My 7 work mantras

This morning I decided to share my "work matras" with my followers on Twitter:

1. Always strive for simplicity
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Work smarter, not harder
4. Seek synergies, avoid waste
5. Think reuse before creating
6. Share everything that can be shared
7. Be open-minded to ideas and opportunities

Right now I keep them in a note in Notes, but I would really like to put them on a wall or have them as my background on my devices.

If you are interested in illustrating or visualizing these mantras, please let me know by leaving a comment to this post. I would happily share your illustration or visualization here on my blog.

UPDATE:

Below I will post any incoming illustrations and visualizations of my 7 work mantras below. Enjoy!

Linda Mill

Joachim Stroh

Getting one step closer to the Digital Workplace

Mobile and social concepts and technologies are redefining knowledge work and transforming our digital work environments. Mobile technologies enable us to get our work done regardless if we are at the office or not. Social technologies allow us to collaborate in new and smarter ways, within and across organizations.

If the Intranet is to continue to have a reason for existence, it has to play a part in this transformation. It has to evolve from being a website for information self-service to becoming a platform that connects people, information and tasks across the enterprise. It is feasible to assume that intranets will evolve, just as the Internet itself, into a number of services that provide relevant capabilities to people in different situations. These services will need to be optimized for specific usage situations and accessible from the device that we find most convenient to use in that situation. Most of these services will be inherently collaborative, leveraging social technologies to make the best possible use of our collective intelligence, so that we can get our work done in smarter ways.

In other words, the Intranet as we know it will seize to exist as it will blend into our digital work environment, a.k.a. our Digital Workplace. (By the way, if you’re interested in the Digital Workplace as a concept, here are a few definitions as well as my own take)

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, the vision of the Digital Workplace can't be realized in a day. You can’t buy it off the shelf. Nor is there a single product or platform that will take you there. The only feasible way to get closer to the vision of the Digital Workplace is to adopt a think big / start small approach and establish a process for continuous service development as well as continuous improvements of ways of working. To avoid getting stuck in technology-centric thinking, you need to apply people-centric and service-oriented thinking and design principles.

This is essence what I talk about in my keynote at the Intranätverk conference in Gothenburg, Sweden on 21st of May. I will share some insights and practical advice on how to establish service-oriented thinking and how to start developing services for the Digital Workplace. If you happen to be in Gothenburg at that time, I hope to see you there!

UPDATE:

This post inspired Joachim Stroh to create this great 2-2 matrix and visualization:

The simple reason why most intranets fail

I’ve written on this blog and elsewhere about 6 things to expect from your intranet, why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers, what is wrong with SharePoint, if employees really need intranets (and answered the question with a 'no') and why the Digital Workplace is both necessary and relevant. You can find several reasons why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers in these posts. But there’s an even simpler way to put it.

For an intranet team, the intranet is usually the center of the universe. It’s what they do.

For the employees, on the other hand, the intranet is only one component of many in their digital workplace that they need to interact with.

The intranet team may have a holisitic view of the intranet, being able to see how all its different parts fit together, and all the stakeholders it is there to serve. However, what most intranet teams lack is a holistic view of the employee’s everyday work and a holistic view of the employee’s entire digital work environment.

The only way to provide an intranet that actually supports the everyday work of the employees is to understand the work employees do on a daily basis, what tasks they perform, what information they need, who they interact with, and the typical situations they find themselves in. Including what other tools and services they use. These things need to be viewed from the employee’s perspective, not from the intranet’s perspective. Don't start with the intranet in mind. Start with the employee in mind.

It’s that simple – and that hard.

Facing a New Business Reality

We are all living in a world where the rapid development of new information technologies and globalization are changing everything; our society, entire industries, and the way we behave as consumers and employees. The days when brands could be built and markets created almost entirely through advertising in mass-media are over. Today, people who share similar needs or wants can easily connect with each other through their own volition, creating markets where they can exchange information about any products or services available that can satisfy their needs or desires. They might even create the services or products themselves. One thing that is sure is that the impact and reach of personal recommendations and influence has never been stronger, and it has all to do with the reach, immediacy and multiplier effects now available through the social web. If people like a brand and its products or services, they might become advocates for that brand, influencing their friends and other people with similar needs or desires to buy the brand’s products or services. The brand in turn becomes part of their social identities, which turns them into loyal and powerful brand advocates when they are considered as influencers among their friends or communities. If people start to dislike a brand and its products or services, or change their buying behaviors, they can create a force that might soon put the company out of business.

