Technology Driving Change in Work and the Workplace! Who Knew?
Well – just about everyone. Unfortunately, no one is quite sure what the full impact will be and what direction the changes will take.
Well – just about everyone. Unfortunately, no one is quite sure what the full impact will be and what direction the changes will take.
How can distributed teams better handle the challenges of being virtual teammates: task management, communication and a-synchronicity complications—in addition to mastering the basics of great teamwork when working across distance and time?
Following the popular trends and doing what everyone else is doing may feel like the best option. But benchmarking other organizations can only tell us what’s commonplace—it doesn’t tell us what’s right for our particular organization with our unique set of circumstances.
Using interactive tools including interviews and focus groups, workplace strategists identify the most business-critical processes an individual or a team contributes; and within those critical processes, the most critical activities individuals and teams engage in to deliver successful outcomes.
In previous posts, we advocated for alignment between an organization’s workplace strategy and its unique combination of current realities and business strategies, as well as its brand, values and culture, to ensure the workplace is truly tuned and tailored to that unique organization.
We use alignment instead of promoting some definitive one-size-fits-everyone truth because each organization needs the workplace to reflect and enable their unique organization: their current realities, their brand and values, their business strategy for the coming year or two, their culture and its unwritten rules.
The last of the four keys is Adaptability: enabling the workplace to evolve as the organization does, keeping up with the speed of the business.
Moving out of enclosed offices into workstations is one of the more difficult workplace changes to make, since it almost always has emotional and political issues tied to it.
With an underlying concern about our own and our communities' health, we're also moving, literally overnight, into a place where working together is being discouraged and working from home is being considered the 'new norm'.
If only we had a consistent and reliable way to measure knowledge worker effectiveness. Just imagine all we could do with that—like testing a mountain of possible enablers to see if they cause improvements.