OK, Mr Bean perfected the art of miniature golf, but this is pretty funny and would work in an office.

I will be speaking at the NCCJ’s BRT on New Forms of Communications. Here is the flyer. The presentation is on 14th February from 8:00 to 10:00 am, at the Deshima Lounge at the Dutch Embassy.  Register here

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."
From: The cluetrain manifesto.

Communication is a process of transmitting and/or exchanging information. Today, due to rapidly changing technology this exchange of information is reaching, literally, new heights. We only have to think of the rise of the use of email, blogs, social networks, newsgroups and chat.  The changes that the new technology brings with it is having a significant impact on the way we do business.  We will need to change the way we talk to not only our customers, but our subcontractors and employees as well.
Martin van der Linden, the Communications Committe Chairman of the NCCJ, will during this presentation show some examples of these new forms of communication technologies. Finally, he will present case studies of how these new forms of communications can have a positive impact on your business.

Svein Bergum: research findings and introduction to the topics of digital natives, and ICT for sustainable development

Rich Ling: Telenor R&D. Social cohesion and the use of mobile communication.
Sociology and the electronic revolution
The interaction of technology, society and social cohesion is one of the major projects of sociology. 50 years into ICT (transistor developed in 1947). Cities are still the same as 50 years ago, workplace same, education still the same. Not as big of a change as during the industrialism.
Putnam and the loss of social capital. There are fewer people (in the US) where people feel they can confide in. Social cohesion: people you can talk to, have dinner with etc… is becoming more fraid at the edge. That which holds people together. According Durkheim it is ritual. According to Freud ritual is obsessive behaviour. Durkheim looked at Aboriginals and saw that it is a mutual recognition that holds the societe together. A common mood. Often there are barriers of those who are not part of the group. Ritual is a catalyst for social cohesion. Most successful rituals are copresent. (For example dating and the use of messaging. Use email before and after the date. Mobile technology allows to extend the face to face presence.
Third parties bringing other people together like priests, rock musicians or politicians. Goffman these rituals are happening all the time, ritual is a continual part of daily life.
Face to face interaction is important. Mobile communications means that we call to people, not to places. We are able to have more continual and nuanced interactions with one another. Mobile communication allows us to play out rituals via mediation. Gossip is a ritual interaction, there has to be a common mood, it marks the boundaries between who is inside and outside of the group, it marks minor transgression of social norms, it is used in the way we work out power relations and it can fail.
Mobile communication can enhance the in-group solidarity, interaction is more frequent. Togetherness and outside “threads” help to develop local ideologies and enhances groupness. Increased mobile communications helps to create stronger social bonds. If there is too strong of a social coherence it becomes a mafia type of group and will miss out on what is happening outside of the group.
Mobile telephony and bounded intimacy.
Mobile communication is encouraging social cohesion. We are living is a quasi gemeinschaft society. Mobile communication is facilitating solidarity and cohesion within groups. Implications for business groups: team building cohesion on for example on a project basis, but up to a point when the project has been done.

The digital native and the future workforce: Marianne Levinson, Futurist and Chief of research
The digital natives: born in 1990-2001, large generation because of the revival of family values. Project, trophy and curling children (wanted children), parents assist them in any kind of matter. Not selfish, but individualistic: everyone has the right to fulfill their dreams. Be famous, it does not matter what (like Paris Hilton).
Huge circle of acquaintances: 4-8 close friends, 30-50 text friends, 100-200 msn friends. Each digital native has a huge personal network with people in different parts of their own city, country and some of them world wide. Have the possibility to send messages on regarding for example issues at the workplace to hundreds of people. Google everything, almost born to live online: news, information, shopping, chatting, download music and create their own music and videos, do all of this at the same time. Excellent digital skills, fast and adaptive.
Expectations to future employers: what’s in it for me? Want to meet different people, leaders, job functions and workplaces. Comprehension and willingness to understand the things that they care for, leaders that can motivate them and be their star. Companies are held hostage by talent. (Karaoke Business).
Give me a direction and show me that I do a meaningful job. I can always find a grown-up to help me. In a world full of information about companies and people, they trust their family and friends. Their trust will come from what their family and friends know about companies.
Digital immigrants:
Baby boomers (1946-1964)
Generation Jones (mid 1950-1965)
Generation X (1966-1979)
Generation y (1976-1982)
Leaders and challenges: Huge challenge to be able to motivate these different generations as their values are so different. Leadership will be more complex than before.
Generation of 2002: surveillance from birth, no distinction between real and virtual. Famous before they are born.
Google chosen as the best workplace to work. It is fun to work at Google, work and fun need to go together.

