The 12th workshop will be in Lillehammer this summer. I will attend and am currently writting my paper called: Why offices? I am writting about “the post-telework condition”. Technology makes it possible to work anywhere, anytime, and thus many people spread their time in client’s offices, in planes, trains, at home as well as in the office. Somehow it seems that we still need offices, but what is its role today?
I will investigate the changing role of the workplace amid the other confetti of transitional spaces people use as their working environment. In order for companies to attract and retain high quality staff they need to take this renewed importance of the workplace into consideration. The role of the office today is to act as a catalyst in company culture creation as well as team building, collaborating, learning, and knowledge sharing.

Here is a brief summary of the 12th International Workshop on Telework in Lillehammer.

Welcome note by Svein Bergnum
Svein started off the 12th international workshop on telework with the joke about teleworkers who travel from all corners of the world to meet face to face in Norway. He also mentioned that there was not as much competition to get the workshop to Lillehammer compared to Winter Olympics in 1994.

First keynote by Karsten Gareis (Empirica.com): The state of eWork in Europe. Whatever happened to telework? Change of names for more or less the same phenomena. EWork, eCollaboration, Telework, etc… Confusion about what we are talking about. There have been major conferences but most of these have discontinued after 2002, there seems to be a lack of interest by European commission. Telework R.I.P? People might still want to work from home, the topic is not off the agenda, for example in a recent article in the Guardian on Second Life, the idea of teleworking is being discussed as if it is a whole new concept.
35% of companies in Europe have technological possibilities for telework, although they don’t all use it.
8 observations (questions) on telework:
1. Work relocation to home environments? Alan Toefler discussed electronic cottage quite sometime ago, according to Toefler work should belong to the home. However, this is done very little, home has not yet emerged as a centre for work, but has become part of a whole range of different work environments. From an employer point of view and especially regarding career development, the home environment is not ideal. Knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge, learning environment, project -and teamwork is difficult to take place on remote locations. Managers prefer to keep a certain level of control.
2. Worker oriented flexibility? Yes, but very selectively. Business strategies pressure to increase productivity and workers have higher demands on job satisfaction. Outcome depends on the bargaining power of workers, demand of home-based telework. Not all workers have this bargaining power thus this part of the employees are not part of the telework pool.
3. Regulated improvements of working conditions? Hardly relevant. Little interest in most EU states. Was due to review in 2006, but nothing happened.
4. Taylorism is dead? No, 39.3 % of work in Germany (1998) is based on a Taylorist way of work. 24.4% of companies apply a post-Taylorist work organization. Call centres are examples of a Neo-Taylorist work environment, different skills are being used, but the majority of the work has features according to the Taylorist principles. Call centres in UK have grown 250% since 1995, 1 million by end of 2007.
5. Less control? No, key importance in times of volatility.
6. Work Life balance? Yes, but not as expected. Boundaries between work and family balance, email and mobile applications have become eroded.
7. Telework substituting for transportation? “Only when looking in isolation. Residential relocation seems to be not an issue, but when turning to the impact of ICT on work…the impacts on travel are unequivocally to generate more” (Patricia Mokhtarian UCLA) In EU transportation since 1995 has increased significantly especially if one thinks that this is the period when ICT has been started to be implemented in the workplace.
8. Technology not an issue any more? Tele-presence application, personally not so easy to use, still not like meeting face-to-face. Video conferencing that “feels” real as not arrived yet, however, improvements are coming up.
The role of research: More focus is needed. Home-based telework as an initiative for knowledge workers:
Work/life balance
Control versus self-responsibility
Virtual collaboration techniques and practices not sufficient.
Re-focus on telecommuting? Response to climate change challenge, incentives and regulations needed. Refocus should be on outcomes, rather than tools.

Stream 1C: Innovative organizational forms in the public sector:
Andrew Gaudes: A framework for constructing effective virtual teams.

Paper for the public healthcare in Canada in looking at utilizing more virtual teams. Research was done on Virtual Team literature, looking mainly at recent literature on the topic.
What are virtual teams: according to Webster and Staples: “a virtual team is a group of individuals that are working together in different locations. They work independently sharing responsibility for their outcomes.” Successful completion of a project, building of team cohesiveness, satisfaction among virtual team members.
Framework: input-process-output model. Second dimension explores virtual teams at each stage with a more systemic association. Looking at a matrix on the input-processes and outputs versus individual, team, leader, organization, project and technology, to show which literature is available.

