Why the train is the new office

There’s a certain romance to travelling by train. Even if you’re heading out of London’s Euston for the Facilities Show at Birmingham’s NEC as I am this week, there’s a distant echo of more glamorous journeys taken on the Orient Express. There are quiet lounges to sit in if you choose to arrive early for your train, or unlike planes where you must queue for hours, you can simply arrive at the station and hop straight on.  The hiss of the train as it glides into the station is reminiscent of old steam trains. The slam of the door, the station manager’s whistle and the grind of the wheels starting to roll out of the station all feel incredibly civilised compared to waiting in a bright airport lounge or at a bus stop in the drizzle.

And once you grab that cherished forward-facing window table seat, plug in your laptop and phone, connect to the WiFi and spread out your papers, you’ve never had a better office. Whatsmore, you need never move. Whereas the tea-lady has long gone from most offices, the train catering trolley rattles down between the seats, catching the ankles of the unaware, but providing sustenance to those embroiled in reports and emails. And from lunchtime even that most treasured of items: the G&T. For while an open can of lager is frowned upon on London buses, thanks to Boris, it’s de rigeur to enjoy a little alcoholic refreshment on a train.

Even better,  generally terrible mobile reception means that most phone conversations are pointless, so you can work (and drink) in peace, safe from interruption both from your own colleagues and fellow passengers’ conversations with their office.

The train is one of the few public places where it’s also perfectly acceptable to fall asleep (though not to snore or lean on fellow passengers, so beware). And the soporific nature of the train means that while one minute you can be immersed in the last year’s sales figures, the next you’re gazing out of the window at the fields full of sheep rushing by and are quickly in the land of nod. Which, if you look at any of the research into working patterns, is hugely beneficial. A 10-minute power nap can leave you feeling refreshed and invigorated, it’s just a shame that it’s frowned on in the real office.

But there are of course downsides to train travel. It used to be the fearsome stench of the smoking carriage, where you could feel the cancer developing as you hurried through the smog. Even seasoned smokers would prefer to sit on the floor of the corridor outside rather than risk a Newcastle to London stretch puffing away with their fellow smokers. Now the most feared of travel experiences is the train loo. The glamour of travel ends the moment you reach the electronic door (which has a habit of opening an inappropriate moments) and the smell of what I hope is disinfectant but can never be quite sure.  No workplace is ever perfect.

 

In defence of the office

Over the years I’ve written countless articles about new ways of working and they’ve all focused on the practical, tangible stuff – the buildings, the furniture and how the workplace itself has adapted to support people in their shiny new flexible world. I touched on culture change a fair bit, particularly looking at how the ‘management by presenteeism’ culture tended to be eschewed in favour of measuring people by their actual performance.

But what I hadn’t fully appreciated is the internal journey someone goes on when they learn to work intelligently, flexibily or whatever the latest buzzword becomes. We ask people to give up their desk stuffed with memorabilia, pedestals full of even more ‘stuff’ –their history – and give them a laptop and a range of ‘flexible working solutions’ and then tell them to get on with it.

Some organisations recognise what we’re asking of staff and do provide training in new ways of working, but many don’t  –  the budget’s all gone on the funky furniture and the workplace consultants.

And, as a result, many people struggle. They find that without the structure of day-to-day office life, they can’t manage their time properly, can’t discipline themselves to work and get distracted by other ‘stuff’. They miss the buzz of the office, and the familiarity it brings. And they find, because perhaps they haven’t got to grips with the new technology, that they can’t locate important files or connect to that key person. They find that without the workplace they can’t work – or at least not as well.

For people who work alone, or as part of a virtual team, it’s even worse. A while ago a senior consultant told me about someone who he’d employed who, after six months, admitted they found it very tough NOT to work in an office. They missed the possibilities that office life provides in abundance: to chat or not to chat; to have a quick impromptu meeting; to pop out at lunch with someone; or for a drink after work; to bump into colleagues in other departments or get the chance for that chat in the lift with the the big boss over from the US. That’s office life and when we dismiss the office as being something a bit naff and rather yesterday, we forget the essential role it fulfills as a social, as well as a work, hub.

As for me, after almost 20 years going to a defined place to work (whether that be old people’s home, library,  pub, shop or office) I’m now working from home most of the time. I didn’t have my first ‘work’ conversation until 10am today and I got a huge amount done with only the hamster to talk to. But I wouldn’t want to do it everyday. Tomorrow I go back into a workplace – albeit not my own – for a client meeting and I’m looking forward to it.  But there was one particular person I missed more than any other – IT support.  It suddenly dawned on me that when my computer struggles (and as a result I struggle) then the only person with the answer is me – or my ability to find the answer from the numerous online forums created by people for whom IT support is not an extension number but a virtual network of thousands of like-minded souls with similar problems.