Peter Arnfalk: ICT and telework for sustainable development, Swdish National Policy. Telework for transport savings in the Swedish National Strategy for ICT and Sustainable development.
Sustainable development. Can telework support sustainable development? Potential: less need for passenger transport & office space. Reduced environmental impact. Hard to say that telework reduces transportation. Crucial variables differ: the definition of telework, the impact on transport. Environmental indicators: life-cycle impact or ecological rucksack: transport, infrastructure, housing, office space, life-style (food, clothes, leisure travel etc…).
Conclusion promote more sustainable telework arrangements, state should act as a forerunner, establish a telework policy 2007 for all state agencies, support a spill-over effect to the private sphere.
1998 ministry of employment in Sweden create a handbook (395 pages) on the implementation of telework, including the change of 2 laws. After this the environmental ministry during 2002-2004 including a workshop in 2003 with about 100 conclusions such as assessment of current economic policy framework, assessing initiatives already in place, more research on telework. After this the government’s IT policy looking into the problem as well.
Outcome: major labour policies have been removed, no support for transport, energy and/or Co2 saving effects.

Suggested measures for eco-efficient design of telework:
1. Make employers responsible for traveling and commuting,
2. promote policies for efficient telework

National status for e-Work in the Netherlands. Philip P. Todd, e-Work
The Netherlands still a front runner, over 25% of the working population involved in eWork. Stimulators for ework in the Netherlands:
1. Traffic jams
2. sustainability, CO2 reduction
3. HRM factors (labour shortage, eLife, recruitment, retainment, absenteism) When is a eworker really ill?
4. Main reasons for employees to eWork: work quietly, overtime…
Promote eWork: organize conferences, research projects, lobbying, eWork award.

Wendy Spinks: main findings from the workshop
Are we at a cross-road? Mature markets and new countries, not all at the same level.
The work boundary has been used a lot, work-life boundary. Is becoming an increasingly important issue. Teleworkers are like the pendulum of a clock. Multiple locations, multiple job functions, the degree of flexibility. Spacial and cognitive space need more research to become tools to use.
Teamwork versus traditional telework (individuals working at home) whereas teamwork can be a dispersion of teams working together virtual and in real locations.
Stop to promote telework as a rational management solution but from now on use it as an ideology.

Svein in his goodbye note said that he is having the same feeling as after the Winter Olympics of 1994.

These are rough notes of day 2:

Keynote presentation
Distance work in public organizations: in the intersection between technology, organization and politics. Hanne Heen, Work Research Institute, Norway and Wiggo Knudsen, Norwegian Public Road Administration. Three case studies:

Sunnaas Sykehus: telemedicine, distance work, assistance to medical research. Hospital with 500+ employees, very specialized treatment of spine injuries, 1990 data revolution, various IT elements were tested, but not all of it worked, however simple things such as the use of internet worked. Collaborated with US and Swedish hospitals, constituted a revolution.
Returning the disabled to a work situation, treatment from a distance.

Labour inspection: 400 employees, inspectors follow the work-force work from home with very good results. Problems with security, tried firewalls. Too much focus on technical issues, too advanced, too much focus on technology. Mobile office inspector, use a laptop and a telephone, went round doing inspections in a systematic way, forms to be filled-out, then send to secretary who would finish the documents.

Evaluation of home offices in the public roads authority. Quite successful, but projects were not pursued or canceled. Of the 10,000 employees production department split off, and the remaining 6000-4000 employees would be slimmed down. Regionalization, as a result new ways of working, dispersed work modes explodes: in 2002:20% in 2006: 60% of the employees work in a dispersed way. Distant work should be used to obtain the aims of reorganization. Project was opportunity drive, later on became politically driven. Driving forces behind distributed organizations: new public management reform, to appear modern, willing to change, to develop new forms of management, development of impersonal control systems, technology push.

Remarks: Facebook (programme?) that should give visibility to tele and distance workers.

Stream 3A: User driven innovation in new workspace design: Eva Bjerrum and John Brøndberg Simonsen, the Alexandra Institute, Denmark.
People not at their desks but at home, traveling, in the city etc… New office design is not a change agent in itself, the concept of work is biased: the only real work is individual, by yourself, and result based.
Danish dairy board. Methodology: questionnaire, workshops towards attitudes and expectations and implementation of the new office design. 1year later post evaluation review.
Workshop: took pictures to talk with managers about these pictures and asked about associations with these pictures.
POE: 89% appreciate the new office design, 85% agree that the new office design support work better, 66% talks more to colleagues, 69% believe they become better at informal meeting.
Observation: a lot of light, a good atmosphere, empty spaces, many different materials, flexible rooms seldom used. Although these rooms were requested at the start of the project.
Methodologies:
Snapshots: register on a floor plan in 5 minute periods what is happening in the office,
Episodes: detail written descriptions of what is happening in a space,
Workshop 2: Unfreezing the organization
Use all the space, change behaviour, desk sharing, rethinking the space, more flexible IT and telephone systems.

