Business Reimagined

Why work isn't working and what you can do about it

Dave Coplin

• Editore: Harriman House
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857193322
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Entrepreneurship

Are you happy with the way you work? Are you engaged, energised in the office? Or do you sometimes feel that your days are dominated by process and technology?Reimagining business is about waking up to a new environment, based on collaborative and flexible working, on technology that, used correctly, liberates rather than constrains. The future of work must be based on being open, on focusing on results, not process and on empowerment, not hierarchy.Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft UK, has been immersed in the technologies that are making waves in the workplace. This is his call to reimagine business.#bizreimagined

Chapter 1. Is Business Broken?

SO LET’S GET this straight from the start: I meet all the stereotypes of someone who has dedicated his entire career to IT. I grew up on a healthy diet of Star Trek and comic books at the dawn of the personal computer revolution. I was taught (or wanted to believe) that technology could be a force for good in our society, that it would provide a set of tools which would enable us all to make the most of our potential.

And in many ways it seems that we are all living the dream. Our lives have been transformed by the advent of the internet and the web and the ever-faster evolution of connected devices and services. We have come an awfully long way in the last 40 years. In fact, we have come pretty far in the last four. And recent technological innovation, in particular, has tended to impact consumers more than businesses, turning our personal lives into rich technological experiences at almost every turn.

Whenever I am giving a speech as part of my job as a technologist, I ask people to raise their hand if the computer they have at home is better than the one in their office. Every single time, the majority of people have better technology at home. Normal people, not just geeks like me, have embraced technology in incredible ways. We are communicating with friends over Skype, we are playing games online, we are on Facebook, we are streaming movies and music and sharing photos. And we are doing all this increasingly on the move. It is worth pausing for a second to remember that only a decade ago the vast majority of people saw a computer as part of a place of work or study.

The technologists among us would say that the ever-accelerating trends of mobile, cloud, big data and social are transforming the IT landscape. Most of us would simply say that we live in a period where technology has become a normal, necessary part of our everyday lives.

But over the past few years a nagging sense of doubt has entered my mind about all this. I have begun to question the truth of the utopian vision of technology as the ultimate liberator. Like some people, I’ve been beginning to wonder whether the very thing that was supposed to set us free might not have instead ensnared us – without truly adding the value it promised.

Because there seems to be one area where technology fundamentally hasn’t changed things. Work.

A recent study brought this into clear focus for me:

‘Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs’

This was the headline that caught my eye. What sent me reeling was the detail. The study revealed that: ‘[s]eventy-one per cent of American workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive.’[1]

Seventy-one per cent? That means that less than a third of workers feel happy and productive in what they do, day in day out, 40 hours a week, 220 days a year.

Surely this cannot be true?

But I would guess that if you work as part of the knowledge economy inside any organisation, small or large, you will know for yourself that there is some foundation to this claim. It seems to be true of lots of companies in lots of countries; I did a bit of digging and found that these figures were replicated in the UK and many other developed nations.[2]

Today we are living with the legacy of a couple of hundred or so years of office work. We have gone from working pretty much for ourselves (or the local lord) as farm workers and labourers, through the factories of the industrial revolution to working for big business with the rise of modern multinational corporations. And somewhere along the way, the way we work got stuck. We have found ourselves at the mercy of command-and-control hierarchies, butting up against principles that were designed for an analogue world and which have become more or less irrelevant in today’s digital, connected world.

Everyone seems to agree that technology has changed everything. Then you look around at the world of work and realise that it really hasn’t. There are superficial differences. Sometimes quite a lot of them. Yet, as we’ll see, the underlying structure and principles of most people’s working lives are the same as if the technological advances of the past quarter century had never taken place.

But is it technology that hasn’t lived up to its promise or we who have failed to change to make the most of what’s really on offer?

Working like a Victorian

We are living in a time of huge change but the way we work is still stuck in models first devised at the time of the industrial revolution. Let’s take one aspect of work and follow it through by way of illustration.

