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.