The Future of Work

Richard Donkin's The Future of Work is a fascinating book. It discusses how working practices have changed over the last half century and how go-ahead firms are adapting to the opportunities provided by new technologies. Companies like Microsoft and Google are way ahead of the mainstream in the way they treat their employees. People communicate by video conferencing instead of travelling the world. Offices are open 24 hours a day so that people can work at the time of day or night that suits them.

Then there are the state of the art office complexes which provide gyms, health services, Internet access and concierge services. Apparently where employers have completely revamped the way they treat their employees staff turnover has declined by as much as 90% - suggesting it is not just money which motivates people to do a good job. Companies are experimenting with the modern form of piecework - teams given a deadline by which to deliver a project and left to get on with it. How they achieve the desired result is up to them.

Donkin makes the point that work needs to change. The old hierarchical structure needs to be modernised and for many businesses it is no longer suitable. There are other ways of getting a job done than the tried and tested methods.

Facebook and books

I have taken a decision to deactivate my Facebook account. I'm really really not interested in the Facebook phenomenon and I can't be bothered to learn about it. Call me a dinosaur if you wish but I'd rather pick and chose which bits of modern technology I use. You could easily spend all day on the social networking sites if you chose and I'm going to limit myself to blogs I think. I have no interest in Twitter either.

I may however start a new blog - when I can think of a name for it - though I shall still be using this one. I've had a blitz on the more personal posts on this blog as well and in future it will be limited to books read, writing and subjects in the news - unless anything major, good or bad, happens in my life. The New Year is, I feel, the time to decide what's important and evaluate how I want to spend my time. A writing project is still under consideration as is an Open University Course as well as various maintenance projects around the house so life is busy - and enjoyable - apart from the usual 'down' feeling I get at this time of year.

Books currently being read: Richard Donkin's The Future of Work; Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract; Susan Faludi's Backlash. Thoughts on these three in the coming days, I hope.

Work - continued

kcm's comment on yesterday's post started me thinking about work and how it could change and why it frequently doesn't. The organisation I worked for was always a bit slow to accept technological developments but even there VoiP phone calls were being talked about, hot desking in some places was becoming the norm rather than the exception and working from home would at least be considered as an option before I retired.

Hot desking met with a great deal of resistance from the staff as a whole - a resistance which I can understand to a certain extent. But with an organisation in which you can log onto a computer in any office in the country and get all your own services, data and files you really don't need to be confined to one desk or one office.

I used to do a job in which I was part of a virtual team - which did meet physically once a month but needn't have done - and I used to travel all over the country training managers. I could log in at whichever office I found myself and deal with e-mail and catch up with changes in information. To me this was great. To others not having a firm base was the height of insecurity. It will take time to change people's minds about this and to deal with the human issues involved.

For the last 10 years of my working life I was not based in the same office as my immediate line manager. I found this liberating but I soon realised, when I went back to being based in one office 4 years before I retired, that other people hated their manager only being available on the end of a phone or by e-mail. To me it was the norm - to my colleagues it was something totally alien and very uncomfortable. It is perfectly workable and makes the individual worker far more self reliant and able to solve their own problems but again resistance needs to be overcome.

I've just started to read what looks like being an interesting book - The Future of Work by Richard Donkin - which looks likes raising some - if not all - of the same issues.