Category: Productive Workplace

A really interesting video from Aeon with the wonderful subtitle:

Is the office cubicle actually designed to crush your soul? The strange history and significance of a much-loathed space.

‘We drive to work in a box, we work in a box, we go home and watch a box and, before we know it, they bury us in a box.’

Lot of us have worked in them, but how many of us knew that they weren’t supposed to be what they have become:

I’m writing this post from my deck which is not in a  full height cubicle, but is in a set of low height partitioned desks. The featured image at the top is from a weekend walk in the mountains of the Lake District.

I spent much of this year on this blog looking at how we create productive workplaces. One of the articles talked about a holiday cottage company taking its work outside for the day and walking meetings with a colleague. While the event described in the article was primarily, I’m sure, a publicity event, there’s a lot to be said for the idea of getting outside to work.

A recent study has looked into the correlation of creativity and walking outside and this is what they concluded (read the bits in bold for the summary conclusion):

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity

In other words, there’s creative value in walking, there’s extra creative value in walking outdoors. This conclusion isn’t particularly novel, or new, to many it would seem to be axiomatic – “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” said Friedrich Nietzsche back in 1889. That being said. it’s good to see more study based evidence added to our understanding.

It’s another situation where “there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does”. There is a strong correlation in organisations between sitting at a desk in an office and working, hence, if you are not sat at your desk you’re not working. What organisations should be doing is encouraging people to get away from their desks and go walking outside. If an outdoor walk isn’t possible they should be providing treadmills because there’s still value in that. That’s assuming that organisation want their people to think creatively?

And while we are at it, you might like to know that all of that sitting is probably causing you psychological distress too.

A little while ago I highlighted some research by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne looking at the computerisation of jobs which was applied to the US jobs market.

In a recent report this research has been applied to the UK jobs market.

In summary it states:

Technology, automation and robotics will cause a significant shift in the UK labour market in the next twenty years, with one-third (35%) of existing jobs at risk of being replaced according to research carried out by Deloitte with Carl Benedikt Frey, of the Oxford Martin School, and Michael A Osborne, of the Department of Engineering Science, at the University of Oxford.

Advances in technology will likely see jobs requiring repetitive processing, clerical and support services, replaced with roles requiring digital, management and creative skills. These trends are already well under way.

Frey and Osborne conducted a similar study in 2013 on automation in the US job market. The latest research finds that:

• 35% of existing jobs in the UK, decreasing to 30% in London, are at high risk from automation over the next two decades.
• However, 40% of UK jobs are at low or no risk. In London, 51% of jobs are at low or no risk.
• “High risk” jobs are in office and administrative support; sales and services; transportation; construction and extraction; and production.
• “Low or no risk” jobs are in skilled management; financial services; computing, engineering and science; education; legal services; community services; the arts and media; and healthcare.
• Across the UK, jobs paying less than £30,000 a year are nearly five times more likely to be replaced by automation than jobs paying over £100,000. In London, lower paid jobs are eight times more likely to be replaced.

To put it another way, at the last count, there were 30.76 million people in work in the UK, so a 35% impact would see over 10.8 million people looking for new employment.

Those are alarming numbers, but there is evidence that organisations are already preparing. The report focusses on London as the driver of change in the UK and includes the results of a survey of 100 London based business.

The key finding is that we are transitioning from one set of skills to another set. This is a change that has been happening for some time, as the following two tables from the report highlight:

(Speaking as an IT person it’s interesting to see Zumba Instructor above Big Data Architect 🙂 )

The full report is available

It’s recently been the British Council of Office Awards so I thought I would highlight some of the places that made the awards; for no other reason than to remind myself that office spaces can be inspirational places to work:

Brent Civic Centre, Engineer’s Way, Wembley

Motability Operations, Bristol Business Park, Bristol

The Council House, Corporation Street, Derby

The Carriage Building, Bruton Way, Gloucester

Exchange Station, Tithebarn Street, Liverpool, Merseyside

The full gallery of award winners is here.

Time.com has highlighted a couple of studies that reference the desire for face-to-face meetings whatever the generation:

What both studies also demonstrate is that while technology may be wonderful, efficient, and convenient, the benefits are limited. We innately need to be around other people. As good as technology gets, we still value in-person meetings highly. No matter what generation we’re talking about, the vast majority of employees don’t want to be alone, isolated from coworkers and managers. I worked from home for four years, and it was a huge challenge as a business owner. So now I have an office, and the expense has been worth every penny.

Even Millennials Want Face Time at Work

There’s a broad assumption that as Generation-Y and Generation-Z (who are really the post-millenials) enter the workforce their use of technology will negate the need for meetings and workplaces where people can meet in person.

The future might look different, but for now, technology hasn’t replaced that deep-felt need for people to meet in person. Nor has it replaced the need for engaging workplaces.

One of the questions I’ve been pondering during my work on the Productive Workplace has been the question of how many job types will still exist in the future with many being wholly or partially automated through computerisation. There’s no point in creating a workplace for an activity that’s been automated after all.

