As there are two sessions are running simultanuously I decided this morning to go to the Human resources management practices.

The first session in the morning requests for telecommuting: exploring managerial decision making. As the authors were not able to make it to Canada, Wendy Spinks made the presentation instead.

The paper is a study of 65 managers in 6 organizations in 3 countries (NL, UK and Sweden). The conclusion is that managers are either very positive as well as very negative about teleworking. Howver managers still seem to prefer conservative approaches to management such as command and control.

The second presentation by Svein Bergum of the Eastern Norway Research Institute is called “Alternative strategies to manage non-dependent workers at a distance”. Svein looked at four variables that might improve the person-job fit: leadership, competence development, changing the job contents and organizational support in the public sector.

Svein talking about the problems managers of the Norwegian public road administration are facing regarding telework.
The last presentation of the first session by Martin Wielemaker and Andrew Gaudes is on diversity, conflict and trust. Martin talked about relation trust: in order to trust you need to meet this person. Once the trust is there you can move to a computer mediated relationship. He showed us the difference between functional and emotional diversity. In a next step a framework is set-up using a quadrant in which functional diversity versus a social cultural diversity will give an easy to understand overview to decide whether one should use a computer-mediated versus face-to-face meetings.

Martin’s excellent presentation.

The last presentation was by looking at Collaborative Visual Work Environments by the National Research Council Canada’s Institute for Information Technology NRC IIT  which is enganged in pioneering research on remote visual collaboration environments.

Here is a report and some pictures from the first day. My presentation was from 11:00 and I guess was well received with many interesting questions.

The session officially kicked-off with a breakfast keynote presentation by Brian O’Connell.

Brian, a president of IEEE from 2004-2005, gave a very interesting presentation called “Locating signals and noise in the study of social implications of e-networks”.

During lunch Dr Penny Jennet spoke about the use of technology in medical and health workplaces. Among the issues related to the project Dr Jennet is working on she gave some examples such as a physical activity monitor: a device that monitors physical activity of a person wearing the device on the ankle. To show people who are sitting most of their time at desks to encourage them move around more.

In the afternoon there were three presentation regarding Teleworkplace design. The first two presentations were given by Yamashita and Saji, students at Kyoto Institute of Technology looked at the design of space for virtual teams and ways to improve the quality and diversity of communication with the office.

Diana Limburg spoke about the role of design in the introduction of telework.

The last two sessions were by Reimi Suomi discussing the setting of goals of increasing knowledge work productivity.

and Yoko Kawai who looked at the City of Loma Linda’s IT infrastructure programme.

The Japanse town Kakegawa dedicates itself as a “slow city” promoting a slow life:

” Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the “slow life” principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind.

The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy. “