Published September 08, 1999
The popularized home office is a modern renovation to the formerly serious and sterile work place. More women are starting their own businesses, and productivity is rising.
More so than the daisy on the desk and the family portrait conspicuously framed on the wall, the alternative office is closer to an individual’s home environment while at work.
The stark six-by-eight foot cubical is not the environment for creativity and productivity anymore. Barriers of isolation are replaced by cooperative work groups. The conversion is a considerable challenge for management and associates, neither welcoming change, however promising.
“Getting people to change is 80% of the effort; 10% persuading the chief executive, and 10% is choosing the equipment,” says Richard Nissen, director of the Virtual Office in London. The idea of rearranging tables, chairs and walls is greeted, by the workers, much like the bombing of Dresden during WWII.
Frederick Taylor, of Work Study and Scientific Management, once called people workers “units of production.” Units of production, however organized for maximum efficiency, are still people.
The meaning of creativity today involves personal dynamics previously ignored as important to the design and management of a facility. Space planning, a holistic process, is clearly approachable. Aesthetic and efficient interiors support a company’s business objectives.
The layers of relationship cultures, within companies, are a variant mix of personalities, nationalities, visions, and creative energies. It is not, by definition, homogeneous. Tampering with the physical setting adversely impacts people who tend to become disoriented, disloyal and who could care less about the physical environment or, more fatally, the successes of the company.
Workers are frequent to accuse management of not listening. But at Cisco, it was the employees’ vehement opposition to change that festered into an internal war!
Cisco’s New York City offices housed 50 people and were expected to mushroom to 300 within two years. The space would be converted into a hotel-like environment.
Marina Van Overbeek and her team convinced Cisco’s management. But at the next meeting, 60 associates yelled and screamed for three hours of hell and ultimately turned violent, a physical attack upon Van Overbeek and her staff. “They were absolutely livid!” she remembers. “I truly thought they were going to kill me!”
“They seemed so illogical, but I calmly continued explaining the space redesign plan for Cisco worldwide,” Van Overbeek recalls, with a defensive tone.
At the peak of screaming and shoving, the Cisco management team finally descended upon their mob: “Why not compromise by working together as a team to develop the office space, or step aside,” they warned the staff.
Weeks later, after tempers cooled, Van Overbeek chose another meeting with just the ring leaders. They asked, “How could 300 people possibly work in this space?” Van Overbeek again explained: “There will never be 300 people in the office at once… that never has happened, therefore, it never will happen.” The antagonists finally understood; the war was over.
The New York City Cisco office is working in what they now happily call the New Workplace, everyone proudly taking credit.
Employees are told what to wear, where to sit and spend their precisely eight hours of work. Then the managers wonder, “Well, where are the ideas?”
Telecommute America survey reports that productivity increases when companies allow employees to work from home.
“Liberated workers should be able to choose the time, place, and tools to do their best work,” said Duncan Sutherland, school of business and public management at George Washington University.
“Knowledge creation is a multisensory phenomenon; the key to creative liberation is a rich sensory stew. But offices are constructed for entirely different purposes. We strip the smells out of the building, lower light levels to reduce glare, and thereby impoverish the brain.”
Logan Need, of the Farrington Group, concedes that our brightest and best office workers only produce useful work 17 minutes of every hour, on average. The alternative home office person-in-charge is actually working more hours per day, by choice, and contributing 46 minutes per working hour in the surroundings of home.
Some employers use Spyglass SurfWatch Software to monitor, in extreme detail, employee in-office online activities and compare it to their workflow, generating statistical reports to management. Is the employee a machine too?
Free from the employer’s automated stopwatch, occasional distractions are not a paramount pressure to reconcile. So what if the home office participant interrupts work to perform a domestic chore, or retreats to the refrigerator frequently. The work is enjoyably accomplished, and the time flies.
Twenty-five million people are self-employed in the U.S. (one in five), existing without a single memo from headquarters.
The wage gap, an index of women’s earnings relative to men’s was 74% in 1996. Closing the wage gap, since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, has been very slow, until recently.
Women-owned businesses in America now number nine million and are expected to represent 50% of all businesses by 2005. Twice as many women entrepreneurs, than of the male bastion, are successful. Women-run businesses, employing more than 100 persons, are increasing at six times the national average (source: Gregory Ericksen of Entrepreneurial Services.)
So what accounts for women’s success? They are more nurturing, a necessary commodity in this communication oriented business world, says Ericksen. “The skills required to communicate, to create networks, not hierarchies, are powerful. Women can lead a team and work among the employees. Mass- manufacturing and mass-marketing don’t play-out anymore. But customization on demand does. It’s a one-on-one economy.”
Attracting and keeping talent is a significant issue, and the women entrepreneur business models have the advantage. The challenge for them, however, is financing. Women are not easily permitted access to the capital markets, but tend to run service-intensive businesses, which require less equity. This too will turn around as more women demonstrate their prowess.