Work Environment
Published on 5 Jun 2006 at 11:53 am |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Business and Corporation Related.
HowStuffWorks (a highly reccomended site by the way) asks How Should Work, Work?
Which allows me to get back on topic, because one way of summing of the topic of CargoCult.biz is just that: How Should Work, Work? (Although we also get into some discussion of how it fails to work, and other things somewhat off topic…)
It looks like the folks at How Stuff Works, and the first commenter there, are kind of limiting themselves to the Dilbert office worker, cubicle denizen model. I can’t blame them, it helps to keep things manageable, but when I think of my ideal work environment, the first thing that comes to my mind is flexibility. Some days I want quiet, some days I need to interact, some days I need to go somewhere on site for something, some days I have pressing personal matters but don’t want to be absent from my work entirely. For all of that you can’t beat telecommuting.
I hope that we’re going to see a slow but steady shift to a situation in which most people are at least partially telecommuting. Sure, there are many jobs which don’t lend themselves to it, police officers and firefighters won’t be working from home to any great degree, and there are many jobs in which people aren’t cursed with the cube farm to begin with. Sales folks, contractors, and the above mentioned police and fire fighters have a long tradition of getting out of the office, and no one is very surprised to see their desk empty, or run into them on the road.
Which brings me to the point which is the biggest challenge to more common telecommuting. It’s not technology, that’s pretty much working. Rather, it’s culture. Many companies can’t allow for it, many managers can’t manage it (or panic in fear that they can’t), and unfortunately some individuals can’t handle it and be productive. I’m hopeful though, I think those folks mentioned above can point the way. They manage to spend a lot of time out of the office and still be very productive, their organizations seem to manage to communicate with them, and their managers seem to know how to manage them.
Technology does have a role to play in easing the acceptance, increasing productivity, and opening up new kinds of work. Cheaper VPN, faster (and cheaper) broadband, and more pervasive wireless are ongoing trends, but there’s still lots of room for improvement.
Sure, some people are still going to spend a lot of time in the office, but as culture and technology develop, and what constitutes work shifts, many of us may find the cube farm a thing of the past.
-- John
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