Designing our work experience

Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It's not intangible or fluffy, it's not a vibe or the office décor. It's one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It's not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death. Think about it like a nurturing habitat for success. Culture cannot be manufactured. It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down. Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.

Read the whole article over at http://www.fastcompany.com/1810674/culture-eats-strategy-for-lunch

Found via  http://nicdipalmacreative.posterous.com

Workers who find themselves answering work emails on their smartphones after the end of their shifts in Brazil can now qualify for overtime under a new law. The new legislation was approved by President Dilma Rousseff last month. It says company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee.

While some may not think twice about answering that phone call or email, others see it as an intrusion on their life and an erosion of their pay. Is work creeping into our own lives too much? Full article with readers' comments over at SMH: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/email-after-hours-its-overtime-by-la...

Do incentives work? Well the answer is yes and no. They work for rudimentary mechanical tasks, but when you up the cognitive anti, incentives fail to motivate. Not only that, they can negatively impact performance. Pay people enough so they are not thinking about money and can instead be free to concentrate on their performance. Also relevant to management practice is the idea of giving people autonomy. Think autonomy, mastery, and the purpose motive. Watch the video to see how this plays out.

Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative from 99% on Vimeo.

The only resources that last are those that we renew. No, this is not an environmental statement -- Tony Schwartz is talking about capacity. Our capacity as doers, workers, creators.

This is a passionate half hour talk from The 99% that I discovered via eye candy design blog Swiss Miss.

I don't follow the science, which comes from sports science (and maybe some sort of spiritualism?) but the general gist of the half hour talk is that we have 4 sources of energy, not unlimited capacity to work and that rest is vital to working effectively. They are: 

1. Physical energy, the quantity of energy
2. Emotional energy, the quality of energy and how you feel when you are performing at your best
3. Mental energy, the focus of your energy 
4. Spiritual energy, a sense of purpose, of serving something bigger than yourself

Here are some quotes:

Myth -- the best way to get more done is to work more hours

Reality -- were more productive when we build in intermittent renewal along the way

Myth -- one hour less of sleep will lead to one hour more in productivity

Reality -- even small of amounts of sleep deprivation have a profound impact not just on our health, but also on our cognitive capacity and our effectiveness

Tony Schwartz also attacks "the myth of mutlti tasking" arguing that "we are most efficient when we do one thing at a time in an absored way for a significant period of time". I hear this argument more and more and speaking for myself it rings true.

Tony Schwartz is advocating that we bring renewal into the workplace to raise quality, productivity, and satisfaction. The next step is to think about what this means -- for the design of the work environment and for the planning of projects.

You can read a bio of the author at  The 99%. His site is www.theenergyproject.com, and his Twitter is @tonyschwartz

How a strategy plays out in personnel changes: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/business/media/todays-cable-guy-upgraded-and-better-dressed.html?_r=1&ref=technology

via NYTimes.com

From cubicle to newsroom to hot desks. The complete article talks about customer service trends and spaces, but the snippet below pertains to the workplace environment specifically.

Every company now is a retail company

Another interesting trend is the rise of new workplace designs that are meant to accommodate an increasingly mobile, matrixed, virtual workforce.   In early December, I sat in a new cafe on University Avenue in Palo Alto with a leading thinker in workplace design.  We were both marveling at the innovation in the seating design at the new cafe.  I asked if she was seeing the same kind of design in the workplace.   Yes, she said.  Not only the same kind of design, but the same design.   At one time, the dominant workplace design in Silicon Valley was the cubicle farm.  Sometime in the mid-2000′s — perhaps inspired by the Web 2.0 ethos — we saw the rise of the “open newsroom” as the favored design.  Now we are seeing something else:  longish tables alongside the walls and perimeters of workspaces where itinerant workers can drop in at anytime with their own equipment.  This twist on design recognizes a shift in behavior and expectations:  people crave the opportunity to drop in and work side-by-side their peers, but the experience has to be less chaotic than a newsroom.  Yes, the experience has to be more like a contemporary cafe, with better bandwidth and less noise (people will bring their own music).  There was a time, not long ago (again, the mid-2000′s) when we used to say, “every company is now a media company,” a reminder to the corporate world that they have an obligation to rethink their content and outreach strategy in the age of social media.  Now that we have entered the postdigital age — where the offline experience is as important as the online experience — every company now is a retail company, where the customer is the empowered employee who can come and go.

• http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/the-business-of-being-a-boss/2962696