Park Life

Local authorities have a new money-making idea to make up for the funding shortfall from central government – to charge people such as personal trainers for using the parks as their workplace. Potentially even professional dog-walkers and nannies could have to pay. Hammersmith and Fulham parks department announced the move recently. Parks suffer from “recurring activities that took place on a commercial basis, such as private football coaching, which needed to be identified and charged”. The council said this month that use of the parks is free “however, as soon as personal trainers start charging and making money out of the park, they are running a business and would need a licence,” a report in FM World said.

Personal trainers have argued that they already pay for the upkeep of the parks through their council tax, but there is a reasonable argument that as they’re using them to generate commercial revenue, they could not necessarily do elsewhere (or would be charged to do so) then they should contribute some of that revenue to the park’s owner. Other businesses pay for the rent and upkeep of their own workplaces after all.

But how far should this go? If you happen to meet a business contact in a park and have a meeting, should you contribute a percentage of the potential revenue, or a fixed fee, to the park? What about people working on laptops, or reading documents in the park (particularly working mums waiting to pick up their children from a nearby school)? Surely a vibrant park, with all different parts of the community using it, is an essential pat of community life?

Personal trainers aside, this is just the beginning of a problem caused by flexible (or agile, intelligent) working. Now that technology, and many organisation’s cultures enable us to work anywhere and everywhere, that’s exactly what we do. People have business meetings and work in public spaces from parks, squares and beaches to museums and galleries. They pay £2 for a cup of coffee and then sit in Starbucks for four hours with what essentially amounts to a mobile workplace. Only the hole punch is missing. And they expect to get it for free.

Local parks need to encourage that trend (and compete with the Starbucks) by providing facilities, not just for the personal trainers but also for the flexible workers – well-organised cafés with really good coffee would encourage people in to spend money and work, generating revenue for the council and creating a vibrant, fun space for all parts of the community. And how about installing some office pods-style drop-in workplaces for people to use on a pay-as-you-go basis – not just in parks, but in other public spaces. Like the 20p you pay for up to 20 minutes in an automatic toilet, the council could charge a fee to use a pod for an hour or two. My guess is they’d be popular with the legions of people who are not coffee addicts, want to work without the distraction of overhearing everyone else’s conversations, and don’t want the distraction of home or the office. They could become the true third space.

 

 

London: the city that’s never dark

I’ve just got my hands on Jason Hawkes’ London at Night,
a beautiful, glossy coffee-table book with stunning photographs of the capital in darkness. It is also a sad illustration of the light pollution lack in the UK’s biggest city. Because when I say “darkness’ I refer only to a lack of sunlight. Every image on every page is flooded with light. Some are street or car lights, or lights from bars and restaurants – all probably necessary to some degree. But the majority of brightness comes from office buildings.

And those where the reader is close enough to see individual chairs and desks appear to be completely deserted. The majority of the floors of the Willis Building at 51 Lime Street are lit and devoid of people; and this eerie emptiness can be found throughout the City, in the American-style office blocks in the Docklands and the More London complex near London Bridge which houses big names such as Ernst and Young and Norton Rose. The Gherkin is one of the few buildings which appears to be selective about its lighting requirements: a beacon of darkness in a city of shining lights.

Yes, cleaners would no doubt be accessing the floors of some of these buildings, and there would be some people working late in distant, unseen, corners. But the vast majority of the energy used is unnecessary, and costly to both the bottom line and the environment. When are designers, facilities professionals and building users going to wake up to the need to switch the lights off: either manually or through movement or time sensitive controls. It’s not as if the technology doesn’t exist. In theory we’re willing, but in practice it seems, we’re weak.

 

Loose lips sink more than ships

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the unstoppable trend towards mobile working and how, wherever you go, there are people perched with their laptop or talking business on their mobile phone. I had two concerns: lack of free WiFi coverage and a lack of consideration for ergonomic comfort. The day after that piece was published in this magazine I was on the Stansted Express when two chaps got on and started discussing their employer, a well-known facilities management company. Not only did they openly name the organisation several times but they talked about what they believed to be fraudulent practices and made derogatory remarks about senior execs.

OK, this was an extreme example but it got me thinking about privacy and confidentiality for mobile workers. Sitting in a Costa Coffee a few days later I overheard two colleagues talking about a major client and the contract renewal process (including how they could add in ‘additional costly services’ once the deal had been signed). On the train to a meeting, a woman was on her mobile to a client talking about fairly confidential aspects of their relationship. And at a serviced office space, I was sharing a table with someone and could clearly see the business plan they were working on.

