Offices are literally transitional spaces. If we calculate the actual offices occupancy for example: we find out that companies pay rent for their office space for:

8760 hours a year (365 days x 24 hours).

BUT

The occupancy is only 2080 hours (260 days x 8 hours).

This means a 76% non-occupancy level.

Isn’t it time to start thinking about alternative solutions for using the office after hours and weekends such as:

Allowing people to work anytime of the day. I often have to make calls to Europe and the US and most of the time I have to do this from home in the evening or early in the morning. Instead global teams could work locally in the office in different time zones. A truly global office.
Being able to go to the office anytime of the day would solve the “morning person – evening person” syndrom. No more grumpy people at the coffee machine in the morning anymore. An office adjusted to your own bio rhytyhm.

Johan Cruyff made the comment that in Spain all the 22 football players make a cross when entering the football pitch. He commented that if praying or making a cross would really help, as both teams made a cross all the football games should end in a draw.

In a recent article in the Scientific American it seems that praying to actually can have the opposite effect. In a $ 2.4 million research study it was discovered that there was no significant change whether there was a group of about 70 praying for the recovery of patients undergoing heart surgery or not.
However, when the patient knew about the prayer group this would create stress and his or her chances of recovery actually became worse.

“The patient might think, ‘Am I so sick that they have to call in the prayer team?'”

Scott Adams wrote this on the article in his Dilbert Blog:

“I have to say that I wasn’t surprised to learn that praying for sick people didn’t help. If praying worked, convenience stores would have lines of monks down the block every time the lottery reached $100 million.”

The Financial Times had a very interesting article in their weekend edition called Sweet Child of Mine. The article discussed the transition of the way children are being perceived today compared to centuries past. Children from the age of 5-6 used to work around the home, later they would search for employment in mines and factories, from an economical point of view “children made sense”.
Today “children are worse than useless. Far from making any economic contribution to the familiy life…they loaf around at school all day…”

The writer, Richard Tomkins, goes on that now that children “no longer generate cash, the whole of their value lay in the emotional gratification they brought”. Thus this shift has resulted in parents who approach child-rearing by being obsessivily worried about “health, safety and academic achievement”.

Even though parents “embark on a programme of enhancing…cognitive, motor and social skills…further learning, organized sports and cultural enricing activities…none of it makes a scrap of difference to the way the children turn out…[as] about half the variation in a person’s personality comes directly from their parent’s genes and the rest is shaped by the forces outside the home.”

So why post this here? What does this have to do with WorkVitamins? One of the fundamental issues regarding the implementation of WorkVitamins is a greater emphasis that individuals place on themselves, all of which have an effect on how we look at the work environment. Companies not only compete for business, but will increasingly compete for staff as well. Finacial benefits alone will not get you the best staff, but emotional benefits might. I see the shift between companies who see their staff as purely financial commodities to those who tread their staff as a sweet child of theirs. Thus the importance of the design of the work environment, the continuous training and the “soft” benefits.

On 22nd of June I attended an ACCJ event “Sustained innovation: knowledge-based leadership the P&G way” by Ravi Chaturvedi, president of P&G Far East. Mr Chaturvedi talked about:

“the P&G ideal known as “knowledge-based leadership,” a systemic, cultural approach to enabling employee fulfillment. Basically, it puts the power in the hands of the people, which allows each employee to control his or her own destiny and not be dependent on the hierarchical leadership in the company to win in the market.”

P&G’s basically hires their staff at entry level and trains them inside the company. Mr Chaturvedi told the audience that he puts a great emphasis on empowering his staff and creating an environment where work is fun. He mentioned the word “fun” at least a dozen times during his presentation. I spoke with him after his talk about WorkVitamins and mentioned the crucial factor of the work enviroment in being able to create a basis for the staff to have fun. “I had a difficulty convincing the architect about the colours of our current office in Tokyo” Mr Chaturvedi told me, ” the architect wanted to use black, white and grey, which I thought was going to make the office very boring. In the end we decided to use colours to make the place more fun”

People will come up with very ingenious solutions in the office, such as this picture I took at a client’s office. The owner of this office has hung his jacket on the glass. The jacket blocks the view into the room and it also indicates that the owner is in.

Privacy is almost always an issue in projects we work on. Privacy and the private office, associated with it, is often a status factor. Somehow the request for greater privacy has evaded the rest of the office as well, resulting in a maze of cubicles. In the movie office space we can see workers sitting in these 1.6 meter high cubicles communicating with each other over the phone, eventhough they are sitting next to each other. We have worked on a project that the staff described as “the silent office”. Most of the staff would read and check documents faxing the results back to head office, resulting that very few telephones calls were made. The office consisted of cubicles as the argument was that the work required concentration and privacy for all of the staff was needed. When someone had to make the occassional telephone call it felt like the whole office was listening in, creating a very uneasy atmosphere, “like a library” as one of the staff described it.

We got rid of the cubicles and went completely open plan and provided internal meeting spaces nearby that could be used for the occasional telephone call that requires “privacy”.

The Financial Times has been featuring various articles and comments on the effect of football on office productivity such as this one:

“Sir, You quote the Centre for Economics and Business Research as saying that the impact of the World Cup on UK productivity should be limited, since most of England’s matches will not be in working hours (“Analysts have a field day with ‘soccernomic’ predictions”, June 1).

