Monday, December 2, 2002		Guest Speak

New work speed, new terms
Paddy Menon

Paddy Menon, Facilities Manager-India Operations, Global Development Center, Cisco Systems India.

AS globalisation continues to sweep across the world economy, businesses are being forced to adopt newer models and factor in cultural changes. The very concept of "work" itself has undergone radical changes during the past three decades, leading to increased overlap of "work space" and "personal space".

A generation ago, the average person had a 100,000-hour working life (40 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years). Today, we can do everything that person did in a tenth of the time, a mere 10,000 hours. According to Peter Cochrane, head of research for British Telecom Labs, "in the next generation, people will be able to do that in a 1,000 hours". With the increased use of technology in the work environment and the changing nature of workflow and work process, today this statement is not as implausible as it sounds.

In the old world, lifelong employment was the buzzword. Today the emphasis is on continuous learning. In the old world employees were expendable. Today the focus is on attracting and retaining the best talent to sustain competitive advantage. No longer is work compartmentalised and done in silos of privacy. Teamwork and interactivity are the buzzwords. Most young workers will, on average, hold nine jobs by the time they are 32.

All this places tremendous onus on facility managers to create sustainable workplaces that are flexible, cost effective and employee friendly. Several factors contribute to the design and construction of new-age workplaces.

Business needs that drive workplace design are multifarious. Team interactions across product, functional and geographic boundaries are now in vogue. Corporations are now creating alliances, often with erstwhile rivals, in record numbers. While the current workplaces are normally functionally organised around job responsibility and job role, the emerging business workplace design will need to be project focused, matrixed and team based.

Social needs of employees are also playing a critical role in designing the workplace of the future. With the adoption of technology, business decision-making and response turnaround time is getting shorter and shorter by the day. This places tremendous stress on the employee and there is a constant demand for performance and financial results. Work rage is becoming a common phenomenon in the workplace and people are finding it increasing difficult to manage their emotions at work.

In March last year, CNN reported that "many US workers may be working too hard, leading to more mistakes on the job, neglected personal relationships and higher health care costs". Many of us in India can undoubtedly relate to these tell tale signs. A facility manager’s job is no longer related to merely managing the immediate physical infrastructure. Today’s facility manager needs to be trained in areas such as behavioural sciences, emotional intelligence and social psychology.

Concepts such as alternative workplaces and telecommuting are also gaining momentum in India and the key to this shift in work mode lies in the effective use of technology. Today, companies can no longer pin employees down at offices and expect results. Neither can they let productivity decline from the numerous site visits, business trips, travel schedules and business meetings that occur throughout the year. Remote and mobile office programs are gaining popularity and there is proven evidence of its usefulness. In fact, in some cases mobile office programs have been shown to have a direct impact on the employee retention rate. Bell South, a US company, reported that 92 per cent of remote workers in the company said they were less likely to leave. Similarly, an AT&T survey showed 36 per cent of the employees would look for a different job if teleworking were eliminated.

Without doubt, technology deployment is emerging as a key driver in creating these new-age mobile office programs. Computers, Internet, satellites, advances in telecommunications, including ISDN lines, VPN, GroupWare, and video-conferencing capabilities, are redefining our communication paradigms. Real-time application sharing tools allow two or more users to see and use the same software application regardless of whether they have the application installed on their computers.

While the challenges are varied in defining and designing new-age workplaces, a common theme emerging is the need for highly skilled facility managers. The role of today’s facility manager is no longer to simply manage the physical infrastructure. Facilities managers of the future, skilled in multiple disciplines, will soon need to lead in the corporate boardrooms of tomorrow.