What brave new world?

I’ve just finished a new and very readable book written by Bruce Daisley (an EMEA Google/You Tube and Twitter veteran) called The Joy of Work. The premise of his book is simple: we can make work far more accessible and rewarding by adopting a number of simple and easily-implemented techniques.

Which is great and begs the question: if it is so easy, why are all organisations not adopting them, wholesale? After all, making work accessible, productive and rewarding is the holy grail in organisational development and employee engagement circles. There may be many answers to this, but the obvious ones are – fuzzy corporate culture and the absence of a willingness to try and stick with simple organisational approaches that focus more on individual and team productivity and less on traditional processes.

Wow: that should be commonplace these days, surely? After all, with flexitime, a growth in part-time working, a more mature and nuanced approach to ‘managing’ people and home and virtual working, you’d think that the focus would be entirely on individual and team outcomes.

Sadly, apparently not so.

Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed reading what Daisley had to say, it did leave me feeling that the corporate world really had not moved on from the old time-and-motion days … not part of my working experience, although I have seen plenty of the old-ways approach of hours-committed rather than outputs delivered. Furthermore, the author laid some of the problems firmly at the feet of technology. Despite the rapid growth in technology-based work-process improvements which should have created the space for the work experience to be less stressful, more productive and more reflective, Daisley seems to disagree.

Do we really believe that the prevailing current working environment still feels more 20th Century than 21st?

The impression Daisley gives us is that the workplace is still a drudge for many people: the brave manager will take the bull by the horns and implement a series of simple, potentially counter-cultural actions for making the working life of their people more rewarding and less convoluted.

For the rest, same old, same old.

The focus should be on the importance of productivity, the reduction of unnecessary accepted processes and the power of teams. It is relevant to everyone in an office-based corporate environment, and its ideas are immediately deployable by anyone in their work environment. The challenge it implicitly raises for each of us is to confront established approaches and to commit to new ways of conducting ourselves at work.

Be brave; be productive!