You hear a lot of talking on 'The New Way of Working' (NWOW) and to be honest, I'm a strong believer in this! I think there is no way back, and all companies should be investigating their options to let their information workers utilize the benefits of NWOW.
Implementing NWOW in many companies is far from just a technical project, but impacts the bases of an entire organisation (e.g. HR - from hiring to evaluation - to management skills, to assuring that all your staff is utilizing the NWOW).
Being attractive to new hires
First of all, without some form of NWOW in your organisation, you will have a hard time being attractive to new hires. New hires (typically coming from the Generation Y - see below), tend to do things differently than 'Veterans'. One could argue about whether this is required and all.... but the fact remains. Generation Y are not looking for a manager that looks over their shoulder to monitor what they are doing. No... one would need to give Generation Y people an assignment and a deadline. Give them the tools required to do the job... and let them be. You will be supprised!
Management skills
One basis result of the NWOW is the fact that your employees will no longer be (as frequent) in the office physically, but only virtually. That's a big change for some companies! For some companies (and for that matter: management of those companies), the fact that you are physically present in an office building assures the management that you are working efficiently and are not destracted from anything else but your work. Although I understand where we're coming from, nowadays, your employees (specifically the information worker) are requesting some trust from their management. Trust in this context means, that in stead of you get a monthly presence allowance, you need to get a monthly deliverables allowance.
Assuring all your staff joins
I have talked about Generation Y and the different way of doing things in your company, but most likely your company has more than just Generation Y on staff. How do you get these generations to fully utilize the NWOW? That's an interesting question. Not doing so might result in a huge social gap between the generations.
Some ideas:
- You would have to start with respecting every generation. Pushing any generation into doing things the way that another generation would do it, will result in unhappy employees.
- Allow people to choose their workplace that best fits their needs. Assure that the tooling they use to communicate are integrated and people (from different generations) can easily find each other.
The generation differences.
I found this great article on FDU Magazine which clearly describes the different way of handling / managing different generation groups. Very interesting and worth a read!
The article can be found here: http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/05ws/generations.htm
The full impact of NWOW for organisation goes far beyond a single article. I'll give more focus on other elements in future articles.
Ronald 'Generation X' van Barneveld