Tailorable blog

Concepts for the future of work: the mental strain injury (MSI) meter

We’re starting an online collection of concepts for the future of work: ideas about how knowledge workers may be supported to work freely, effectively and healthy. For an overview of the ones we have currently collected, and to contribute concepts yourself, please visit: concepts.futureworkspaces.nl.

One of the concepts I like a lot is the Mental Strain Injury (MSI) meter.
Digital nomads tend to have long working days. They are expected to be available during evenings and weekends, but also feel obliged to work during traditional working hours. So in the new world of work, work-life balance is not just fading – it’s shifting. And with less time to unwind, mental stress accumulates.

The MSI meter makes you aware how much mental strain has built up. It monitors your physiological stress levels (muscle tension in your shoulders and neck, eye blinking rate, heart rate, blood pressure) and warns you if these are out of healthy range. The meter makes you aware of this and provides suggestions for stress reduction. It suggests microbreaks or a change of activity, or even hints you to reschedule appointments.

Top 5 misconceptions about wikis at work

Although many organizations are currently experimenting with wikis, some presumptions about wikis in the workspace appear to be sticky. Our interviews with managers as well as employees (before working with a wiki) revealed some opinions that may hinder the introduction process, if left undiscussed. What misconceptions have you encountered around wikis at work? John Rotenstein from Atlassian already mentioned a couple a while ago. Hereby my top 5:

1. “Making the technology available is enough for people to use it.”
   Carefully planning and supporting the introduction of the wiki is essential. People must trust the new technology, know when to use it (and when not), how to use it, have management support to use it, and find ways to embed it in their normal working routines. Putting the technology in place is just a small piece of the puzzle.
2. “Only information that will stand the test of time belongs in the wiki.”
   Comparing the company wiki with Wikipedia is not helpful: people have to learn that sharing raw ideas and initial thoughts can be great conversation starters and lead to a “pressure cooker” effect, where insights from different angles are combined into valuable results.
3. “You cannot trust the contents of a wiki page.” As with any piece of information, you have to judge wiki content carefully. However, the mechanism that all employees can mark and correct wiki pages helps in discovering and correcting errors. You’re not alone.
4. “If everybody can change everything, things will become a mess.”
   Ton Zijlstra told me to just make a slide with this text and then animate it, so “everybody” changes into “my colleagues”… If they still see that as a problem, then they need more then just a wiki.
5. “Putting information in the wiki is something you just do on the side.”
   These are actually two misconceptions: it takes time and effort to write a good wiki page, but more importantly, writing down results in a wiki could be the primary outcome of the work process, not a secondary documentation step. For instance, a design, meeting minutes, or a status report could just be delivered as a set of wiki pages. Management has an important role to reassure people that delivering project results as wiki pages is perfectly acceptable.

What are your experiences with presumptions around wikis at work?

What could a Social Virtual Workspace look like?

One of the developments I strongly believe in, is making our personal work environments more social. Knowing that my social network is not just a source of passion, but also a source of inspiration, expertise, and keeping track of current trends & developments, it seems to make sense to have this network on my radar, and integrated in my work environment.

At the moment, I use a mixture of Outlook, iGoogle, SharePoint, Skype, Facebook, Microsoft Office and a dozen other tools to get my work done. I would like to have a more integrated work environment, where I am in charge of what functionality is included and how it is presented to me. SharePoint2007 and iGoogle already show possible models of allowing users to select and combine the functionality they need, when they need it (which is what I call tailorability). The image I attached to this post goes one step further: it sketches an online service that focusses on your social networks (family, friends, colleagues, customers), keeps you aware of their status and activities, and integrates this with personal information management and collaboration functionality. The open interface for Facebook developers and OpenSocial are examples of inititiatives that could be the basis for such a service. It is essential to actually utilize the corporate firewall in the scenario: making sure that confidential information stays within the organization, while giving employees a low-threshold means to keep in touch with their network in the outside world.

What is your opinion on such a social virtual workspace and what do you think it will look like?

New Ways of Working & Social Embedding

Currently many organizations are experimenting with more flexible work arrangements for their knowledge workers. Well-known examples are Best Buy’s Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), and, here in The Netherlands, Interpolis. Although there are different visions of the New Way of Working, it usually involves more freedom and responsibility for the knowledge worker, more trust by the employer, while maintaining cohesion in the company (social embedding of knowledge workers). Information and communication technology can help in this process by allowing people to work from anywhere at anytime, while still being able to find each other, communicatie and coordinate their actions. So far so good, and actually most basic solutions for anytime, anywhere working have been around for at least 10 years (laptops, e-mail, cellular phones, file servers).

Veldhoen + Company (in Dutch) state that a change towards the New Way of Working requires a balanced change of the physical environment, a mental change and a change of the virtual environment. Many initiatives just focus on putting new tools in place, some address new management styles (such as the Results Only Work Environment), some try to provide knowledge workers with a stimulating physical work environment (like Interpolis). But how about the stimulating virtual work environment? Just being able to share files and folders does not really stimulate me to socialize with my team members. Meanwhile we know that social embedding (feeling connected to our colleagues) is a factor that requires extra attention when working more and more at different locations and at different times.

What I am curious about is whether wikis, blogs, social networking sites and applications like Twitter can help us feel connected, share our passions, know what others are up to and socialize also in an office environment. And how to make sure this all is nicely embedded in a virtual environment that actually stimulates us to socialize? Any thoughts or examples (good and bad) are very welcome.

Limited options for applications in Second Life

For our new project on Future Workspaces, I have been looking into the possibilies of integrating applications in the Second Life environment. Frankly, I was a bit disappointed by the options and the limitations of the Second Life script language (LSL). First of all, in-world applications have to be constructed out of the basic building blocks of Second Life (prims). You can define limited functionality inside such a prim using the LSL language or let it communicate with the outside world using e-mail, URL requests or XML-RPC. So far, so good…

However, the LSL scripts have some serious limitations (as I discovered when I tried to program an SL poker table in my free time). First of all, a single script can only use 16K memory (welcome to the 21st century!) and there are all kind of unpracticalities, such as no nested lists and no library functions, so code reuse is done by copy-pasting code. Moreover, there are serious memory leaks and build-in delays, for instance when sending an e-mail. Of course it is possible to overcome these barriers, but this complicates any programming effort so much, that it quickly takes the fun away.

Because of these limitations, some operations that seem pretty standard become extremely complex, as illustrated by the story of displaying an external image by Dav Yaginuma, who even went as far as to create a series of cubes to represent individual pixels.

A few days ago, I saw an integration of Basecamp in Second Life and I was very curious how they did that. It turned out that it was a static screenshot, placed as a texture on a prim, with a link embedded to a Basecamp webpage. Clicking on the object just opened your browser to a fixed webpage. That is not quite the integration I had in mind.

Part of my trouble is of course that I don’t now yet what I would like to make to support knowledge workers in Second Life, but I figured that it makes sense anyway to explore the options. Anyway, if you know of any cool examples, I would be happy to hear from you.