Daylight

One thing I really don’t miss about having a proper job is the lack of daylight and fresh air. Even if you are sat near a window, the ambience in most offices is of artificial light and stuffy air.

If you were given the task of constructing an environment that prevented people working efficiently but wasn’t actually damaging to them, it would be like most offices: lack of proper daylight (except when the sun hits your screen and you can’t see a thing); lack of fresh air (air conditioning is not fresh air); and inexplicable temperatures that are either too hot or too cold about which nothing can be done.

If you went further and began to construct people’s working lives around being unproductive, you would probably: insist that they all work at set hours irrespective of when they were most productive; insist they all came into a central location, possibly miles from their home, that is just like the place described above; make them responsible for things they can’t control but give them no responsibility for what they can control.

Sound familiar?

Zero-sum

Redundancy looms.

Apparently the department wasn’t going quite as swimmingly as we might have been led to believe. The head is confident that everything is above board, and everything has been done to avoid this; the gut is in a tight knot of anxiety and victimhood.

So, the next thing is to apply for one of the smaller pool of jobs that will be available. If I “win”, one of my colleagues will lose. That kind of zero-sum game is fine in sport, but not here.

Working hard at something doesn’t mean you are good at it

Two recent stories from politics got me thinking about working hard.

First, alleged dissatisfaction amongst Birmingham Conservatives with David Cameron’s support for an open primary to select the Conservative mayoral candidate:

Under Mr Cameron’s leadership, the Conservative Party has also sought to encourage people from outside politics to stand as MPs.

But the policy has been controversial among some party activists, who felt hard-working local councillors and party stalwarts were being sidelined.

Another story I heard on the radio (sorry, no link) was about proposals for elected police chiefs. A local councillor in Essex who is on the local police board was talking earnestly about how hard she and her colleagues worked at her job. Going to meetings with the police, with residents, listening to concerns, providing oversight. She feared that elected police chiefs who overshadow or supersede the role she currently fills.

In neither case do I doubt the hard work and conscientious, honest approach of the people concerned.

But working hard does not mean you are good at your job, or that you deserve by rights a shot at the top job.

Just because you are a “hard-working local councillor” or a “party stalwart” does not mean that you will naturally be good at being a mayor. If you would be good at it, then you will be the cream that rises to the top of the open primary process.

Just because you work hard and go to a lot of meetings doesn’t mean that you are effectively representing the concerns of Essex residents with regards to policing. Perhaps you are – but if you want to justify your role you have to say how effective you are, not how hard you work.

Social networking at work

Work have just started up an internal social network based on MySites.

These are the facts:

• You can create a profile, connect to calleagues (like friending on Facebook, but doesn’t appear to be automatically reciprocal), publish a blog, post documents and files for others to see, and generally tag and comment on things.
• There are about 400 “connectors” whose role is to generally test out the system, evangelise about it, and create content and connections
• After two weeks, only about 40 people have “complete” profiles
• Roll-out to the rest of the company will be around Christmas

There is a lot of work to do. Prior to it being rolled out to everyone else it needs to have generated a solid core of content (blog posts and files) and connections. The start has been very slow but hopefully it will pick up speed. I’ve started blogging and adding colleagues but not enough of the connectors are yet engaging with it.

I’ve talked about this kind of thing before, about how in a large organisation top-down communication isn’t enough. Traditional “water cooler” conversation isn’t enough either in a firm of 15000 people in many different locations. The conversation needs to be company-wide, and social networks are the only way to achieve this. I’ve added the chief exec as a colleague and asked if he will be blogging and generally leading the way. I await his response…

What makes a good business presentation?

What makes a good business presentation? I’ve sat through many a lecture and presentation, and certain things keep bobbing to the surface that make for a good presentation, and a bad one.

Last week I went to a presentation by the acoustics team – one of many specialist teams at the engineering consultancy I work for. Their aim was to give people from the other disciplines an overview of what they did, and hence why it might be relevant to our clients and our projects.

I think they did it back to front, and here’s why:

• You know how people say that when selling you should focus on the benefits rather than the features? The first section was all about the features – all about the British Standards they assess to and the planning regulations they address.
• Only then did they move on to the benefits. Some real life examples of projects where they had had a significant input to the design. This was much more interesting than the first part.
• At the end – after the questions – they wheeled out the single best and most useful part of the talk. Some simple models (as in actual physical models) that really neatly demonstrated how noise problems can be made much worse (putting noisy machinery on things that reverberate) and much better (the effect of noise insulation). This should have been done first, to set the context.

So, the ingredients were right but they were not mixed together properly. It went features-benefits-context when it should have been context-benefits-features. So if you feel you aren’t getting your presentations right but are sure you have all the ingredients you need – ask yourself if you are stirring  it all together correctly.

Finally, I’m moving closer to the view that Powerpoint is not just a crutch for poor presenting, but an unsullied evil that should be entirely expunged forthwith. Both the presenters were experts, and this was clear when taking questions and doing the demonstrations – clear, confident, interesting. The bits done to the Powerpoint slides were presented haltingly, and with little flair or interest. If you have to do a talk, know your subject, rehearse it several times out loud, and ditch the slides.

Micromanagement as a substitute for masterly inaction

Elsewhere, I have said that you should always look at the data.  That is not always the case.

When I worked for Norfolk Children’s Services, we reported monthly on the number of Looked After Children – i.e. children staying with foster carers. We looked at the total number, children leaving foster care, children entering foster care, the demographics and all that. “Benchmarking” had shown that the number of Looked After Children was “too high”. I’m sceptical – can you really compare the aggregate of such complex lives between one local authority and another? And surely, if a child needs foster care they need foster care and that should be that.

The Powers That Be decided that the number that was “too high” should come down. To this end, we were asked to report weekly with details of every child that had entered and left care. Why? What could possibly be achieved by this? The highly-paid head honchos were agonising over data that should have been the concern of the social workers involved and their managers. THEIR concern was and should be the children, but now they had weekly numbers to be implicitly judged upon. But if a child needs foster care he needs foster care. End of. Should the social workers decline to put children into care, or take them out too early in order to bring the figure down?

The Powers That Be wanted to do the right thing. But is it within the power or remit of a Local Authority to affect the number of children who are or should be in care? Surely that is far too wide and deep a societal issue for a council to solve. But when Something Must Be Done, that answer is unacceptable. If nothing can really be done, then the appearance of action (to deceive oneself as much as others) is necessary. When no meaningful action can be taken, only meaningless action is possible. Hence, an ineffectual but well-meaning micro-management.