Our weekly roundup of workplace news from around the web.
- From HBR: “To really improve productivity — and to be honest about what it means — you first have to gain a level of organizational self-awareness to understand what work actually drives value at your company, and then direct employees towards these tasks. This is pretty straightforward for manual work (e.g., assembly lines), but extremely complex when it comes to knowledge work.”
- The LA Times explores corporate coworking: “Long the domain of tech start-ups and individual workers, large companies such as FactSet, Delta Air Lines and home builder Lennar Corp. are now leasing co-working offices. And many are looking to do so for the same reason start-ups find the concept attractive: a hip environment and the lack of commitment a short-term lease offers.”
- In case you missed it: sweet new drone footage of Apple’s new HQ.
The HBR article implies people don’t know how to measure value chains. They did when it was a structured process but now unstructured work fills the day, we need to measure “what work is actually getting done”.
Our experience has been to split the work into simple scenarios; common multi-team work activities that have a clearly desired outcome (review a document, make a decision, respond to a customer) and define measures that fit the scenario.
What this leads to is an increasing maturity of access, usage, adoption and finally consumption measures by scenario. Real time dashboards exist that show how experts are helping on sales calls, or how many problems are being solved on the fly through ad-hoc collaboration. And these are connected with change campaign content to drive the change needed. Easy to do in this digital age.