Twenty Years … and still counting, no wonder I’m getting gray hairs

Lately I’ve felt that I pushed myself so far out to the edge of the workplace transformation envelope that I am floating in the exosphere of space, barely able to be pulled back by gravity. It’s a lonely place out here. But finally I think I have company.

 The January/February 2010 issue CoreNet Global’s industry magazine The Leader published an article entitled “Moving beyond Alternative Workplace Strategy: After 20 Years Can AWS Finally Scale-Up?”, authored by Gagandeep Singh and Nadia Orawski, two Deloitte consultants. At last I have found some people who seem to “get it”.

Their definition of Alternative Workplace Strategies (AWS) is the current incarnation, “a combination of practices involving space design and usage, technology provision, and HR policies that allow work to be done from a variety of settings beyond the traditional office environment.”

 The gist of Singh and Orawski’s premise is that this is all well and good, and even though technology is well-advanced in support, a very small percentage of companies have successful implementations for an even smaller number of their population, mostly in pilots. Their rationale for this failure of large scale deployment, and I am in agreement though not stated as strongly by them, is the lack of commitment to large scale-up.

 What you do for a small, let’s stick our toe in the water and test the temperature pilot and what you do for full-blown, company-wide enactment is entirely different. The actions in the areas of intent, commitment and support, both in polices and attitude, change.

 Here are key points extracted from the article that illustrate both of our points of view. It’s almost as if I had written it myself. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve expressed that telework, et al, is not a one-off program but a new business process, a way of working, at a distance, over technology, that has now become business-as-usual. Hmmm – maybe they have read my site/blogs. Wouldn’t that be nice!

 Key points, the bold is my added emphasis, are:

 “Integration and alignment across enabling functions – Corporate Real Estate (CRE), Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT) and Finance. AWS often impacts and requires significant changes across HR, IT, CRE and Finance. In our experience … large scale deployment requires systemic and sustained enterprise wide cooperation across these “silos.”

Outside of transactional job categories, productivity is rarely measured in corporations, so improvements to productivity cannot be proven. This is a “red herring” issue and should be stated as such.

 … AWS is not a space program but rather a shift in how people are “expected” to work (even if in reality they are already working differently than expected).

 … the “enterprise mandate” approach relies on a compelling business case with high-level executive sponsorship for large-scale time-bound change.

 A sustainable “business-as-usual end state … AWS programs falter due to their inability to evolve from a project focused approach to an on-going “business as usual” state that would transform AWS from being the “alternative” to being the “norm”.

 … AWS needs to become a part of day to day operations and not be a special project that requires large teams of specialists and the associated costs.”

 To this I would add one more key ingredient necessary for success of Alternative Workplace Strategies – Congruous Branding and Culture

You have to walk the talk. Most companies publically espouse their “want-to-be” culture but fail to match reality with the cultural vision. Lofty goals replete with corporate altruism are wonderful, and necessary. However, a company that refuses to be real about the gap between what they ‘want to be’ and ‘what they are’ can never bridge that chasm. A strategy or plan based upon a false gap analysis leads to invalidation of purpose, a waste of valuable time, energy and money and, no matter how well branded, funded and supported, ultimately experiences failure through incongruity.