UK Large business & public sector
The Power of the Individual. Instant globalisation. Connectivity. Zettabytes. And making “Working Your Way” a reality. Wagdy Samir, MD Smart Solutions, Cisco, examined the implications of the “new workplace” during our 2012 Singapore Summit.
Network connectivity is rapidly becoming the biggest influence in key areas including social communication and the workplace. Traditional boundaries between “at home” and “at work” are blurring to the point of extinction. [Read more...]
It’s that time of year when we look back in appraisal and forward with anticipation. For many I suspect 2012 has been a mixed year. Strange weather, floods, high street closures, double-dip recessions, unemployment, Euro woes and low confidence on the debit side. The Olympics and…well the Olympics on the plus side.
It’s been the same for me, a mixed year of uncertainty, concern and the occasional highlight. It probably seems odd then that I’m optimistic about the 2013 future of Agile Working. Here are my top reasons why. [Read more...]
I don’t know about you but my Christmas list has been gathering dust on the fridge for a month or so now; and it looks like it’s being strategically ignored by the people it’s aimed at.
Around this time of year I always forget my entrenched lack of organisation and start bullet pointing. I suppose it’s the time of year to be planning ahead and that’s why I do it; planning what I want for Christmas; planning what needs to be done before the big day; and thinking about what needs to be done at work in the New Year. [Read more...]
Last week, Frank Boermeester wrote about the National Home Working Day in Belgium. Frank referred to data showing few employers actively stimulate home working.
However, it seems things are changing fast. At the occasion of the Belgian national initiative, new research was released, be it by a different party. It shows more organisations are willing to allow home working.
A survey by Trends magazine, conducted for the third National Home Working Day, shows 74% of (Belgian) respondents now are able to work in a flexible way, including home working. [Read more...]
Today more than 2000 workers in Belgium will be staying at home. No, they’re not on strike; they’re simply working from home having committed themselves to National Home Working Day on 22 November. Here’s why it matters.
An initiative by several technology companies and the Belgian government, National Home Working Day is an attempt to raise awareness about the benefits of home working. Take part as an individual or company and you’ll be contributing to the nation’s quality of life (the ticker currently stands at 1606 stressful travel hours saved) and environment (529 ton and counting in CO2 reduction). [Read more...]
We all have a personal work style, whether it’s hiding our desk under masses of paper or creating our own paper-less bubble. From pots of chewed ballpoints and endless notebooks to holding everything in the virtual world, if it works for you — fine.
And use of collaboration tools seems to be as personal as work approaches. Just because collaboration tools are being hailed as the next big thing, doesn’t mean they’ll be adopted into the individual’s work style — at least, not to the extent the organisation might wish. [Read more...]
In his foreword of the white paper ‘The great technology take-up’, Don Tapscott makes the case for collaboration, co-creation and a new set of business principles. Tapscott, among others known as the author of Wikinomics looks at the changing paradigms in increasingly connected times.
When we use the term ‘connected’, we often immediately think about technologies, the Internet and social media. However, the world is more connected than ever before in other ways too. In his foreword, Don writes ‘the challenges of sovereign debt, economic malaise, youth unemployment, social unrest, resource scarcity and other problems are all connected’. [Read more...]
In the land of the woolly mammoth, prehistoric man was pre-wired to communicate face-to-face, in tribes – it was essential to survival. However, we soon discovered ways to communicate more and more effectively over longer distances. Haven’t we come a long way since smoke signals? Today we often have a raft of sophisticated technologies to allow us to collaborate at the speed of modern life. However, do we allow our pre-historic selves to dictate the way that we collaborate?
Face-to-face is easy to default to as the primary way of doing business – it’s familiar to us and it is sometimes entirely appropriate. However, we may be missing a trick if we ignore the power of the increasingly integrated tools for communication that we have that allow us to do business differently. [Read more...]
In the olden days, when all our team members worked the same hours as us in the same building, you’d take a breather now and then; maybe have a wander, use a trip to the water cooler as a reason to stop for a word with a few colleagues. Face-to-face contact encouraged you to build social relationships with co-workers that contributed trust to your work together, helping you collaborate and perform well as a team.
A staggering 83 per cent of us prefer face-to-face contact when dealing with people we don’t know; perhaps because we’re genetically programmed to collaborate in close proximity where we can learn rapidly about one another from facial expressions and body language. [Read more...]
