A masterpiece called project work

Worktech 2015, Melbourne, Deakin Theatre

Worktech 2015 in Melbourne was held in the iconic Deakin Edge theater facing the Yarra River on 4^th of March 2015. A variety of presenters provided a wide spectrum of ideas and insights to future of work: from gadgets to workplace vibe, spatial typologies to unworking, sitting as a killer to sensoring people flows. The themes that were most on the table were related to mobility and recruitment, wellbeing of the workforce and community engagement.

Are we heading towards a Hollywood model of work? Harold Becker from Microsoft painted visionary scenarios of how technology could help us to collaborate in a 5-10 year timespan. His team at Microsoft interpret that the socio-cultural change taking place increasingly in the near future derives from three major shifts: connected development, replacement of hierarchies with networks and the break down of corporate offices with less than 60% vacancy rates. He suggested that we are heading towards a Hollywood model of working with which he referred to movie production-type of team recruitment and project-like approach resulting in a demand for services enabling fluidity of both real estate and HR. Consequently, he envisioned manager roles to shift towards more team empowerment and humanization of work. He saw that in an attempt to support the evolution, we need to bring people together, live smarter through focus and flow, and enable friction-free creativity and fluid mobility.

Can there be a united culture for the mobile work force? Phillip Ross talked about Jelly bean working and the internet of things, providing scenarios of buildings as physical networks, quantified self and quantified offices. Tony Armstrong from CBRE discussed the increasingly temporary nature of workforce and highlighted the wellbeing of teams and the role of managers in empowering them through culture and trust building. He also put emphasis on workplace solutions as supporters of teams and a relatively recent standard called the Well Building Standard.

So how can supportive services answer these shifts? Are effective recruitment services and extremely flexible project room leases on-demand the way to go in the worklife of high performing super talent teams? Would it make sense to integrate LinkedIn and Liquidspace to serve the directors and producers of a masterpiece called project work?

Rytkönen
Campus dude, PhD student, an inspired adventurer surfing the waves of randomness

Access granted

Underutilized assets could be taken into better use through providing access

A large part of any organisation’s value lies in its people and access to silent, accumulated market knowledge. Due to internet and technological advancements in IT, all knowledge has become increasingly accessible for the public and transparency is increasing from an individual perspective if only one knows what to look for. This shifts the power from massive organizations towards individuals which can be seen ie. as an increase of smaller firms and their network-like structures.

The described shift has opened market opportunities for new service providers which provide access to pools of underutilized resources. Eckhardt and Bardhi underline in their recent HBR article that access economy is more precise a term to describe the phenomenon than the inflated buzzword sharing economy that has been on the table for quite a while. They argue that sharing includes a perception of empathy and engagement without monetary advancement, whereas access better describes the nature of the phenomenon where transaction but no actual sharing is necessarily included at all. Which ever the definite term, both individuals and organizations have access to an increasing amount of resources.

Larger organizations are challenged by this shift that provides individuals with more options and decision making power. This was a topic largely pinpointed in Worktech conference 2015 in Melbourne by basically all the speakers. The demands become more heterogeneous and the overall picture more chaotic – individuals need to be attracted to the workplace, or other alternative processes have to be applied to take the silent knowledge of organisations in use. Controlling the environment becomes harder from the organisation’s perspective and proactive, serendipity-searching individuals who actively network are able to generate more value in the access economy.

So could access economy be considered a killer of massive organizations, corporate headquarters and hierarchical structures? We don’t think so. Rather, we think that large organizations are overflowing with talented individuals, potential assets and silent knowledge that could be taken in more efficient use. This can best happen through supporting the proactive individuals inside the organization who use the available resources flexibly. Seemingly, traditional management principles such as command, control and standards are not as valid in the access economy but should rather be replaced with softer principles such as support, facilitation and applications in order to succeed. The access economy provides heaps of agile collaboration opportunities and flexible use of resources for organizations that accept the new economy and are willing to evolve along with the changes of the surrounding world.

-Eelis

Campus dude, researcher, PhD student, an inspired adventurer surfing the waves of randomness