It’s clear that different jobs will be affected in different ways. Some things that humans do today can already be done more effectively by a machine; other things are more of a challenge to the machines.

Carl Frey and Michael Osborne from Oxford University have undertaken a study to try to predict what they impact might be:

THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION?

(We refer to computerisation as job automation be means of computer-controlled equipment)

In this study they assessed 702 different occupations (in the US) and assigned to them a probability of being computerised. From this they estimated the number of jobs that would be affected by that probability. The headline result was that:

“about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk”.

The probability of computerisation is based on a number of current bottlenecks: perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, social intelligence.

The higher the need for these skills the less likely it is to be automated. We need to be clear here that a bottleneck is simply that, it constrains entry, it doesn’t eliminate it. The other aspect of bottlenecks is that it’s not permanent and will be eroded over time. Technology is moving forward at a rapid pace and areas currently high in bottlenecks will be affected by other areas where bottlenecks are less impacting.

The results of this assessment for the US population are as follows:

This is a massive simplification of the work that they have done, but it’s enough to give clear indications of where the impact is heading.

Jerry Bowles has recently published on bruegel.org a utilisation of this study which assessed its impact in European countries (the original was US). This suggests a different impact for different European countries based on the mix of jobs and their susceptibility to computerisation.

//docs.google.com/a/theigc.org/spreadsheets/d/1Na9bLYoobDkTYmvwGNfvygxXRV4Vx3eyOA25JmB-ycY/gviz/chartiframe?oid=1137284633

As you can see countries in Northern Europe are less susceptible to those in the South because of the mix of jobs.

From a personal perspective, while my actual role isn’t defined in the appendix of the report similar jobs are, and they appear in the low probability section which would align with what I understand. Although, there is much of my current role that will be heavily affected by computerisation.

If you’d like more information you can, of course, read the study, alternatively you might like to watch this:

Recently a holiday cottage company in the English Lake District decided to take their work out of the office, and up a mountain:

We decided to take our business to new heights this week by moving to the top of Blencathra to encourage Brits to get outside this summer.

Our team were fed up with looking at the lovely weather from inside our Keswick building, so we packed up and re-located our office equipment up the 2,850ft-high mountain. Desks, phones, lamps and computers were set up and staff settled in for business as usual.

This got me thinking about the times when we should really get out of the office to do work. When I say office here, I’m meaning the place where you do most of your work, that place that sees most of your time, particularity if most of your time is spent sedentary looking at a screen.

There are huge benefits to being in a different place; there is even more benefit if that different place requires some physical exercise.

A colleague and I occasionally go on walking meetings. These aren’t just wandering around meetings, we go on a walk around a reservoir or up a hill. The flow of blood that the walking creates really helps the mental stimulation and being outside changes the nature of the conversation.

We all recognise the saying:

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Henry Ford

If you want something different then do something different. If you’re not being productive where you are, you should go somewhere different. Perhaps you should take you’re office up a mountain?

Having finished a set of posts on the Proactive Workplace, based on the future skills that we are likely to need, I thought I would list some of my observations that may not be directly reflected in the other posts:

• The traditional office is already dying – fewer and fewer people feel the need to go into the office to do their work. They can work where they choose to work. This causes much anxiety in many organisations as they try to work out whether people are really working.
• Collaborative spaces are increasing in importance – if people are going to meet face-to-face it will be to collaborate. The cost of that collaboration is very high, because it now includes travel, so they want it to be highly productive. The space needs to enable the best possible collaboration.
• Virtual still isn’t the most productive – people still want to get together to interact; they recognise high performing spaces when they see them. The virtual alternatives are still not intuitive enough to be a full replacement.
• Flexibility is hugely important – it’s my personal view that most offices are built for the convenient of the people managing them, not for the flexibility of the people using them, but it’s the flexibility that facilitates the productivity. Flexible may be more costly but it’s also massively more valuable.
• The screen isn’t as important as I think it is – I work on screens, they’re what I look at all day. Many of the workplaces that I have looked at use a diverse set of media – the whiteboard and the post-it note is becoming more important, not less.
• It’s all changing – what I do today, and how I do it, is going to change. The change may well make me redundant in that activity. Even if it doesn’t make me redundant I’m likely to do it in a different way using different tools which require different spaces.
• We’re not ready for the change – most of us struggle to cope with amount of information that work creates today, the work of the future is going to require us to behave differently, and we haven’t worked out how yet.
• Place of flow are going to be a key differentiator – many of the future activities, much like many of today’s,  are going to require deep focus and concentration – flow. Those places are likely to have different characteristics dependent upon the individual. They will be treasured by the individual and fiercely defended. If organisations want people to collaborate they are going to have to provide both collaboration spaces and flow spaces.
• Meetings are being reshaped – people are using many different techniques to gain value from a meeting. Techniques initially conceived in software development are being adopted across all sorts of fields, the same with techniques created in car design.
• Networks of people will create the value – the people interacting in a workplace are unlikely to all be employed by the same organisation. Many more people will be sole-traders or acting as part of a network of people. This becomes another driver for workspace flexibility.

Another video on the Future of Work: