GigaOm just cited Jim Ware's recent posts on the Worksnug blog about the value of moving from one place to another as the work you are doing changes:

"Here on WebWorkerDaily we recently posted on the musings of [former] Harvard Business School professor and partner in FutureWork Forum Jim Ware, who used a recent blog post to urge knowledge workers to shake up their routines and work in a greater variety of spaces. But what sort of spaces might improve your creativity? Ware throws out various possibilities from outdoor places to libraries and even sailboats. But a recent British study offers another suggestion: pubs and restaurants.

The GigaOm post is at this link, while the original Worksnug post is here.

And if you are a glutton for punishment, you can read the original article (published in The Future of Work Agenda in 2011) at this link.

Click on any month to access the full newsletter, or click on a feature article link to go directly to that individual article:

• March  (Feature Article:  "When Did Temporary Become Permanent?")
• April  (Feature:  "From Workplace Services to Workforce Support")
• May  (Feature :  "Growing Talent for Tomorrow's Industries")
• July-August  (Feature:  "It's Time to Rethink How and Why We Do What We Do")
• September  (Feature: "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow")
• October  (Feature:  "Don't Stop Talking About Tomorrow")
• November-December  (Feature:  "Picture That!")

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“Working with The Future or Work...unlimited over the past three years has been an educational and enlightening experience for our company and our customers. Not only is Jim an authentic, intelligent speaker, he is a gifted researcher who thoroughly thinks through and analyzes trends and data for the reports, papers, and presentations he completes for us.”

--Jessica Brown, Citrix Online

“I’ve spoken with Jim on webinars and worked with him on creating white papers. From these experiences I can say that Jim is inventive in his brainstorming and thorough in his creation. The white papers he creates for us are some of our best performing pieces. It’s really a pleasure to work with him!”

--Katelyn de Diego, Citrix Online

We will be leading and participating in several sessions at IFMA's Facilities Fusion Conference, at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel on April 11-13, 2012:

April 11

Work on the Move: Authors Roundtable

Jim Ware will be facilitating an open discussion with the authors of the new IFMA Foundation book, Work on the Move:  Driving Strategy and Change in Workplaces

April 12

"Change Management:  A Core Competency for Facilities Managers"

A hands-on workshop focused on mastering the core skills of leading organizational change.

"Managing Knowledge Workers:  How Do You Know What They Are Doing?"

(with Diane Coles)

A case study based on the development of outcome-based performance measurement practices at SCAN Health Plan.

April 13

"Getting Your Questions Answered at the Facilities Fusion World Cafe"

We have been working with SCAN Health Plan (a not-for-profit Medicare Advantage company) for over five years, first to design and then to implement a flexible work program that today enables over 30% of the company’s employees to work from home (or other locations) 2-3 days per week.

We have proven that those mobile employees are between 15% and 20% more productive than their office-bound peers. And the program has produced a 40% return on investment for SCAN for four years in a row.

SCAN health Collaboration Park

Partly as a result of the flexible work program we helped develop, SCAN was able to redesign its corporate headquarters office, producing a cost reduction of $7 million in facilities costs and supporting a planned 30% increase in staff with no increase in floor space. Finally, employee satisfaction and engagement have increased, and staff turnover has been significantly reduced.

SCAN’s story was freatured recently in an article in the September/October 2011 issue of Facilities Management Journal:  “Creating an AWESOME Workplace: SCAN Health Plan’s Innovative Office Space.” Contact us to obtain a copy of the article.

Photo provided by Diane Coles, Director of Workplace Solutions at SCAN Health Plan

Online courses and tutorials can be integral to an online business or website's success. Most offer information keyed to doing business online and some are available for free. However those that cost can often be written-off on your tax return.

Tutorials offer general tips, tricks, and hints at how to do something or succeed at doing it well. Formal courses offer grades, credit, and even degrees in commercial fields. Sometimes a course also includes licenses and permits, but not always.

There are plenty of online tutorials and blog posts on how to manage your online work, but if you are serious about turning a profit, you should definitely look into taking an online course in subjects like marketing, business management, and accounting. This kind of knowledge will come in handy when it comes to making your business profitable and not just sustainable.

Online courses can be great for those turning a hobby into a job.

You may know how to do what it is you are offering, but you probably do not know how to run a business. Being good at what you do is an important key to success, but knowing how to run a business is essential to turning a profit and staying in business.

You should never stop learning, though, and that includes improving your abilities. Whether you are offering a service or product, things change quickly, and it is your job to stay on top of things. It can also be beneficial to revisit the basics once in a while. There are online courses focused on many hobbies and interests, and many more tutorials.

Online learning advancement eliminates the need for transportation, parking, and usually time limitations. You can sometimes "attend" live courses and webmeetings, but you are often left to your own pace and study time. Tests can be taken from the privacy of your own home, without having to go anywhere. You attend classes at home, at your own leisure, as you see fit.

You are also free from the clutter of books and papers that accompany traditional advanced learning. Generally speaking, everything can be done online . Some major tests may require paying postage and mailing in a paper copy, but that depends largely on the courses you are taking. Tutorials do not require testing of any kind, though they may suggest projects for you to complete on your own.

Participating in online tutorials and courses requires great determination and will. If you fail, or fail to complete a course, then you are simply out your own time and money. You cannot make new resources when you squander those you have. But this being on  your own is also good practice for running your own business, which is much the same - it only succeeds if you do, and work only gets done when you do it.

Learning to live on deadlines and follow through on what you start are only two of the benefits to online learning. You can also improve your craft and how well you handle your business. You can learn to better manage your resources and turn a profit from your online business, hobby, or interest.

