Designing our work experience

Every so often an article appears in the newspaper citing the cost to business of dodgy sick days. What should be more concerning than the cost of sick days (apparently each one costs business $385, but isn't this the cost of business?) is lost productivity, low employee morale and lower customer satisfaction when staff are unhappy when at work.

Earlier this month, Toyota's chief executive in Australia admitted there are occasions - especially the day after a public holiday - when a third of his employees chuck a sickie. He blamed our industrial relations system for this epidemic and urged a change in the law. In reality, though, when an organisation has one-in-three employees calling in sick, no amount of tinkering with IR legislation is going to fix the issue.

That’s because changes in the law would only deal with the symptom. High rates of absenteeism are a signal there’s something very wrong with the way employees are engaged. An analysis by research firm Gallup, for example, revealed that disengaged employees have rates of absenteeism that are 27 per cent higher than their peers.

The article in today's SMH does however shed some new light on the subject. Canadian professor Gary Johns from Concordia University has found that absenteeism is contagious and that teams influence one another more than their managers. He also found that those doing menial and repetitive work are far more likely to call in sick.

According to Professor Johns, research indicates that “teams can often exert a lot more influence on attendance behaviour than managers". “There is some tendency to treat absence as a personal, individual performance issue and ignore the fact that it is under considerable social control. People imitate the attendance behaviour of their peers.”

The lessons:

• address the team not the individual
• make sure employees feel that there is purpose to their work

Read the full article for more facts and figures about the estimated cost of absenteeism to businesses: http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/blogs/work-in-progress/sick-and-tired-of...

The writers over at IT Pro at SMH have delivered another article to help us all manage our email inbox. They offer tips to effectively manage the stream of communication, many of which will be familiar to you (such as switching off auto alerts). Its worth a read to see if there are any new tips you can take on board.

What I like about this article is the advocacy for alternative tools for communication such as instant messaging and cloud based document storage. Here are some highlights to entice you to the story.

An overflowing inbox is the enemy of productivity, according to experts.

University of Queensland strategic communications lecturer Sean Ritnel said companies around the world were tackling inbox management, completely eliminating internal emails and using micro-blogging, scheduling and instant messaging platforms instead.

...

“Email is used because it's convenient and everyone's got it, so it's the lowest common denominator, but there's so many more tools that are more appropriate for each given task."

...

Atos chief executive Thierry Breton announced he was setting a goal of no internal emails, forcing the company's 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

“I think the burden is on organisations to provide more centralised data searching for all those documents that we need to read - that shouldn't be sent via email, but should be stored in a cloud - and that can be accessed anywhere in the world so it's easily accessible,” Dr Ritnel said.

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...

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

It's worth reading this article about the treadmill desk. Don't dismiss it as a novelty. Its an example of how an idea was born, implemented, how its usage changed over time and how the concept spawned a new idea -- the walking meeting.

Then Levine had another idea. If people could work while they were walking, why couldn't they have meetings as well? And so the concept of the walking meeting was born. His plan was that a designated walking track could be marked out in an office using carpet tape. Two people walking together could both wear coloured badges so that everyone else knew they were in a private meeting and shouldn't be disturbed.

... remarkably a Minnesota financial recruitment company called Salo heard about his ideas and decided to put them into practice ... "we found that walking meetings not only tended to be more productive than sedentary ones, they're also, on average, 10 minutes shorter."

http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/management/so-busy-are-we-really-working-harder-than-ever-20111129-1o46f.html#poll