As the alleged “father of teleworking”, I enjoyed Pilita Clark’s examples of the obstacles to working well remotely (“Work at home if you can, but don’t expect it to be paradise”, Business Life, February 10).
I do have one quibble. Ms Clark says: “It is invariably easier to get something done with a person right in front of you in the office — and it is sometimes safer.” In my experience it is often much easier — and occasionally safer — to get things done when the people involved are in entirely different locations.
Most traditional office environments are dysfunctional: noisy; interruption-filled, and at the wrong temperature for many if not all of its users. It’s a wonder that anything gets done in them. I once had an argument with Tom Peters, an advocate of management by walking around. I claimed that, just because someone looks busy, it doesn’t mean that he or she is actually doing things useful to their employer.
Ideally, offices should be designed:
- for productive meetings
- for housing resources that must be physically secure, and for expensive or unwieldy equipment
- with a few insulated cubicles for ad hoc work associated with those meetings
- with workspaces for those who do not have access to suitable office space at home.
Results, not time spent, should be the criteria for good performance.
See? I get carried away sometimes. But I have been involved in office and work design projects all over the world. Ms Clark’s comments rightly hit at some of the points that almost always come up at the beginning of new remote work projects. The solutions are (here I go again):
- planning to avoid failure
- setting rules, requirements and expectations
- preparation and some training for remote working
- execution
- fine tuning
And then they all walk off into the sunset.
Jack M Nilles
JALA International,
Los Angeles, CA, US
"traditional" - Google News
February 17, 2020 at 12:01PM
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Letter: It’s a wonder anything gets done in a traditional office environment - Financial Times
"traditional" - Google News
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