Martin van der Linden, architect, engineer, CEO, inventor of the WorkVitamins methodology etc…etc… states in his Uncertainty Principle that: “It is impossible to create an office environment where each employee has both a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously.” Classical office design presupposes that exact simultaneous values can be assigned to all physical quantities, ie. a business based on number of people sitting at their desks. Martin’s Uncertainty Principle denies this possibility, the office, the work environment is, in Louis de Broglie‘s words, no more than a “macroscopic continuity resulting from statistics operated on the discontinuous elements that are effected by uncertainty”.

Symptoms: There is an uncertainty relation between the position and the momentum of the office employees and their work environment:

There is an uncertainty relation between the angular position and the angular momentum of the office employees and their work environment:

Treatment:

The first, and only step to treatment is really to understand the need of WorkVitamins which is based on the uncertainty principle: offices are not causally determined environments. It is important in getting treatment for the disease is getting a correct diagnosis. This is crucial to do this quickly because our WorkVitamins research has shown that the sooner you get diagnosed and treated the better the long-term outcome. In case of the uncertainty relation between the angular position and the angular momentum will depend on the creativity of the team to design a fluid, non hierarchical work environment.

Tokyo Syndrome describes the behavior of office workers who, over time, become sympathetic to their most horrible office environment. The name derives from a 1966 office incident in Tokyo, Japan. At the end of the regular eight hour workday, several workers actually resisted going home, and even refused to be paid overtime.
Symptoms: Captives begin to identify with their office environment, initially as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of going back home. Small acts of kindness by the managers or coworkers are magnified, since finding perspective in a workplace is by definition impossible. Telephone calls by family members are seen as a threat, since this is perceived as hindering their career within the company. Tokyo Syndrome is a survival mechanism. The men and women who get it are not lunatics. They are fighting for their lives. They deserve compassion, not ridicule.
Treatment: The treatment of Tokyo Syndrome, has two stages: first, the victims need to feel welcome return home. To do this they (a majority of the victims are male), need to cure their wives of the Cockroach Husband Syndrome, which in itself is a tremendous task. The second stage is the use of group therapy in which the victims should be helped to integrate both disassociated ‘sides’ of the work environment. The therapy should assist him in giving up his dream that the relationship will become what he had hoped it would be. Japanese companies, under pressure from governmental groups have introduced drastic and far reaching methods, the most radical being switching off the lights in their offices after midnight.

Desk envy: A new employee notices the strikingly visible and well-proportioned desk of a manager or senior executive immediately recognising it as the superior counterpart of his or her own little desk and from then on he or she is subject to desk envy. They have seen it, knowing that they do not have it, and want it.

Symptoms:
In desk-dominated organizations, patients displaying the symptoms of desk envy express a wish to take possession of a larger desk at any cost. Management within these organizations have learned to use this uncontrollable urge for a large desk as a motivational tool and have started introducing a variety of desk sizes within the office, while keeping the largest desks for themselves. To paraphrase Jean Cournot the thing about which there is most consensus in this world—much more than the notion of common sense—is the difference between desk sizes. Recent research has empirically shown that emphasizing the difference in desk size can become fatal to an organization.

Treatment: The cure is very simple by keeping all the desks the same size the organization will avoid desk envy. Care however should be taken not to make the desks too small as this might lead to a desk inferiority complex. Patients who suffer from a desk inferiority complex might catch, while visiting other companies, office envy.

Functionalitis is a very common condition, affecting up to 70% of the workforce in an organization. A sufferer of functionalitis is under the illusion that an office should have functional requirements only. Care should be taken when diagnosing the diseases as often the upper management including the CEO has been infected. The exact cause of functionalitis is still under debate, but it is believed that the roots can be traced to Frederik Taylor’s Scientific Management and Josef Stalin. (Stalin was admirer of Taylor and suffered from functionalitis, but in most books on Stalin his condition is called: a five year plan)
Symptoms:
The disease is extremely infectious and it will spread throughout a company infecting staff without discrimination. The sufferer will at an advanced stage of functionalitis isolate him or herself by creating a wall of boxes, stacks of paper and files. When the topic of removing documents, printers from the workplace is discussed sufferers will often violently oppose any change. Patients with functionalitis often have other types of mental disorders including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and substance abuse (usually excessive printing).
Treatment:
Only very drastic measures should be taken to root out functionalitis. Due to its high contamination it is useless trying to isolate individual patients. Due to it complex nature, functionalitis usually requires a comprehensive treatment plan including verbal and nonverbal communication about thoughts, feelings and emotions related to the work environment. Receiving support from the upper management and outside consultants is important because often patients with functionalitis are in denial and resist treatment, believing they do not need help.

Please contact us immediately if you think you and your organisation is suffering from Functionalitis

Yesterday I attended an ACCJ breakfast event, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of the Gallup Organization. An interesting presentation, first No Powerpoint, which was refreshing. The topic was Employee Engagement, and we were told that according to Gallup Japan and Singapore have very low levels of employee engagement.

After the presentation I had lunch with a few friends and one of them pointed me to this article in Yahoo news.

Some excerpts:

“LONDON (AFP) – French workers are the world’s biggest whiners, according to a study published Monday which said the Irish complain least about their lot.Britons come second to their Gallic cousins in the moaning stakes, followed by Sweden, the United States and Australia. Japanese workers have the lowest morale, but don’t complain so much.

The lowest levels of whining were found in the Netherlands, Thailand and Ireland, according to the study by the FDS research group.

“It is interesting to note that after France, Britain and Sweden, the world’s biggest workplace whingers are Americans, despite their having by far the highest levels of income,” said FDS chief Charlotte Cornish.