This post was contributed by Kelly Austin from Higher Salary.

Bob Fox, publisher of Workplace Design Magazine, has just published the December 2011 issue, which has several important stories on office lighting. But I'm mentioning it here for one self-interested reason: it also includes a nice, brief bio and photo of none other than me. Bob and I have many common interests. We spoke briefly at the WorkTech11 West Coast conference in October, and his request to publish my bio came from that conversation. Thanks Bob!

How much time do you spend thinking about, and talking about, the shape of the future that your own organization will experience?

We asked some very simple questions like that in our October Future of Work Quick Poll. We opted for simplicity and a quick partial look at strategic planning, rather than any extensive, complex view.

26 of our newsletter readers  were generous enough to respond, for which we are very grateful. We know that’s a very small sample, so we make no claims of statistical validity in what follows. However, the results are nevertheless indicative of a pattern we should all be uncomfortable about.

Our brief analysis of what the survey respondents told us shows that while some organizations take the future very seriously and devote significant time and energy to understanding its shape, many others do not spend anywhere nearly enough time thinking or talking about the future.

In the face of the uncertainties and pace of change we all know are affecting every organization, that’s real cause for concern.

First, an overview of the respondents. we had a very bimodal distribution of firms: 35% of the respondents work for organizations with over 5,000 employees, while another 35% are either self-employed or work with less than 10 other people. The other 30% were spread out between 10 and 500 employees.

Figure One:  Size of Organizations

The functional areas represented ranged across a wide spectrum:

• Owner/CEO/President  (24%)
• Consulting/Coaching/Research  (28%)
• Marketing/Sales  (8%)
• Real Estate/Facilities Mgt. (8%)
• Other  ( 20%)

The 24% who are senior business executives come almost exclusively from the smaller companies, while the Marketing/Sales and Real Estate/Facilities executives come from much larger organizations (those with more than 1000 employees).

Now, what did we discover about the way these organizations approach strategic planning and think about the future?

Almost three-fourths of all respondents (72%) do construct a formal long-range strategic plan. For large organizations, the number is 89%. In itself that is not surprising. However, 50% of all respondents update their plan once a year or less; a third (33%) update the plan quarterly or more often, which seems like the minimum time frame needed given the immense uncertainty in the current economy.

Figure Two: Frequency of Plan Update Now comes the really interesting part. We commented in the September article, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”:

In their classic text, Competing for the Future, [Gary] Hamel and [C.K.] Prahalad reported that most senior executives spend less than 40% of their time focused on the world outside their own organization, only about 30% thinking about the next three to five years, and no more than 20% of their time talking with their colleagues about the future to build a collective view. In other words, only about 2.4% of management time (40% x 30% x 20%) is focused on building a corporate view of the future (Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, p. 4.).

This Quick Poll included three questions that enabled us to reproduce that kind of analysis for our sample. Here’s what we found:

• Average amount of time focused on the external world:  20%
• Average amount of time focused on the next 3-5 years:    15%
• Average amount of time in conversation with peers about the future:       19%

That translates into only 0.6% of management time being spent building a corporate view of the future (20% x 15% x 19%)--about 15 minutes a week. And that is only one-fourth the amount of corporate time focused on the future that Hamel and Prahalad found among senior executives way back in 1994.

0.6% is an appallingly low number! Faced with increased complexity, increased volatility, and increased uncertainty, how can any senior executive justify spending so little time sorting out the future?

Isn’t it time to begin thinking much more seriously about what lies ahead?  Of course, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, the future is less predictable now than at any time I can remember. But throwing your hands up and burying your head in the sand (apologies for the horribly mixed metaphors) is no way to deal with the future.

We’ll comment about this issue in more detail in future articles and blog posts, but the most obvious advice I can offer is to start right now to set aside more time in your already-overloaded week to scan the environment, to build scenarios (see “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” September, 2011), and to talk with your colleagues about the future every chance you get (“Don’t Stop Talking About Tomorrow,” October, 2011).

Facilities Management Journal

September/October 2011

by Diane Coles, MCR, and James Ware, PhD

SCAN Health Plan® is the fourth largest not-for-profi t Medicare Advantage health plan in the United States. The company serves the needs of more than 128,000 members in California and Arizona. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, USA, SCAN was founded in 1977.

SCAN’s corporate mission is to find innovative ways to enhance senior citizens’ ability to manage their health and to control where and how they live as long as possible. Why shouldn’t SCAN employees have the same control over where and how they work? That’s exactly what the workplace solutions team did by creating an “Alternate Workspaces Engaging Staff & Office Management Efficiencies” or AWESOME project.

Please note that the FM Journal is accessible online only with an IFMA member login. Contact us directly to obtain a single copy of this article

My good friend and colleague Joan Blades has just posted another thoughtful article about the virtues sand values of teleworking ("Telework: Help Solve Climate Change by Staying Home"). She starts with this:

Would you believe me if I told you that we could take a big step to combating climate change simply by staying home from work? Rather, I should say, staying home and working.

And she ends this way:

As far as climate solutions go in this age of partisan deadlock, teleworking appeals equally across the ideological spectrum. (Need proof? Check out this Forbes op-ed I co-wrote with avowed conservative Ralph Benko.) Apolitical, great for business, and hugely popular? Teleworking might well be the best immediate opportunity we have, right now, to make serious headway reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and combating climate change.

Read what's in the middle; it's well worth five minutes of your time. Joan Blades is the co-founder of two important national movements:  MoveOn.org and Momsrsing.org. And she is the c0-author of an excellent book on flexible work, The Custom-Fit Workplace:  Choose When, Where, and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line.