Tailorable blog

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.

Reboot 9.0 and new work environments

Please visit Ewan McIntosh’s blog (http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_your_id.html) for a discussion on my session “Your ideal working environment” on Reboot 9.0.

As I mentioned in his comments as well, I loved the stories people told about their ideal working environment and the fact that this seems to be not only very personal, but also depends on what type of activity you are engaged in (creative or having to finish a paper).

Also very interesting to hear what some people considered ideal social software: software that understands when it is okay to disturb you with awareness information and when not: a Twitter that knows when to bug you. I certainly see some design challenges and possibillities for further research there…

The good news is that I will be able to test some of the suggestions I heard in the near future: the kick-off of the Telematica Instituut project on new work environments is next week! In this project we will start living labs at various medium-sized and large organizations to test the impact of new, flexible collaboration processes. We know that social software opens up new possibilities for communication and even enables new working processes. However, we also expect that the motivations of people to collaborate do not change significantly. So, with this consortium we are going to investigate new working environments, in the physical and organizational sense and in terms of (social) software support.

From Russia with love…

Today we have the last day of the final meeting of the RUSMECO project. I’m having mixed feelings about it: it is always nice to finish a project, but I’m also sad this one will soon be over. The project is/was about improving the competitiveness of innovative Russian SMEs by helping them start a Community of Practice to share knowledge and experiences. Apart from the management and design challenges, the project provided me with many opportunities to get to know many interesting Russian people and helped me gain more insight in the Russian culture.

The project has resulted in three connected communities: one in Moscow (Zelenograd), one in St. Petersburg and one in Ekaterinburg. These communities of iSME members meet regularly face-to-face and have an online platform for sharing content, having discussions, performing self-assessment tests and even following trainings. According to the other project members, the project has also resulted in our marriage and little Alexander - but we have to see if those deliverables also end up in the list towards the European Commission

Anyway, the project was a great source of experiences, a lot of fun and I hope to work with these people again soon! But for now, back to the last items on our to-do list.