In terms of worker morale, Dutch workers are the happiest, followed by their Thai and Irish counterparts. The lowest morale of all is found in Japan, followed by Germany, said the study.

A few years ago Steelcase ran an add: “Revolution @ work” accompanied by a picture book / brochure written by Rowan Gibson. The book starts off with demise of the of the notion of work: “back in the 1970’s everybody sort of knew what ‘work’ meant. Particularly office work…But today, all of that is disappearing…Office furniture has to support a business environment that’s gone flexible, gone hyperspeed, gone mad!”

Gibson goes on: “The important thing today is to align ourselves with the social, technological and economic forces that are driving change. in other words, to belong to the revolutionaries, not the old guard.”

But who are the revolutionaries? Think of that great Monty Python film in which office workers are depicted as galley slaves who start a mutiny by attacking the management. What do you do to make sure YOU don’t belong to the old guard? When I was interviewed on a Singapore radio station last year a receptionist asked me what kind of WorkVitamins I could suggest for her. Receptionsits are the face of the company, but have a price to pay for it, most receptionists are sitting all alone in a cold, empty, big, big hallway. I told her to speak to her boss (he should try to sit there for a while and experience what it means to be a receptionist.)
Revolution (WorkVitamins-type!) to me means what Guy Debord wrote in 1961: “Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organisation must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation”.

Read this at Jim Roepcke’s blog:
” There are different degrees of freedom in a home-office environment. There’s working at home, working at home with flexible hours, being self employed, and being self-employed with flexible hours. Some of the benefits are exclusive to different degrees of freedom, some are easier at different degrees of freedom, and some aren’t possible.
I’ve worked in all these situations, so I’ve seen the whole gammit of good, great, and freakin’-awesome telecommuting scenarios.

No commute. Wearing whatever you want while you work. (Maybe nothing :-)) The extra sleep you get by not having to commute and pretty yourself up, or, the extra amount of time you get to work by not having to commute and pretty yourself up.

Your (hopefully comfortable) desk. Your (hopefully comfortable) chair. No cube walls. Your decor. When the phone rings it’s for you or your spouse/friend. It’s oh so quiet… or, maybe LOUD because you’re listening to you’re favourite music that the person in the cube next to you didn’t like, booming with the subwoofer turned up, or you’ve got CBC/BBC/NPR Radio going in the background.

No pressure to go out to lunch. You can eat whenever you want. Drink whatever you want. Hopefully not alchohol, but you’re an adult, be responsible.

Working your own hours. Some people work better in the evening. Some people work better at 2AM. Some people like to work a litle bit here and there, all day long, but not for one long contiguous period of time.

Deciding to go get groceries and run to the bank at 11AM when Safeway (and your bank) is just about empty (if you have flexible hours :-)). Or, at 2PM. Noticing how beautiful a Tuesday morning it is and deciding to play a quick 9 holes of golf, or go for a jog or bike ride before starting the work day.”

I have uploaded a short film I made about WorkVitamins on Youtube. Click below to watch.

Do you agree with the following statements?

1. The office is not a warehouse.

2. Work can be fun.

3. Privacy is a dirty word.

4. Paper does not grow on trees.

5. Grey is not a colour.

6. Forget about storage, buy a large rubbish bin.

7. Email is not communication.

8. Team work requires hard work.

9. The need for storage is a symptom of insecurity.
10. Being in the office does not mean you are working.

Neophobia, the fear of the new Wikipedia describes it as:

“Neophobia is the fear of new things or experiences. It is also called cainotophobia. In psychology, neophobia is defined as the persistent and abnormal fear of anything new. In its milder form, it can manifest as the unwillingness to try new things or break from routine. The term is also used to describe anger, frustration or trepidation toward new things and toward change in general. Some conservative and reactionary groups are often described as neophobic, in their attempts to preserve traditions or revert society to a perceived past form. Technophobia can be seen as a specialized form of neophobia, by fearing new technology”
In a time when all we hear and read about the need for constant innovation, renewal and change it is interesting to take neophobia into consideration. Wikipedia mentiones a book by Robert Anton Wilson called Promethues Rising, in which the author argues that neophobia is instinctual in people once they have become parents and raise children.

It reminds me of a book by Douwe Draaisma: Why life speeds up as you get older. Draaisma uses an example of a Willem van de Hull, a Dutchman who lived in the 18th Century and who wrote a meticulously detailed memoir. A histogram of recollections shows that there is a peak between the age of 15 to 25, a period in our life in which “events occur that shape our personality, determine our identity and guide the course of our life”. Does Draaisma’s analysis indicate that neophobia is a biological phenomena wired-into our genetics? This argument would almost render all the talk about change and innovation meaningless for anyone older than 25, married and with children.
British biologist Rupert Sheldrake takes a different view with a “Morphic field” in which a “certain group which has already established its (collective) morphic field, will tune into that morphic field. The particular form will read the collective information through the process of morphic resonance, using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through morphic resonance, a feedback to the morphic field of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database).”

Sheldrake argues that change comes slow but when it reaches its peak it is implemented with great ease. Examples used by Sheldrake include a study on birds in the Uk who learned opening milk bottles. The study found that when a certain type of new closure for milk bottles was introduced initially birds in a certain area of the UK discovered how to open these bottles, and that the method then was “discovered” by other birds all over the country. According to Sheldrake’s theory the morphic field is extending geographically through resonance. He acknowledges that the learning curve for things new is faster in children (learning to use computers for example) but still the factor of an increasing number of users adds to the speed with which the change is being adopted.