In a world where things changed less frequently and when there was plenty of time to react to newly emerged information, where markets did not emerge by themselves and change shape by themselves, it was possible to centralize planning and make long-term detailed plans and execute these plans over a period of several years. The contrast of this scenario to today’s situation couldn’t be larger. Most companies now operate in highly unpredictable and dynamic business environments where they are forced to prepare for the unexpected. They may still have an overall strategy and plan, but they need to be prepared to change it at any point in time and accept that the only feasible strategy is one that allows them to respond to change fast enough and good enough by distributing decision making power to everyone who may ever need to make a decision.

The ever increasing pace of change requires organizations to be able to respond to change by quickly mobilizing people and organizing and coordinating their efforts in new ways. To develop such abilities, Steven R Covey argues that organizations will rely on proactive and powerful leadership who:

“...keep a constant eye on the environment, especially when it comes to customer behaviors and attitudes, and make sure that resources are organized in the right direction. If they don't know what is happening in their business environments as well as within their companies and make sure to be headed in the right direction, "no amount of management expertise can keep them from failing"

The text above is from my contribution to the forthcoming book "Right Sourcing - Enabling Collaboration", edited by Rien Dijkstra, John Gøtze, and Pieter van der Ploeg. It's the result of the Right Sourcing project, a collective effort from a number of experienced contributors from 7 countries. The full book will be released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. It will be published in a few weeks from now - be sure to keep your eyes open for it

If we want change we need to change the system

According to Deming, 94% of the root causes of all problems can be found and attributed to the system, and only 6% to the individuals. This means that when a problem occurs, we should start examining it with the assumption that the system is broken. Most times we will be right. When we repeatedly make the wrong decisions or face rework or duplicate due to lack of communication, the root cause is likely to be found in the communication system, and ultimately in the communication culture.

The system, as Deming defines it, is "a network of interdependent components that work together to accomplish the aim of the system.” (Wikipedia). Deming said that the system is the responsibility of management.

A lot of us are frustrated at work because we have gotten used to new ways of communicating in our private lives, but we cannot adopt the same behaviors at work. The first barrier we are confronted with is usually the lack of tools and platforms. How can we possibly share what we are doing or the ideas we have in an open and transparent way if we don’t have blogs or micro-blogs? Email and file shares simply won't do it. How can we make our knowledge more accessible and aggregate our collective knowledge if we don’t have wikis? It's not for anyone to edit and contribute on the intranet.

Then, if and when we get access to social tools and platforms, we soon realize there is a second and much bigger barrier to overcome: our existing communication culture. It is much easier said than done to change the norms that tell us how, what, and with whom we should communicate.

Even with the new tool in place, most people will cling on to their existing behaviors and practices. An existing behavior that has been automated and turned into a habit always requires a lot of effort to change, even if the new behavior will make things simpler for us. People often stick to inefficient behaviors simply because they have automated them - they do them on autopilot. If the system doesn’t force or encourage them to change their habits, then why should they?

A norm – a behavior we share with other people and that is expected of us to – requires even more effort to change than changing an individual habit. A few individuals alone cannot change it: there need to be a critical mass of people who make the effort to change their behaviors.

To change the communication culture, it is not enough to change the tools. We need to change the system. All relevant components that make up the system must all be changed to support the change we want: goals and measures, leadership and management practices, processes and routines, incentive systems, policies and rules, IT systems. And as management is responsible for the system, the system cannot be changed without management committing itself to make the change, setting a clear vision and roadmap, and walking the talk by changing behaviors themselves.

Finding smarter ways of working together

Lots of people complain about dense meeting schedules and overflooded inboxes. Yet, few people try very hard to find the root causes or to explore better ways of working. Instead, time and energy is wasted on blaming the tools, asking for more disk space, and sorting emails into folders. In a work environment where our work is more or less invisible (digital), we tend to see the symptoms of our inefficient practices (such as full email inboxes and meetings all day long) as evidence of hard work.

Few executives and managers pay these things much attention, and the ones who do often seem to think that investing in new technologies will make the situation better. Although technology is an important ingredient, there are some even more important ingredients in any recipe for achieving smarter ways of working together; people, their needs, their attitudes and behaviors, and the situations they find themselves in at work.

It is high time for organizations to take productivity and collaboration tools for what they really are: tools that enable people to work smarter together. It might seem as common sense, but if you take a quick look around, you will find plenty of organizations where this kind of common sense isn't put into practice. In fact, technology-centric thinking prevails in most organizations; any new technology, product or feature that is implemented is perceived as a silver bullet that will solve automagically solve a bunch of problems once deployed. What these organizations fail to acknowledge and act upon is that real and sustainable business improvements come from continuous efforts aiming to improve ways of working, not from throwing a set of new tools or features at people every now and then. Ways of working cannot be improved if you don't have people as your starting point - understanding their needs, attitudes and behaviors, and the situations they find themselves in. After that, you can add the technology ingredient.

Is the office really the best place to get work done?

