Tag: Productivity
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Why Big Teams Keep Getting Bigger
Large teams, like large movie studios, are more likely to generate sequels than produce anything new
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The Case Against Collaboration
The challenge is not to cultivate more collaboration. Rather, it’s to cultivate the right collaboration Morten T. Hansen One of the most popular arguments for getting employees back to the office is about collaboration. We need to be on site, we’re told, because collaborating with one another has been harder to do when everyone is […]
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The Great Resignation and The Relentless Rise of Work About Work
We really need to start treating people’s time as being more valuable than the organisation’s money. Mark McArthur-Christie In 2012 a civil servant in the German town of Menden wrote a farewell message to his colleagues on the day of his retirement stating that he had not done anything for 14 years. “Since 1998,” he […]
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The Hawthorne Effect: Why Employers Need To Be Cautious In Post-Pandemic Planning
In lockdown you can’t really experiment as people have constraints. There are too many variables at play. But now we have the opportunity to test out the best of multiple worlds; home, roam, office, wherever.
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The Productivity Paradox and Zoom Fatigue: Why Technology Won’t Solve Our Problems
“Imagine in the physical workplace, for the entirety of an 8-hr workday, an assistant followed you around with a handheld mirror, and for every single task you did and every conversation you had, they made sure you could see your own face in that mirror” Jeremy N. Bailenson –Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the […]
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Why Are Remote Workers Facing Burnout?
Employee fatigue and burnout was a wellbeing concern for many employers before the pandemic, but eight months in, the problem seems to have been exacerbated by granting people the very thing they coveted the most: unlimited flexibility. Are we experiencing the unintended consequences of working remotely?
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Why Do So Many People Want Us Back In The Office?
After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work – the office fightback has well and truly begun.
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Smaller, Flatter, Faster. Is The Two Pizza Team Finally Going Mainstream?
This weeks post looks at the two pizza team which was popularised by Jeff Bezos. In the early days of Amazon he instituted a rule that every internal team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas. The goal was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. Is it finally the time that our organisations will make the shift to smaller teams, not just because of financial savings, but because of their increased effectiveness and productivity? Read the post by clicking the link. And if you like it I’d really appreciate a share on your social network of choice. Have a great weekend! Best wishes Paul
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Did A Virus Just Bring About The End Of The Office?
Remote work has accelerated 10 years in 10 days. The only thing that could pull people back to the office is the ego of the bad middle manager scared of losing control – Chris Herd The revolution in remote working , when it came, was peaceful. Orderly even. There was no fightback from technophobe hold-outs […]
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The Way We Work Isn’t Working
The office, after management, is arguably the biggest inefficiency tax that organisations layer over themselves. They cost huge amounts to procure and maintain, they become an all too convenient base for meetings (another inefficiency tax), and they set a precedent for the expected hours that people are meant to work. Offices promote lengthy commuting which […]
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Continuous Partial Attention: Designing A Less Distracted Future Of Work
Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better – Nicholas Carr , The Shallows You’d have thought we’d have given up on the physical office by now. […]
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Don’t Let Busyness Kill Your Creativity
Last week I was getting a drink when a colleague asked me “So, you busy as usual?” I took a second to avoid my kneejerk affirmative response and went for it: “No – we’ve decided to slow down. Give ourselves some time to really think about things”. They looked at me like I’d lost my […]
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We Need To Promote Outcomes At Work Not Presenteeism
“Presenteeism is the biggest threat to UK workplace productivity. Workers coming in and doing nothing is more dangerous than absenteeism” – Professor Cary Cooper A full car park and people appearing busy at their desks is zero evidence that any meaningful work is taking place. UK productivity, our output divided by the hours spent producing […]
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How To Find And Kill Zombie Projects
According to Clayton Christensen , of the 30,000 new consumer products that are launched each year – 95% fail. Compare this with the public, voluntary and non-profit sectors – where hardly anything fails. The social sector must either be fantastic at launching new initiatives, or there’s a lot of things going on that shouldn’t still be living. […]
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Digital Transformation is Failing. Why?
“A key reason why true mobile working isn’t being implemented is because of management culture. The case for mobile working has been proven; it is the people who are the biggest barriers.”- 2017 Deloitte Human Capital Trends report The way we work , it seems, is no longer working. What we’ve long suspected – that […]
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Technology Won’t Kill Meetings – But We Can
Technology failed us. We thought the world of work was to be reimagined. The death of the office. The end of email. A utopia of work/life integration fueled by work-where-you-want technology. It hasn’t happened. Six years ago 2.8 million people made daily commutes of two hours or more. In 2016 that’s risen to 3.7 million. […]
Paul Taylor 