Ask around and you find that this is a common experience. One facilities professional told me how she was waiting in a hotel reception before a FMA meeting and couldn’t help but overhear a chap talking about a named FM client to a colleague over the phone. Once the call was finished, she introduced herself and said she was also in FM. He went white. Someone else told me about a recent train journey when he was sitting next to someone who was working on an internal document about a new software product which was going to market despite several known glitches. And of course the press is full of stories about memory sticks and confidential documents left where they shouldn’t have been. Next time you’re out and about, look and listen and I bet you’ll pick up some interesting titbits.

You would have thought that much of this is common sense. But I think workplace managers and HR professionals must also shoulder some of the blame. I don’t think we take the time to train people in new ways of working. We take them out of static workspaces, give them a laptop and a BlackBerry and expect them to understand the etiquette of working in public. But of course they often don’t and they continue to work in the way they did when they were in private workspaces. We need to explain how people using those spaces need to adapt their style of working – perhaps by using code names when talking about clients or your own business in public; not naming people individually but perhaps by their job title; and being careful what confidential documents you work on in certain environments.

I’m writing this on the tube and don’t think I’ve been overlooked…

Crisis management and the Japanese earthquake

As crisis management plans go, Japan’s was a well-prepared one. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the Japanese have become world leaders in seismic technology and all modern structures are designed for earthquakes – and older buildings retrofitted appropriately. Buildings shorter than three storeys have reinforced walls and foundation slabs of a certain thickness, while taller structures have innovative earthquake-resistant designs that undergo regular review by structural engineers. Mid-rise buildings often rest on huge rubber or fluid-filled shock absorbers which slide from side to side, dissipating lateral motion and turning it into heat. Buildings sway in high winds but that helps to prevent them disintegrating into reubble when earthquakes hit. Every household is instructed to keep a survival kit with a torch, radio, first aid kit and enough food and water to last for a few days, and issued with instructions such as avoiding placing heavy objects in places where they could easily fall during an earthquake and cause injury or block exits; having a fire extinguisher to hand; and being familiar with the local evacuation plans in their area. Earthquake planning is a key part of all organisations’ business continuity planning, and the Japanese view crisis management planning as a core business activity – it is simply an essential way of life.

This is a country used to quakes as the Japanese archipelago is located in an area where several continental and oceanic plates meet. But the recent earthquake in the north of the country, measuring 8.9 on the richter scale, followed by a series of aftershocks many of which were larger than the earthquake which devastated Christchurch last month, a tsunami and the resulting nuclear emergency, demonstrated that no crisis management plan, however carefully prepared and well practised, can cover all eventualities. The crisis management plan for New York’s Twin Towers, for example, included the notion that a plane might strike the towers. But it was envisaged that this would be an accident on the way back to a New York airport and the planes would therefore be almost empty of fuel. Of course when the planes hit on 11 Septemmber 2011, they were full of fuel which exercerbated an already disastrous situation.

The crisis in Japan is expected to be the world’s costliest natural disaster – in the region of £100bn. As facilities professionals, all we can do is to plan for realistic and anticipated emergencies. No doubt, crisis management plans in earthquake prone areas are being revisited at the moment, and of course it’s a timely reminder for all facilities professionals to dust off the business continuity plan and make sure it’s suitable for today’s business – and continually rehearsed and updated.

But of course it’s not just earthquakes and natural disasters which can rock a company. Cotswold Geotechnical was fined £385,000 last month after becoming the first company to be convicted of corporate manslaughter. The sum amounted to 115 per cent of its annual turnover and could well result in the company’s liquidation. The message is clear: while the horror of earthquakes and the shocking loss of life make the headlines, a lack of proper health and safety management can quickly result in not only reputational damage and massive fines, but also in the company’s demise. And all this is in the hands of the facilities manager.

Working on the move

This week I have worked at my own office desk, at a client site, at the kitchen table, on a plane, a train, a bus, on the Tube, and in a number of coffee shops. While some of this work has involved reading magazine and newspaper articles, chatting on the phone and scribbling notes, the majority has been tapping away at the laptop. An FM case study of a Liverpool building, for example, was largely written in the waiting room at Liverpool Lime Street station and on the train back to London, and then finished off at home.