Yahoo’s decision to ban working from home can hardly have escaped anyone’s attention. Whatever the reasons might be, to me their decision sends out a signal of desperation and reveals that Yahoo's management is incapable of dealing with flexible working.

"Green Paper - Managing in a Flexible Work Environment" from Australian Institute of Management

In some respects, the flexible work environment presents a more demanding context for managers. In this complex or heightened environment deficiencies in management skills development more generally are foregrounded. In effect management weaknesses -
irrespective of context - are exposed, opening the opportunity to better target skills development as a consequence.   

A major challenge to implementing flexible work is attitudinal. Business owners or senior executives may perceive that flexible work arrangements are associated with a lack of commitment to the organisation. Perhaps resistance comes from a busy line manager, fearful that implementation of flexible work arrangements will become yet another item on an already crowded ―to do list. Or again, colleagues may resent flexible work as a privilege extended only to the lucky few. 

Research shows that underlying this attitude is a set of assumptions about the idea of the "ideal worker": someone who is able to work full time, and to be solely committed to their job, because they are supported by someone outside the workplace who attends to their non work needs. Such a worker may have been the norm in the past, but this is no longer the case. Work is no longer neatly contained between set hours. Workers have a multiplicity of  non-work responsibilities and interests which they seek to balance against their work roles. 

Nevertheless, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the ―ideal worker continues to shape expectations in the workplace. Until this assumption is challenged, flexible work may be perceived as a curiosity, privilege, nuisance or unnecessary cost. 

"Why You Should Work From a Coffee Shop, Even When You Have an Office" by Wesley Verhoeve, Lifehacker

While team Family Records was in between offices in early 2012, we had 6 weeks to bridge until our new space was ready. During that time we were fortunate enough to be taken in as guests byawesome companies for stretches of time, and for the remainder we took over corners of coffee shops all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. The experience of working out of coffee shops was so positive that even after we moved into our new home, I made sure to get in a few "coffee shop days" each month. For carpal tunnel related reasons alone, I would not recommend working out of coffee shops every day, but here are some reasons why it might be great to try it for one or two days every month. 

A change of environment stimulates creativity. Even in the most awesome of offices we can fall into a routine, and a routine is the enemy of creativity. Changing your environment, even just for a day, brings new types of input and stimulation, which in turn stimulates creativity and inspiration. 

Fewer distractions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but working from a bustling coffee shop can be less distracting than working from a quiet office. Being surrounded by awesome team and officemates means being interrupted for water cooler chats and work questions. Being interrupted kills productivity. The coffee shop environment combines the benefit of anonymity with the dull buzz of exciting activity. Unlike working at home, with the ever-present black hole of solitude and procrastination, a coffee shop provides the opportunity of human interaction, on your terms. 

Community and meeting new people. Meeting new people always provides me with new ideas, a different perspective at existing problems, or an interesting connection to a new person doing something awesome that inspires me. Today alone I met a top Skillshare teacher whose class I will now take, a sleep consultant, a publicist who offered to help with a project, and a wine consultant who recommended some bars.

"They Work Long Hours, but What About Results?" by Robert C Pozen, The New York Times

IT’S 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don’t come off as a slacker. 

By applying an industrial-age mind-set to 21st-century professionals, many organizations are undermining incentives for workers to be efficient. If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite “face time” whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data. It’s no surprise, then, that so many professionals find it easy to procrastinate and hard to stay on a task. 

There is an obvious solution here: Instead of counting the hours you work, judge your success by the results you produce. Did you clear a backlog of customer orders? Did you come up with a new idea to solve a tricky problem? Did you write a first draft of an article that is due next week? Clearly, these accomplishments — not the hours that you log — are what ultimately drive your organization’s success.

"Open-plan offices make you less productive" by Vatsal Anand, Onlymyhealth

In a study on the impact of open-plan office environment on the productivity and well-being of employees, researchers have found that it is not the best. The new study claims that the commotion of a modern office leads to a drop in productivity by 15 percent and well-being of workers by 32 percent. According to study researchers, the unwanted noise and other aspects of such an office can distract their brain from the task without them even noticing.  

Open-plan offices were designed with the objective of promoting interaction among the workers. It was expected that such a free interaction would promote creative thinking and result in better problem solving approach. Study researcher Dr. Jack Lewis has discredited the wisdom of thinking on these lines. He states that such a work environment is not conducive for the concentration of the workers. If a phone goes off in the background while you were concentrating on something important, the resultant interruption is a waste.  

The brain can respond to distractions without the person even being aware of it.
Similarly, in modern offices, if the employees are not allowed to have their own decorations on walls and desks, it is not conducive to their welfare. Workers should be allowed to personalise their working area. It improves their productivity and well-being as with a surrounding of their choice, they feel more engaged and comfortable, and are able to concentrate much better.