Open Offices Work About as Well As Open Classrooms

Here's an interesting discussion of studies about open offices and workplace efficiency.

Boss's Day Thoughts

For National Boss's Day,  the WSJ put together some comments from staffing and consulting companies that show how bad bosses can damage workplace.

The comments are useful, if obvious, but I've always thought that to get real examples of bad management and how it affects people's work, you should talk to employment lawyers.  Let's face it, most of us have seen things that would curl the hair of those that still have some. The reported employment law cases are bad enough-the stuff that doesn't get reported is truly remarkable. So here are some hard won lessons regarding bosses from an employment lawyer:

1. Character matters. Supervisors who are dishonest, sleep around, and take advantage of people in their personal lives will, in my experience, infect the workplace with their lousy moral outlook. And notwithstanding our views that people can compartmentalize bad behavior (think Bill Clinton, for example), my experience is that who you are inevitably comes out around people with whom you spend most of your non-sleeping day.

2. Accountability is the hardest attribute to develop in a modern manager.  For whatever reason, people are loath to hold their subordinates accountable until things get absolutely intolerable. Front line supervisors and mid-level managers must be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their direct reports, and act appropriately in response to demonstrated instances of poor performance.

3. Supervisors should take care of their subordinates, both in terms of protecting them and ensuring they have physical necessities to perform their work, and to ensure that they develop professionally within the company. This aspect of leadership is often lost on American corporate managers. I saw the best example of its application when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy. The officer in charge of my cadet squadron and I were getting ready to line up to get a meal at a field kitchen. He pulled me aside and we waited until all the cadets under my command were in the chow line and being served. Only after everyone had food on their plate did we get our meal. "As commander, you eat last," the officer said. The message was explicit-your job as a boss is to take care of the people underneath you first, and worry about your personal needs later.  In the same vein, the best bosses look to develop the professional strengths and mitigate the professional weaknesses of their subordinates so that they continue to grow as employees and develop skills that will make them more of an asset to the employer, and also better themselves.  By the way, the officer in question was easily the finest officer with whom I served in 27 years of active and reserve time.

May all of your bosses be good ones.

Tracking the Wild Employee

The advent of cheap and relatively unobtrusive RFID technology, along with data crunching capacity on a large scale, is offering employers lots of new ways to monitor and improve productivity in the workplace. This article discusses a fairly scary trend (at least, it’s scary for me): the real time, full time tracking of employee movements during the workday.

The radio tracking of people is done for exactly the same reason that biologists fit radio collars to high value wild animals - it’s possible to glean a lot of useful information from simply watching them go through their daily routines. When you merge productivity measures with this data, you can start to develop strategies that can help make the workplace a better environment for collaboration, concentration, and productivity.

For example, knowing that your most productive workers are interacting directly and closely with a particular group of colleagues means that you should schedule your work breaks for those people as a group, rather than at fixed times for each individual. Similarly, noting a correlation between higher productivity and face-to-face interactions might lead a company to cut back on telecommuting and out-of-office time for its employees. An indication that people are using their lunch breaks, to eat at their desks and check emails might lead you to upgrade the quality of your in-facility cafeteria to encourage people to eat together. You might increase the size of your tables in the lunchroom so that more people can sit at them together, and cut down on the size of your conference rooms, so that you can have more of them so that people can meet in smaller groups that seem to foster more productive meetings.

Even employee advocate groups don’t seem to have much of a problem with this kind of tracking as long as it’s done at the group level, and individual employees are not singled out for reporting. But it seems to me that individual tracking and sorting will be the next and obvious step - most employers want to be able to identify their most productive and least productive people and structure their performance improvement efforts accordingly. Once employers start focusing on individual movements around the office, I’m guessing there will be some type of legislative backlash to address the issue. In any event, this "collaring" is just another indication of the way technology is shaping employment management

Employee Expiration Dates

This is a fun read that hides a real truth-as companies change, their workforces need to change with them. When the employees in those workforces stay static, it becomes a drag on performance for everyone around.

The idea of expiration dates for employees is simply another way of saying that employers need to keep assessing their workforces, provide solid feedback and a path for improvement, and weed out people who either can't take the hint, or act in such a way that shows that they aren't willing to be part of the team. Identifying these people (putting an expiration date on them, to use the article's metaphor) is important, but putting together a strategy to keep refreshing and improving your workforce is even more important.