And I’m not alone. Everywhere I go these days, there are people perching laptops on their briefcases, tapping away at iPads, iPhones or BlackBerries and chatting to colleagues through Skype. People who defend the office as the only location for work need to get out and see the reality. People are working everywhere – and that’s just in the winter. On the way to a meeting in Pall Mall last week, I passed a businessman who had set up his laptop on the side of one of Trafalgar Square’s fountains (his IT manager would have had a heart attack) and was busy talking on Skype. And that was despite the temperature being only marginally above zero. When spring finally comes, every open space will be full of people working in one way or another.

But there are two major downsides – and I’m suffering from both. The first is the lack of WiFi connectivity. Last May, London Mayor Boris Johnson revealed his desire to convert the capital into the world’s technological hub with a free city-wide WiFi like Venice, Miami and a host of US cities. We’re still way off that in most of the UK. For those regular mobile workers, buying a WiFi dongle is an easy option for a small monthly charge, but for those of us who are only out and about occasionally, that extra cost is hard to justify. And the result is that you either pay exorbitant costs for one-off WiFi use, you try to piggy back off free connections (only to have them drop at a crucial moment) or you camp out in Starbucks where there’s free WiFi.

The other, more important, issue is physical comfort – or lack of. Us facilities professionals spend a lot of time ensuring everyone in the workplace is as comfortable as they can be. They have the right ergonomic chairs, adjustable desks, screens at just the right height (or laptop stands) but then the business comes along and gives people laptops and we know full well that they’re going to be sitting in uncomfortable positions for long periods craning their neck to see the screen. As anyone who’s tried to type on a laptop on a train table for long periods will know, you leave the train with your shoulders hunched up around your ears.

But few organisations seem to be concerned about the ergonomic suitability of all the locations that their staff are working in. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before there are a spate of claims for repetitive strain injury, and other health problems, against organisations for failing to provide the right working environment – and there have been several already. It will be the facilities manager who will have to shoulder the blame. We need to be thinking now (and I know many of you are already) about how we balance this desire to work flexibly with the need to 
be ergonomically safe and sound.

Hashtag fail

Search Twitter under the hashtag fail and you’ll come across a lot of examples of poor service, disgruntled customers and some almost unbelievable situations. Look for the hashtag fmfail and there are some great examples of facilities management failings, enough to make even the most robust facilities professional blush – the security guard playing solitaire in a City office reception and the receptionist reading news stories on the internet (thanks FM Guru), the security asleep when the FM turns up to do a site inspection (@stapletoncoach), the empty Klix machine during a swimming pool gala (@FM_day2day) or the retailer who plays rap so loudly in their changing rooms that shoppers are forced out (cathy_fm_world). BIFM deputy chair and powerPerfector consultant Ismena Clout (@iswhiz) added to the list when she went for a night out at a local restaurant and spotted the big aggressive sign in a restaurant to instruct people to use the loo brush after use – with no loo brush provided.

As a nation we’re renowned for being poor at complaining and being prepared to put up with some awful service but the joy of Twitter has allowed us to rant about poor service without the embarrassment of actually complaining to a person (big companies should take note – if you’re not searching Twitter for mentions of your company and responding quickly to complaints, then you’re missing a trick and what might now be a minor complaint could escalate very quickly when people retweet the more hilarious or serious complaints). Virgin has been very swift to respond to #virginfail tweets but other companies have not performed as well. It’s now known by BT customers that it’s very difficult to get through to their customer service department to actually speak to someone but if you post negative tweets about an organisation, they will respond more promptly. Surely properly staffing their call centre in the first place would avoid customers having to go public via Twitter with their complaints?

But do we reward good service? Asda is known for its very competitive pricing but not usually for its good customer service or friendly staff. So when an Asda delivery driver went beyond the call of duty and carried my shopping down two flights of stairs to my kitchen (not even the Ocado man used to go that far) I went on to Asda’s website to email my thanks to his bosses, so he would get recognised. Even though there was an option to complain, there was no way to simply make a comment or say ‘thank you’ so I ended up sending a complaint to say thanks (which probably never got read).

As an industry, we need to get better at recognising great service. Yes, there are various annual awards, but what about the numerous examples of exceptional service that happen in facilities management teams every day? Which is why @izwhiz and @theatreacle have suggested an #fmgoldstar hashtag on Twitter. If you have witnessed great FM, then post your comments on Twitter with #fmgoldstar and we can start to recognise all the great things happening in our profession and learn from them.

But don’t stop the #fmfail either – it’s good to know when we get it wrong so we can make it right. My next #fail is directed at computer manufacturers who bury the hash key deep inside the keyboard – they need to move with the times and have it as easy to reach as the exclamation mark. Moan moan moan…