office 2007 RTM and received the following error:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

The online read-me that can be found here, helpfully informed me that:

The Office 2003 Web Components feature installed with Office 2007 Beta2 causes the Office 2007 product to block its installation. Users should use Add Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel to Remove the Office 2003 Web Components, and then install the final Office 2007 product.

I searched through Add Remove Programs and could find no sign of the Office 2003 Web Components, so I installed Office 2007 and then downloaded, installed and un-installed the web components with no luck.

At this point I started searching around and found this article that explains that the error actually refers to the following much more comprehensive list of software:

This issue occurs if either of the following conditions is true:

• A beta release version of a 2007 Office program is still installed on the computer.
• A component from the beta release version of the 2007 Office suite or program is still installed on the computer.

You must remove all beta release versions of the 2007 Office suite or program from the computer before you install the original release version of a 2007 Office suite or program.
Additionally, this issue occurs if any of the following items are installed on the computer:

• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as XPS (Beta)
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer CTP1
• Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2 Technical Refresh)

Interestingly this list doesn’t mention the Office 2003 web components.

Anyway Office 2007 RTM still failed to install, giving the same error. 

Finally I came across the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, which I ran and discovered that Installer files were still on my machine for several of the uninstalled Office 2007 components even though there was no evidence of them in Add Remove Programs. 

After deleting them using this utility Office 2007 seems to have installed.

I have recently been thinking a bit about Enterprise RSS and getting frustrated by key features that seem to be missing, confusing or partially implemented, two examples being:

• Lack of unread status syncing between multiple clients of the Windows Common Feed Store
• Lack of support for basic authentication in the Windows Common Feed Store

I have also been thinking more broadly about security and management issues in general, so I was pleased to come across this post on the Collaborative Thinking blog which provided a useful list of topics to consider concerning enterprise RSS, my additions are in bold:

Security

• Ensure support for SSL and related authentication methods
• Ensure support for basic authentication over SSL as well as NTLM and Kerberos (which are mainly of interest in a Microsoft environment only)
• Some way to authenticate to RSS feeds that are protected by forms based authentication, common when enterprise portals are involved
• Browser add-ins should run “Internet zone” or “restricted sites zone”
• Require Windows XP SP2 Attachment Execution Service support
• Ask about block lists, content filtering, and handling of malformed feeds
• Outline how RSS enclosures are managed
• Require ACL’s per feed at group/user levels integrated via AD and LDAP
• Ability to encrypt the feed store and enclosures,  a lot of enterprise data is going to end up in this store, especially if enclosures are used
• I am also interested to see if some form of DRM could be applied to enclosures, with the digital rights acquired for the download user at the same time as the enclosure is downloaded.  I am concerned that enclosure enabled document libraries will result in very efficient document hoarding and resulting data leakage.  This may be a scenario that’s supported by Outlook and SharePoint 2007 IRM,  but I suspect that the common feed store DOES’ NT acquire the rights for the logged on user as part of the download process, which will make it difficult impossible to view the enclosures offline.

De-duping

• Assess how multiple updates to posts are handled and impact to read/unread marks
• Synchronization
• Check to make sure read/unread marks are managed across clients and devices

Storage

• Primarily a concern when feeds are sent into e-mail systems
• Potentially a compliance concern   

Network Utilization

• Assess download schedule management
• IE7 “salting” the interval (is it good enough)
• Is the RSS 2.0 Time To Live (TTL) tag honored
• Use of / support for Incremental feed updates (RFC 3229 (“Delta Encoding in HTTP”))
• Compression of feeds and enclosures

Management

• Ability to associate automatic feed subscription with LDAP directory group memberships, this really is going to be essential if feeds subscriptions becomes important to process compliance, e.g. a person gets informed when their Quality Management System is updated via a RSS feed.
• Ability to track usage

Personalized Feeds

• Not really an easy feature to implement at this time

Attensa and Newsgator seem to be addressing several of these issues,  but Microsoft and IBM don’t so it will be interesting to see how enterprises get on when they deploy Office System 2007 and Notes Hannover.

Standards Blog provides some useful information on the Workplace Office client.  The context is a series of articles looking at various ODF clients of which Workplace Managed Client is one.

I’m pleased to see that IBM are now picking up speed in their attempts to engage with their community through blogs and other direct to consumer communication channels which is good news as I have previously been a bit critical of their efforts. 

However there is still not much diversity of opinion.  In the IBM world there tends to be one information source and several commentators, which contrasts strongly with the Linux and Microsoft worlds for example where we see many independent people reporting the same thing and much more comment.  So its always useful see see independent posts like this, even if only the questions asked are independent.

For me telecommuting means I am able to work, so it’s wonderful and liberating.  I do miss the office though and the sort of team dynamics that develops only when you work with people day in day out for years.  For anyone contemplating teleworking I have only a little advise:

1. Live somewhere you love, so that you don’t get tempted to stay in the house all day
2. Meet up with colleagues whenever you can, I like to go out for lunch
3. Create a great working environment, one that you really enjoy working in – remember your employer is no longer in control and that this is a room where you will spend most of your waking hours, so treat it with that level of importance
4. Put the money you save in fuel in the bank and spend it – without guilt – on improving your home working experience
5. Make sure you go into it with a positive attitude, it’s not perfect, but the more energy you put into making it so the better it will be
6. Don’t give up on it,  technology is moving at breakneck speed and the social down side of working on your own will rapidly decrease as high definition video, combines with high speed networking and multiple large screen displays

There are lots of books on the subject, but I recommend reading the comments on this post from lifehacker and this one from Joel on Software.

and no, the house isn’t mine!

Microsoft reveal a lot of useful info about terminal services improvements in Longhorn in this chat,  I can see myself making a lot of use of this on my lab servers at home as well as for customers:

Brian Madden has a lot of useful comments on each feature, my favourites are in bold.