Last week I talked about mobility and how important it is to the future of companies. Imagine though that this comes to pass and we enter a future where everyone works from home, there is simply no need to move from your house. There is no commuting and there are no office buildings everyone works on preassigned tasks. What would your company be like then? There are people out there that say your company would be efficient, cost effective and low carbon. They would be right but what they will have missed is that your company has no soul.
In general humans are gregarious and furthermore when working together in teams we have a much greater capacity than working in isolation. Many designs are formed and problems solved not at a stark white desk but in the kitchen, the tea room or around the water cooler. With a mobile workforce there is no centralised point for chance meetings to occur.
One evening a little while ago I got involved in a discussion of the tea room kind. It involved a good friend and as well as us several of his friends and a few of mine got involved in a lively debate. Together we put the world to rights and developed some new friendships to boot, and none of us had left our respective homes. That’s right we spontaneously created a think tank with no location barrier between us on Facebook.
Having used the word Facebook I’ve sent many of you running for the hills making cross gestures, but you need to reconsider. Facebook is not evil or a time waster in and of itself, it is simply a mechanism that can enable that behaviour. It can also enable a lot of good behaviours, used properly this kind of social networking can keep your company’s soul alive even after all the physical locations have be shut down. It does not have to be Facebook, something that works in a similar way will work too. It simply needs to give people ways to interact, without censure, so that they can find solutions or inject into someone else's work insights that they have to share.
People will use it when they are at home anyway, you may as well get some benefit out of it. This kind of social networking is the tip of the iceburg, with much more coming in the future so think about how you can apply it to making your business more sucessful rather than how you stop it.
In general humans are gregarious and furthermore when working together in teams we have a much greater capacity than working in isolation. Many designs are formed and problems solved not at a stark white desk but in the kitchen, the tea room or around the water cooler. With a mobile workforce there is no centralised point for chance meetings to occur.
One evening a little while ago I got involved in a discussion of the tea room kind. It involved a good friend and as well as us several of his friends and a few of mine got involved in a lively debate. Together we put the world to rights and developed some new friendships to boot, and none of us had left our respective homes. That’s right we spontaneously created a think tank with no location barrier between us on Facebook.
Having used the word Facebook I’ve sent many of you running for the hills making cross gestures, but you need to reconsider. Facebook is not evil or a time waster in and of itself, it is simply a mechanism that can enable that behaviour. It can also enable a lot of good behaviours, used properly this kind of social networking can keep your company’s soul alive even after all the physical locations have be shut down. It does not have to be Facebook, something that works in a similar way will work too. It simply needs to give people ways to interact, without censure, so that they can find solutions or inject into someone else's work insights that they have to share.
People will use it when they are at home anyway, you may as well get some benefit out of it. This kind of social networking is the tip of the iceburg, with much more coming in the future so think about how you can apply it to making your business more sucessful rather than how you stop it.
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