Today we still reward work done in terms of time – hours worked. This owes itself to the industrial drive for business efficiency through standardisation: the production-line model of work where people perform a repetitive task or set of tasks contributing to an outcome or product, rather than creating an outcome or product themselves. This was the only way you could have scale. It was also the only way that you could make big, important things like steam trains or omnibuses.

This was a definite shift from the artisanal model of earlier times. What was being rewarded in this new way of work was not the outcome – an artefact sold at market – but hours spent on tasks. Workers received salaries for a working week based on clocking in and out. Companies focused on reducing the cost of labour and increasing the standardisation, all to improve the cost-efficiency and reliability of their manufacturing processes.

And so people became directly compensated for the process not the outcome of their work. This shift was very important. It didn’t go away overnight. In fact, most of us are still living with it today.

As the industrial revolution came to an end and the knowledge revolution took hold – a development of the mid-20th century – the focus of most companies remained on driving business efficiency through standardisation.

The arena where this standardisation and efficiency took place became the office. It was the new place where workers swarmed around the provision of infrastructure.

In the industrial revolution, towns, cities and even countries prospered around the centralisation of infrastructure and resources, whether it was the dark satanic mills in Arkwright’s Derbyshire or the mining towns of the valleys of South Wales. This model carried on into the knowledge revolution because, in the pre-internet era of work, the only way to get the benefit of large-scale personal computing was in the office, where an IT department managed a network which all workers could utilise.

Offices became the very definition of productivity. But within all of this, the separation that had begun in the industrial revolution between employees and the outcome of their work was only widened.

For a while this disconnect was probably harmless enough. After all, products were being made, services were being offered, and many companies became wildly successful. But the levels of disengagement felt by the average knowledge worker today, and revealed in the studies earlier, should set alarm bells ringing.

Put simply: in a world where the reasons for swarming, standardisation and relentless focus on process are disappearing thanks to technology, continuing to organise our work around these principles is driving the majority of employees quietly mad.

The antelope of the open office

What we have lost in all of this is the fact that we are all, for the most part, professional, independent creative beings, employed by our firms to help them achieve great outcomes. Any process we are focusing on at a given time is just that: a process. If it is taken for the whole, the actual goal of our work – the ultimate outcome for our business – is lost. And that makes a business blind.

Things only get worse from there.

Employee discontent is not, of course, an entirely new problem. There have been efforts over the years to try and inject a sense of creativity into the office space, or to better enable collaborative work. Unfortunately, in the story of how the working world ended up such a disengaging mess, this is the bit where the good guys put together a brilliant scheme to save the day only to end up making things worse.

They came up with the open-plan office.

Unfortunately, open-plan offices just don’t work very well. The theory is nice – remove physical barriers, make it easier to communicate – but the reality is awkward at best. Creative people forced into this type of work environment typically end up inventing new ways of creating barriers between themselves and their surrounding environment. Or they end up giving up on creativity.

Walk into any creative company – an advertising agency, say, or a publisher – and what you will see for the most part is row upon row of headphone-wearing creatives, all attempting to create a sense of personal space whilst remaining within the constraints of the business’s idea of an environment that promotes creativity and collaboration.

For many creative industry employees and knowledge workers, headphones have become as essential a part of the corporate survival toolkit as cool laptop bags or hip personal phones.

Technology visionary Ben Hammersley describes this problem best when he refers to the ‘hyper adrenalized’ state of most open-plan workers. When placed in open-plan offices, argues Hammersley, we become like antelope on the savannah, spending most of our time feeling vulnerable to the wide open nature of our habitat.

Everything we do is on display. It’s hard for us to exert any kind of independent creative thought as we are simply part of a broader herd, surrounded by noise and chatter that only seeks to drive conformity not break it. Worse still, just like on the savannah, predators sit on the sidelines observing the herd, waiting for any individual to show signs of weakness. The antelope realise this and spend a vast portion of their time under significant stress from fear of attack.

Want to know where the power-brokers are on your floor? Look for the individuals who are placed around the edge looking in – facing the herd with their monitors shielded. I guarantee you, the people with this kind of geographic position in an office will be the power-brokers of your business.

Interestingly, the open-plan office again ...