Reputation is extremely important to me. When we are talking to prospective clients, I urge them to speak to my clients of projects that we have finished. Not only so they can hear how we, van der Architects work, but also to understand our process.

Today, I had the pleasure to take this even further a making a presentation together  with the client to an audience at JLL’s Executive Exchange seminar. Not just sales talk, but a real, case study.

Thank you Enomoto-san for this!

I will be presenting a case study at the Executive Exchange on Friday 20th at the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo. This will be the first time that I will make a presentation of a project together with the client.

Contact me for further information.

Tentatively set for 6th September I will present a seminar/workshop at the German chamber in Tokyo.
1. Why the office is crucial in leveraging staff motivation,
productivity and retention? General background on the importance of
the work place,
2. The issues that need to be taken into consideration to maximise
the office as a tool to improve motivation, communication,
productivity etc..,
3. WorkVitamins: a description of the methodology used,
4. Explanation of the Shared Workplace Vision exercise that
participants will use during the workshop,
5. Start Shared Workplace Vision exercise in groups of 5-6 people,
6. Presentation of the groups’ findings and reasoning behind their
proposals,
7. Q&A, discussion

http://www.dihkj.or.jp/

The website provides only Japanese or German info. The seminar will be held in English.

After 3 days of presentations, many keynote speeches and little time to digest all the information coming my way, my flight back to Japan gave me enough time to write some comments on the workshop. Basically it was very interesting flying all the way to Canada, particularly due to the mix of professionals with backgrounds ranging from biology to intelligence and law to landscape architecture, all who created unusually interesting points of view on the concept of telework.
The last workshop I visited was in Tokyo in 1999, at that time the focus seemed to be on the details of telework from a business perspective while in Canada, the theme has definitely broadened. However, I noticed a division of viewpoints within the conference. Brian O’Connell, a self-proclaimed “techie/geek”, and past president of the IEEE started the Workshop’s opening keynote presentation with a warning that an over-reliance on technology is leading to a dualism of ignorance in new technology and our faith in it. He suggested that engineers should stop living in the models that they build for themselves. Brian summarized his thinking by quoting P. Goodman: “Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not a science” and urged for the technological studies to integrate with social disciplines and use more reflective knowledge in their work. Mike Hollinshead picked up this line of thinking, and as a futurist he reminded us of the closed circuit of our ecological system. Mike painted a networked future for us with self-sufficient localities.
Some other presenters put more faith in technology and looked at issues where a technological approach could help to solve contemporary issues such as biological threats like SARS or the Avian Bird Flue. A presentation by Maya Hadzic on the creation of an anti-terrorist digital ecosystem seemed to look at bridging this gap, although it triggered a heated discussion.
Finally, I felt that some of the “old hands” of the teleworkshops seemed to be searching for a new perspective on the concept of Telework. Svein’s presentation: “Did telework fail?” or Reima’s presentation were a case in point. Svein mentioned that the term telework does not receive as much attention as it used to. Personally, I felt that telework needs a marketing revamp, as I mentioned above, the range of topics and the various professionals I met at the workshop was beyond what I thought of the concept of telework.

I mentioned to Svein that his question whether telework failed reminded me of the careeer of John Travolta. During the late 70’s and early 80’s Travolta was very popular but seemed to have a rather limited ability of acting. His great come back in Pulp fiction showed that John Travolta could do more than dance movies. Maybe that is what we need of the term telework: a shift or broadening of definition, looking back at the Workshop I feel that that is a definite possibility.

The last day of the conference. This morning we listened to a forum of the panel discussing the theme of this year’s workshop: e-Networks in an increasingly volatile world.

Wendy Spinks, chair of the International Telework Academy opening the forum.

The panel discussed various recent natural disasters and the response to these including the role of the networks, telework to this.

Shane Roberts making a point.

Andrew Gaudes, general chair and the organizer behind the workshop here in Fredericton introducing the final part of the workshop: the track chair reports. As two sessions were running simultaneously every day, the track chairs made a brief report of the various presentations made.

A big thanks to Andrew for making the workshop a success.

Svein making the announcement for the location of next year’s conference in Lillehammer in Norway.

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.