Adventures in home working

Scott describes his home office in great detail in this post.  I’m a little jealous because he has his own space (I have to share mine with my Wife and she’s not very tidy!) but we have a similar setup, although Scott has even more monitors than I do!.  If I had the office to myself I would get rid of Debbie’s desk and replace it with a reclining chair or a sofa for chilling out, reading and informal meetings.

I really appreciate it when people describe how they work and I think workspace design is often the most neglected area.

Chuck (from EMC) has a nice post on their behind the firewall experiments with social collaboration, and I particularly liked this quote:

One of the ways people can work together is around a document.  People contribute, edit, revise, approve and distribute documents, reports, and so on.

Sure, people are interacting, but it’s in the context of a specific document or task at hand.  As an example, it’s pretty hard to carry on a useful conversation using the “track changes” feature of Microsoft Word.

EMC’s Documentum implements a document-centric collaboration model around eRoom.  Microsoft’s SharePoint offering does something similar.

As a social computer, this is better, but we’re still communicating by pushing documents at each other, with some workflow around it.  Imagine if you went to a party, and the only way you could converse is by pushing a powerpoint at someone, who would read it, comment, and push it back at you.

That’s not the way people work together in the real world, is it?

Years ago my team and I designed a collaborative office environment,  everyone was co-located and the physical environment was carefully designed to improve ad-hoc social collaboration, without compromising personal productivity.  I still use this environment as my benchmark when I think about how far virtual collaboration has to go!

Mark Greiner (Senior Vice-President and leader of Steelcase’s WorkSpace Futures team) has a very interesting blog on a very neglected subject, at least in my view as  I’m a big believer in workspace design and have posted often on the subject. 

I was pleased to see Mark discover the book In Praise of Slow, I too loved the book and read it nice and slowly sitting in the sun on Blackpool pier a few weekends ago.  One of my habits is to walk the 6 miles to Blackpool and visit the Library in the early morning, pick any book that catches my eye and read (most of it) that same day and walk home in the evening.

Mark has some wonderful quotes in his post that talk to some of the current workplace challenges associated with speed and I wanted to share a few here:

Carl suggests that with the start of the Industrial Age, the world has shifted into high gear.  He calls it the ‘cult of speed’.  And it’s true.  Racing through traffic, twelve hour days, meeting-after-meeting, and Blackberry email into the night.  When you sit back and consider your life, it’s exhausting,… and depressing.  The author is not saying that every aspect of one’s life should be run at half speed. He merely is saying that for the health of our bodies and minds, we need balance.  Be fast when fast is what is needed, and slow when slowness is called for.

Mark heard about the slow movement at the Poptech conference where he also heard another speaker:

reference a renowned Computer Science professor at Stanford, who years ago completely stopped using a computer for email.  Asked why, this professor said, “email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things.”  I like that.  Trying to always be ‘on’ can turn you into a less intelligent person, as you never take the time to ponder and reflect

As I think more on strategic issues, I too find the need to slow down a little, and its convenient that this also happens to be good for my health as I explained in this post.

On the flight home yesterday I was thinking about how I manage my time, and relaxing in a Cafe after a long walk I thought I would jot down some notes.  First a little about me and my job:

1. I am currently in a vision and strategy role, but really I still love to get my hands dirty with architecture, engineering and particularly user experience and productivity issues.  Hands on experience is very important to me.
2. I work for 4 main groups,  within CSC.  The End user experience group that develops most of CSC’s desktop service offering, the server based computing and the collaborative services development groups.  I also work with our leading edge forum that does research into new and emerging business and technology trends.  In my spare time I often consult on bids and proposals.
3. I consider an important part of my job the coaching and development of the people I work with, no one works for me
4. I work from home
5. I work in a global role which in practice means working mainly with Northern Europe, North America and Australia
6. I have a wife, 4 kids and a cat and they take up a lot of my time
7. I have an auto-immune disease which I can control pretty well, but its does mean my health is pretty unstable on a day to day basis, limits my international travel and the intensity with which I can work.

So these are the principles I try and follow:

1. I leave a lot of unscheduled time in my diary.  This means I get a lot of flexibility in my day.  Many people I know seem to fill their diaries with busy work – often conference calls – which I rapidly stopped doing when I realised that on a lot of these calls I was adding perhaps 10 minutes of value and hour.
2. I work a very long, low intensity day.  I tend to start work at about 7:30 and finish around 11:00PM.  But within that day I spend time with my family, walking, swimming, meditating, business and pleasure reading, lunching with friends and even watching an hour and a half’s TV (generally 1 hour drama and 30 minutes comedy – which we always do as a family at 8:30PM).
3. I also typically do quite a lot of integrated work/life activity, listening to podcasts while walking/driving, watching downloaded or DVD copies of technical conferences while I have lunch, scanning my feeds while I watch TV, reading by the health clubs swimming pool while the kids play, working on my Tablet in cafes while gazing at the views and chatting over breakfast.  I fill odd bits of dead-times with email processing and phone calls on my Blackberry.
4. I don’t use a to-do list really.  I just decide what my top 5 or 6 objectives are for the week and my top 2-3 objectives are for each day.  I tend to leave "to do" items in my inbox (I email to myself) but otherwise keep my inbox empty (thanks to the Blackberry). 
5. I find forgetting about all the things I don’t have time to do – that seemed important when I thought of them but really weren’t – very useful.  When I used to keep a to-do list the backlog of stuff I never got around to was very depressing.
6. Although I have way too much to do,  I still buy extra holidays off CSC, so right now I get about 35 days a year and I have no trouble taking them all!
7. I invest a lot of time, money and innovation in my work environment and relationships,  I long ago realised that my idea of a good working environment was not the same as any of my employers but that if I was going to work for thousands of hours a year,  then I should try and create an environment that maximised my chance of enjoying myself

