Apropos last issue’s theme, a senior manager
pointed out to me recently that we’re approaching an inflection point: the next generation of
workers may not be as eager as its predecessor to “Live in their Email” – they will live in
Facebook, or some equivalent, instead. Indeed, most social media incorporate member to member
messaging, and many folks do use Facebook as their main interaction channel.
So guess what...
as if to confirm that exec’s point, this month I had my first case of a potential client contacting
me via my Facebook account. Is Twitter next?...
Cheers,
This issue’s theme: Work/Life Balance In the good ol’ days workaholism involved coming home late
from the office. These days, we knowledge workers take the office with us wherever we go, notably to
home, on vacation, and around the clock. This serious problem is to a large extent empowered by our
communication channels, which are accessible from ever-more-portable devices. And sadly, unlike the
old time workaholic working late, most of the effort today is a waste of time as people grapple with
information overload at its least productive. Figuring out how to balance work and life when there
is no hard barrier between them has become a major personal challenge...
What YOU can do about it
Actionable Tip The first step you should take to restore some balance
to your life is to set ironclad boundaries, red lines that you will never cross. For instance, I
myself never hold work meetings during my weekend (which is Friday + Saturday, so it clobbers a US
workday I might have used). I think I’ve violated this rule only twice in 27 years of demanding
globalized work. Having a rule you commit to helps push back on such requests – and guess what... no
one ever objected when I rejected their Friday meeting requests with this explanation. Food for Thought If you absolutely have to work after hours, you may
want to consider this: better devote an evening time block to a well defined task with a beginning
and an end (like, well, writing a Newsletter issue, or a presentation) than use the time for “doing
email”. The reason is that email is endless; it’s all too easy to get sucked into it without a
clearly delineated endpoint. If you choose a more chunky deliverable you will know when you’re done,
feel good that you’ve completed the task, and be able to devote the rest of the evening to family
and leisure. Just a thought... Analysis and Opinion When I drove the adoption of Telecommuting at Intel Corporation in the
nineties, we made a careful study to figure the optimal way of doing it. We came up with a one day
per week Work-from-Home policy, and a careful pilot phase proved this to be very beneficial for the
company, for the customer, and for the employee – the last because it added flexibility, which
helped people achieve better balance as they juggled the needs of job and family. In the following
years this mode continued to prove effective; whereas other arrangements, like working full time at
home far from any company location, turned out problematic.
It turns out that, as the saying
goes, God is in the details: the same concept of allowing work from home can add to the balance or
derail it, depending on the specific implementation and on matters like job type, the worker’s
personality, the maturity of the company’s management culture...
I’d like to recommend one
aspect that played a key role in our deployment and that I haven’t seen elsewhere: we treated
Telecommuting as a departmental endeavor, not an individual one. Even people that would not work
from home were part of it; after all, they would have to interface with their homebound peers, and
their support and load sharing would be crucial to the latter’s success. With this in mind, we would
launch the program with the entire department in an “off-site” training day where they would all
train and define together the norms and expectations that would make Telecommuting work in their own
group. It worked like a charm.
Solutions and Resources An interesting book on the subject is “Turn
It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career” by Gil
Gordon, which also has its own
web site. What makes this thoughtful book interesting is that Gil was a leading
Telecommuting consultant in the 80’s and 90’s; I myself learned a good deal from him when I led the
Telecommuting adoption at Intel. No one knows Telecommuting better; and he does the reader a good
turn by showing how to avoid abusing the possibilities by forgetting to disconnect.
Snapshots of Ingenuity Hats off to
Exaudios, an Israeli start-up that has perfected technology that can tell your emotional state
from your voice, as heard in a phone call. In addition to improving call center service and similar
applications, it even turns out that various illnesses affect one’s vocal signature, leading to
potential diagnostic tools. And the wordplay in the name is neat!