E-working: the facility manager’s turn. Michael G.M. Geerdink, Kalchas BV, and Rosanna Lopes, The Hague University.
Focus on the function of the facility manager in the implementation of eWorking in an organization, due to the direct link between real estate and eWorking. Discussion on role and definition of facility manager. If HR takes the initiative the focus can be too much on the HR side, the IT department too much on IT.
Changes in facilities: desk sharing, clean desk policy, workplace supports specific activities, variety of workplaces, eWork leads reduction of individual workspaces. Change of perception of facility manager.

Stream 4A: Workplace design for distributed work: John Willy Bakke, Telenor research and innovation. What is the role of workplace design for distributed work? Why are companies still in workplace design, architecture and space solutions? Despite the dematerialization of organizations. Teleworkers are the digital nomads, heroes of the digital age. Wrote a handbook: a Nordic guide to workplace design. Thus the question what does workplace design mean for distributed work. The body of the virtual worker needs to be somewhere and that place needs to have certain qualities. Space matters for organizational processes. Workspace is not an empty container for activities. Ordering of space in buildings is about ordering of relations between people. “Buildings stabilize social life (Gieryn 2002), they give structure to social institutions, durability to social networks, persistence to behaviour patterns.” Building communicate with the environment all the time.
Mary Jo Hatch (book): distinguishes the difference between the location (communication, recruitment, transportation), lay-out (interaction, coordination, conflict & control) and design (style, décor).
What is the relation between distributed work and the physical workplace? Distributed work is not an exception that motivates a specific form of workplace design.

Stream 5B: Call centre-business model, Christer Strandberg and Olaf Wahlberg. Are all call centres electronic sweatshops? Call centres are not always an industry. Heaven or hell? growing sector, salient vehicle for customer service in a globalized economy with tougher competition, CRM.
Call centres come in many forms: outsourced or in-house. In reality more employees in in-house call centres than outsourced (80% in-house). Basic assumption of psychosocial work environment is important, key to job satisfaction, commitment, efficiency and customer service. Methodology: used QPS questionnaire for investigate psychosocial conditions, 123 questions and 26 indexes-scales. Data base with QPS data for more than 2000 Nordic organizations. Leadership is very important to cope with stress perceived at work, support from co-workers important. Outsourced call centres’ margin is 3%. Outsourced call-centres turn-over of employees is 1.5 years.
Psychosocial conditions, UK compared to Sweden, people are being taken care off, called the Swedish model. Team managers should be people orientated for success.

The impact of home-based telework on Work-Family conflict in the childcare stage: Wendy Spinks
Family conflict: a form of inter-role conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually un
Mainly woman homebased work,
Home-based work: place is at place of living, work autonomy is high, absence of commute.

Struggling for balance: the corrosive effect of consultant’s work and travel patterns on their home life: Donald Hislop, Loughborough University
Work and travel patterns: 2-3 days a week traveling, 1 day in office, 1 at home, often staying over when on the road. Work locations: client sites, cars, homes, own offices. Typical long hours work.
Work Family Border theory (Cambell Clarke 2000): people physically and psychologically inhabit a number of different “domains”, work and family are two important domains, each domain has its own
Domain borders play a key role in shaping inter-relationships: permeability, flexibility, blending, strength (border of domains either strong or weak).
Work domain has negative impacts for consultants non-work domain. Absence from home life, conflict on arrival home, impacts on hobbies and social life, impact on health and wellbeing. Work dominated the temporal domain, unpredictability of the work. Consultants spend a lot of time driving, paradox: travel intrinsic of work but was not regarded as a legitimate work activity (wasted time), partly explains why journeys commonly not during formal “work-time”. Consultant are border crosser but prioritize work when conflict exists.

Job engagement and quality of life: Liv Murud, Lillehammer University,
Job engagement and how it affects quality of life. Job engagement = energy + involvement + absorption
Quality of life=the relationship with yourself + relationship with significant others

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.

One of our clients, BearingPoint was featured in the TV programme “Jisho, Katcho Shatcho” (Company, manager, president) this Wednesday. Using the office as a backdrop in which two comedians fool around, and introducing Bearingpoint’s people and the jobs these people do. The programme is sponsered by Recruit, a major recruiting and job placing company, and in a very light way, various companies are introduced, showing what one can expect working for a company like BearingPoint. Below some pictures I took of the programme.

The play area.

Uchida-san talking about the concept of the office redesign. Taking the example of “the cocoon” explaining that a large percentage of the staff are consultants and basically can work wherever they want. Thus coming to the office is a chance to meet colleagues and the office is a way to encourage brainstorming and exchanging ideas.

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.