 | Issue: | Latin America 2008 |
| Article no.: | 14 | |
| Topic: | Integrating our lives, time and space | |
| Author: | João Macias | |
| Title: | Vice President | |
| Organisation: | BT Global Services Latin America | |
| PDF size: | 274KB |
About author
João Macias is Vice President for BT Global Services Latin America. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s business and customers in 22 countries of the region. Mr Macias joined BT from Oni Group, a telecommunications services provider active in Portugal and Spain, where he was Chief Operations Officer. Before that he worked for Iberia, managing the airliner’s line of business in charge of telecommunications. Prior to this, he held a succession of management functions in Unisys Portugal. João Macias holds an electronic engineering degree from the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon University.
Article abstract
A growing number of workers work from home or in the field. Although this has brought great advantages – better work/life balance for workers, greatly reduced office and energy costs for companies, a smaller carbon footprint – there are many issues and problems to resolve. These problems include reconciling workers’ working lives with their private lives and the loss of team spirit, lower work motivation and a feeling of isolation that can jeopardize the creation of a corporate culture.
Full Article
Work is no longer a place we go to. Thanks to the convergence of information and telecommunications technologies work has gained flexibility in terms of time and place, becoming increasingly confused with private life. New forms of living and working are still a novelty, even for companies in the vanguard of this trend. Companies and their employees need to adapt themselves to a new style of life where our increasingly interrelated work, leisure and social and family lives can co-exist more comfortably. Although discussions concerning the new mobile and flexible work model of the post-industrial society have become the order of the day, the truth is we are still a long way from knowing all its implications and finding the formula for perfectly reconciling professional life and private life. It is also somewhat difficult to talk about reconciling, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to precisely establish the frontier between private and professional life. We constantly find ourselves having to deal simultaneously with work and our relationships with family and friends; we have to administer the situation without rigidly compartmentalizing the time and space we devoted to our different commitments and interests. Perhaps the new forms of production in the post-industrial society are leading us towards a situation in which people can no longer separate the different lives they lead, and all of these ‘lives’ will become integrated into a single life, as in bygone days. In pre-industrial times, humans did not separate the physical space devoted to work, family and play. Blacksmiths, for example, worked from their homes, with family and village life all around. Industrialisation and mass production radically changed this, with workers needing to be ‘co-located’ in order to work effectively and – crucially, as capitalism took over – cost-efficiently. Now, the different spheres of life are merging again, and the concept of a ‘work-life balance’ is establishing itself as the way by which this process is understood. This, however, leads to more pressure. The difference between balancing work with ‘family’, or ‘life’, in pre-industrial times, compared to today, is that in the former there were clear limits on personal productivity. The inescapable downside of technology, as an enabler, is that by enabling you to do things quicker, you end up doing more. When people can do more, they inevitably feel under pressure to actually do more. What does it mean to do more? For anyone who is familiar with mobile phones, electronic agendas and laptops, used together and in varying combinations, it is perfectly clear that these productivity tools often generate stress and diminish productivity, making it difficult to concentrate on a task, pay attention to a lecture, contribute effectively to a meeting or exchange ideas. The challenge consists in using technology to work better and, at the same time, live better. First steps In their anxiety to implement the best and most modern conditions for mobile and flexible work, many organizations fall into the trap of viewing it as just a question of technology – needing only investment in information and communications technology to become a reality. This simplistic view is based on the erroneous understanding that mobility and flexibility is just about technology. We still cannot predict the full consequences of the mobility revolution. As managers, we already know that it is not necessary today to tie a person to a place of work or define a fixed number of hours as the workday to ensure a person’s productivity. The UK government’s Project Nomad, was set up to help local councils to better understand what mobile/flexible work can be done, and how to do it. The UK government believes there are potentially benefits to be gained of up to £336 million pounds sterling per year. The benefits of the mobile/flexible work revolution have been widely praised around the world, regardless of the market or business culture. Examples include better work-life balance for employees, lower property and energy costs for employers, less commuting and a smaller carbon footprint per worker. Although this new way of working cuts costs for companies, which require less space in their offices, other costs are incurred as a result of home and flexible work including higher communications costs, travel expenses for meetings, and expenses with the management of this new form of working. Companies must also consider rebuilding costs (since they will, for instance, need more meeting rooms) and the cost of sophisticated media such as online document sharing, conferencing, social networking and blogs to engage staff in diverse locations. Having got over the initial excitement of the dazzling benefits of flexible work – anytime, anywhere – discussions quickly turn to the possible problems of abandoning the office: loss of team spirit, lower work motivation and a feeling of isolation that can jeopardize the creation of a corporate culture. Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual collaboration affects ‘people chemistry’ – a vital component in business, as well as personal life and relationships – and whether it makes young workers more autonomous. Linguists are debating how mobile communication changes language, and thus thought, itself. In particular, sociologists are questioning how mobile working is changing interactions between people, and what the implications might be for collaboration, business, performance management, and for society at large. A new culture The flexibility, freedom and productivity of the new forms of work still generate significant cost for all of us, whether one looks at it from the point of view of the individuals involved or the companies. We are constantly juggling the infinite demands on our finite hours from colleagues, friends, family and our own need for personal ‘me time’. We are adapting ourselves to a new organization of time, work and life; this demands effort on the personal level and for the company too – where, undeniably, management’s job has just gotten a lot harder. One cannot forget that in order to survive in a globalized economy, companies in any part of the world need products and services that correspond to the highest levels of demand. People, governments and companies participate in a single ecosystem. Alterations in the economy of a given country or location are reflected in other economies, other countries or even globally. However, at the same time global standards become generalized, the knowledge of local realities, and the capacity to operate consistently with particular cultures, becomes more and more important to a company’s success. Global, local, anytime, anywhere We are all connected, and increasingly permanently connected, to different ‘worlds’. The time has gone when one could not access the office email from home, when one could separate telephone bills, when it was possible to control the flow of information in a company. Those days are over, but the effervescent interaction that technology allows still clashes with the procedures that control company employees. The new generation, which is beginning to emerge into the adult world, is fully connected and always has been. These young people integrate their different roles much more naturally and certainly find it easier to work in collaboration and share ideas. Perhaps it is up to them to unblock, definitively, the flow of information, to dispel the idea of information as a good, a property able to confer power upon whoever possesses it. How can one talk of collaboration without sharing information? The collaboration technologies adopted by companies as productivity tools implement a series of practices related to the control and protection of information, and raise questions that will have to be resolved in the near future. These questions cannot be resolved wholly within the administrative sphere of IT systems, as they involve the entire organizational structure, and all the relationships between employees of all professional and hierarchical levels. The changes we are now witnessing call for an effort on the part of company management first to understand and afterwards to promote far-reaching cultural changes. These changes are imperative, in the short term, to keep the adoption of work mobility and flexibility from destabilizing the company so that, in the long term, better and more efficient ways of conducting business can emerge. Corporate cultures must change to adapt to the new society. In the same way, each of us, individually, needs to learn to make the most of what technology has to offer us to live our life to the full.