However, we calculate that lost productivity could still top £1bn in value. We assumed 25 per cent of workers would follow the World Cup avidly, and that each would lose on average (say) 7 hours productivity through absenteeism, distraction, chit-chat and so on over the World Cup. At an average output value of £24 an hour (UK gross domestic product of £5bn per working day, divided by 30m workers, divided by (say) 7 hours per working day) this comes to £1.26bn.

Maurice Fitzpatrick,

Senior Tax Manager,

Grant Thornton UK”

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shows some resemblance to Herzberg’s. The key to motivation according to Maslow is based on the notion that certain needs require a basis for development. Maslow however extends the needs to 5 hierarchically ranked levels. In his book Maslow Motivation and Personality he describes a hierarchy of personal needs, a ladder (or pyramid) of unsatisfied needs where lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be. On the bottom of the ladder are the basic or psychological needs such as the most elemental biological needs like oxygen, sleep, water etc… When these needs are not fulfilled we might feel sick, pain or discomfort. Once we have reached a satisfactory level of basic survival needs we want to protect what we have attained, such as the security of a family and a home. Adults have little conscious awareness of this need except in times of calamity. Social or belonging needs are halfway up the ladder, people are collective creatures and will gather in organizations, bars, sports and work groups, etc…all needs to overcome feelings of loneliness or alienation. Identity or ego need is the need for self-respect, and includes status, recognition, attention, reputation, confidence, independence, freedom and respect from others. If these needs are satisfied the person will feel self-confident if not low self-esteem or inferior complex are felt. According to Maslow the ego needs are never fully met, which accords for the constantly setting of new goals to ourselves. The last need called the Self-fulfillment or self-actualization need is what Maslow described as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”, gaining a sense of accomplishments, reaching an individual’s fullest potential.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
1. basic needs: food, water, oxygen, sleep.
2. Security needs: family, home, job safety,
3. Social needs: group membership, feeling of belonging to a team, a club, friends
4. Identity needs: status, recognition, reputation
5. Self actualization needs: search for knowledge, esthetic experiences

These motivational needs and their hierarchical interrelationships are equally relevant in a work environment. (Figure 3) Even though the basic needs such as desks, chairs and air-conditioning in the office might be taken for granted, people notice the difference when something unusual happens, for example when the lighting breaks down or someone is assigned to a new desk that is smaller or bigger. The change will have a psychological impact on the individual.
Investigating these needs of the workers in their work environment we will find on the lowest ladder the office such basic items as the creation of an environment to work in, with a surface to work on, a place to sit and other technology required to do the specific tasks. Security needs include visual as well as acoustical privacy, the ability to store personal belongings and the ability to create a desk or space employees can call their own. Considering the time spend in the office, the social needs play an important part in the organizational culture. With increasing demand on teamwork and group based activities the social culture that the work environment provides and supports is becoming more and more important. Even though companies are increasingly becoming flatter in their hierarchical structure, identity needs such as status and differentiation still play an important role as a motivational element. Finally, employees look for self-fulfillment in their work. In selecting a company to work for people will look at the corporate values that this company has and judge whether these values coincide with their own.

All these needs can be found in an office environment as well:
1. Basic needs: (proper) light, temperature, desk size
2. Security needs: acoustical and visual privacy, storage, meeting space
3. Social needs: a feeling of belonging, office community, space for social gathering
4. Identity needs: Status, recognition
5. Self actualization: identification with company values, sense of accomplishment, branding

Over the next fews days I will write down a summary of some ideas regarding motivation. Let’s start with the Two Factor Theory by Frederick Herzberg.

Herzberg wrote 1959 a book called “The Motivation to Work” with research colleagues Bernard Mausner and Barbara Snyderman. The book is a study on 200 Pittsburgh engineers and accountants. It looked at the factors that cause job satisfaction as well as the factors that cause dissatisfaction. Interestingly the authors found out that satisfaction and dissatisfaction should not be treated as opposites. The opposite of satisfaction is simply no satisfaction, not dissatisfaction. (The Stones were right) Where managers would believe that motivation requires rewards, the book points out that workers get motivated and thus feel rewarded through the responsibility they can get from their job and the connection to their work itself. The main idea in the theory is the division between two factors: Motivation factors that lead to satisfaction and Hygiene factors that if not fullfilled lead to dissatisfaction.
What people want from their jobs are Motivation Factors:

Challenging work

Exciting place to work

Varied work

Promotion chances
Hygiene factors are the base for the motivation factors. These need to be present, but will not cause higher job satisfaction. Salary is thus not a motivator but forms the basis for motivation factors to start. Hygiene factors are:

Status

Security

Salary

Personal life

Company policy

This idea of a hierarchy of motivation factors is further developed by Maslow, discussed tomorrow.

What make peoples get up in the morning and (here in Japan) commute for one to two hours in packed trains? Trains with up to 400% over-capacity during the morning rush is the norm rather than the exception in most trains into Tokyo.

So what does motivate us to get to work? First of all what is motivation?

Wordnet gives the following description:

The psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal; the reason for the action; that which gives purpose and direction to behavior

but also

the condition of being motivated

And

the act of motivating; providing incentive.

Or

What I want,
Why I want it,
How I want it,

Pretty complex questions. As if we are asking ourselves this every day before we get crushed in the train. But we should ask ourselves these questions! Unfortunately most of us don’t.
WorkVitamins! At least you should go to work at a place that motivates! Who wants to be Dilbert?