Mobility

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Work/Life Think Tank at the American Medical Systems facility outside of Minneapolis.  The Think Tank is the brainchild of Kathy Kacher of Career/Life Alliance Services.  It’s a place where Human Resource professionals get together regularly to discuss the evolving nature of work and how to best support it.

It’s the end of the year and a great opportunity to look back a bit and to contemplate what we will make happen in 2012.

The slow rolling recession has affected us all. We were all challenged to do more with less. And as part of the cost containment, many people lost their jobs. The loss of a job brings undeniable consequences, both economic and personal.

Distributed teams share many of the same characteristics of physically co-located teams but how they are managed is distinctly different. Here’s a brief, admittedly linear methodology for mindfully addressing the ways distributed teams must be managed.

The first thing, define what we’re talking about – THEN develop a solution. Here are some of the variables:

Buildings are notoriously static things. It takes a long time to get them built and a long time to get them off your books once you decide to vacate. To compensate, corporate real estate professionals usually bank vacant space. They don’t want to be the ones blamed for a business unit not meeting their numbers. “We couldn’t hire anyone because they had no place to put them”, they say. I’ve heard this. It’s smoke. But CRE folks just don’t want to be part of this argument.

So you’ve drunk the Kool-aid and know deep down that a mobile workforce is the inevitable wave that will wash through your workplace. It’ll save you money, reduce carbon, manage risk and best of all, help you recruit and retain your best employees. You’ve released your Telework policy (after all that legal review) and you’re ready to reap the benefits.

Not so fast.

I had a conversation the other day with a potential big corporate client. They invited me in to talk about making their workforce mobile (because that’s what I do). They agreed that all the reasons for going Mobile (financial, sustainable, attract/retain talent, reduce risk, increase productivity, etc.) were sound but they kept coming back to this one barrier – “Our culture won’t accept it”. I was nice. I tried to talk them through some of their issues; devise schemes to get through the blocks.

I love good architecture and interior design as much as anyone. My sensibilities and training have tuned in me a true appreciation for how good design can make you feel; how it can inspire something beyond thought. But good design is not the future of work. Much of the discourse over the past twenty years on the new workplace has been driven by the great thinkers at DEGW, Gensler, HOK, BHDP, etc. I thank them for driving the discussion to higher and higher places.

This whole idea, even the term, “Work/Life Balance”, is wrong. It assumes that work and life are two different things – that there is a clear distinction between them. I’m not sure that was ever correct but it is now more incorrect than ever before.