The benefits of this way of working are considerable:

1. I get to work on the important but not urgent – most days
2. I get to take advantage of good weather
3. If something urgent and important crops up I normally have time to cope with it without creating too much stress for my already stressed body to cope with
4. Most of the value I add comes from ideas and I have my best ideas when I’m not "working" so I do a lot of recording of voice notes or emails to myself while out and about, often after I jump out of the swimming pool!
5. I get to spend time with people when they need it,  rather than asking them to "find a slot in my diary" days later
6. I get to see a lot of my family, even when I’m really busy
7. When I’m in a flare, I don’t disrupt too many peoples schedules
8. I have time to dive deep into issues that capture my attention and explore them

There are a few downsides:

1. I have to make decisions about what to do most days,  which is not as easy as just jumping from one meeting to the next, or one document review to the next.  Making decisions can be hard work, especially when I’m not feeling well
2. I tend to do things that are difficult,  often requiring new ideas, challenging existing ways of doing things, stopping activities that don’t work strategically, convincing people to do difficult and often disruptive things that they don’t have time to do.  Difficult things are hard to do on bad days when I can’t concentrate for more than a few minutes or I’m dosed up on pain killers or sitting feeling sorry for myself with a Migraine. 

I refined this way of working using the books peopleware and slack,  but to be honest I have always worked this way regardless of the type of job I have done.

Over the last few years I have paid a lot of attention to improving my happiness at work and it’s certainly paid off.  But more interesting has been the impact on my professional activities.  I work mainly in vision and strategy for a large systems integrator, my focus is on desktop services, personal productivity, PKM, application delivery and collaboration – the stuff that people spend most of the day doing.  That means if I get it wrong end-users of our services are going to feel the impact for 4 or more hours a day! 

For me that’s a big risk and a great opportunity!  if I can improve the users experience of using these IT systems, reduce the frustration, increase the fun and engagement then I can potentially enrich the lives of around a million people, perhaps only in a small way – but it makes the effort worthwhile.  One of the reasons I write this blog is to try and do the same thing but for a broader audience.

Right now life is pretty interesting with the increasing acceptance of consumerization and work life balance and integration as important issues for enterprise IT.  And Web 2.0 service availability, virtualization and smart client applications are dramatically increasing end-user choice and freedom.  We also have much richer immersive experiences being provided by technologies like Ajax, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and Flash as well as much more use of speech and video and early signs of more immersive gamer like work experiences, for example Microsoft Surface. 

I can only see things improving as we see more people working outside the office, further integration of work and personal IT, more work/life integration, and richer IT experiences.  These tech trends are combining with a workforce that is increasingly comfortable working virtually and the rapid consumerization of Telepresence like collaboration experiences will free people to work from home without the isolation.

Finally I am excited about the gradual recognition within business of the value of a happy workforce, blogs like that of the Chief Happiness Officer are showing the way and increasing number of CEO’s are evangelizing the impact that changing their culture has had on their companies success.

This report provides a useful summary of the current state of happiness at work and this workbook provides some good tips if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the volume of work.

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

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!

One of the more interesting business trends is increasing mobility and how it will change many lives, it’s certainly changed mine allowing me to work from home, out walking, from cafes and restaurants and hotels.  So I was pleased to find this very interesting open survey on this critical dimension of knowledge work on this blog,  you can complete the survey here:

Survey :: http://tinyurl.com/sjsar
Password :: GMWS2006

Complete results are instantly available to you when you complete the survey instrument. It takes a scant 10 minutes. I found some very interesting trends in the survey results. Could you please share your responses?

Note: the survey summary is anonymous and does not include answers to open-ended questions.

I just saved the results as a PDF file and I will be having a good read through on Monday.

Readers of my blog know only too well that I love screen real-estate having 3 19” screens and I certainly would never go back,  what amazes me is the fact that the productivity benefits are truly amazing and yet are largely un-tapped by most businesses.  According to Microsoft Research you can expect between 9 and 50% improvements in productivity, which equates to an ROI of significantly less than 1 month for most people.  In my case these are the main benefits I see:

• I am more relaxed
• I am bout 30% more productive for about 2 hours per day and 10% productive for another 3 hours (I work a short day)
• I hardly ever print anything, in fact I have purchased a Tablet PC (TC1100) in 18 months just from the savings in ink cartridges, let alone the savings in time, space, paper and increased security associated with not using paper.
• My desk is paperless, meaning its much easier to focus, tidier and more productive
• I can manage interruptions much better,  instant message conversations can be placed in my right monitor while I work uninterrupted on my other two.  when I am sharing my screen in a web conference or watching someone else share theirs I can still have a screen for IM conversations and another for reference material or note taking.