“…what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause..”

It can be said that one icon alone represents the descent of workplace design into mediocre homogeneity more than any other: the slide.

Misconceived, trivial, embarrassing and regrettably ubiquitous, they have become the unfortunate vermiform (from the Latin “worm shaped”) appendix that performs as much use as our own. They are just as liable to become toxic and in need of whipping out to leave no effect on the host other than a small scar and a deep-seated feeling of relief.

Here are a few reasons why it is time designers should let the idea quietly slip away, and pretend it never happened.

• Novelty is great – once. Its shelf life is inherently short. After that it’s just not funny or interesting anymore. But when it’s repeated over and over, it stands a slim chance of becoming mainstream if it can justify its usefulness – in which case it’s not – by definition – fun or interesting anymore. The slide isn’t useful. Either way, once was only ever going to be enough.
• Given the novelty value, replicating the idea – then just making them longer, weirder, snakier, brighter – is lazy, unimaginative and disrespectful design. It’s been done. If the client wants “different”, then think of something else. Something that hasn’t been done. That makes it different.
• The consequence of the slide is that it unnecessarily demeans the design profession. Otherwise able to make a serious and informed contribution to workplace effectiveness, where designers are asked to “make us cool, put a slide in”  it’s like asking a Masterchef finalist to knock up some donuts. A sugarburst, when nutrition is required. If the designers suggest putting a slide in themselves, they are offering to make donuts. With sprinkles.
• A slide is fundamentally impractical. You can’t carry anything on one. Technical point, but even in a smart casual or casual-dress environment (“play clothes” not being a recognised form of attire), adults generally wear adult clothes and shoes, that don’t work on a slide. There is also no graceful way to dismount a slide with everything about you intact. Which brings me onto….
• Slides are part of the unfortunate genre of misplaced “fun” elements in workplace design (along with fussball, climbing walls, table tennis tables etc) that are fundamentally masculine – the modern equivalent of the black leather, smoky glass and chrome office set-up. They only serve to reinforce the notion that the workplace is a male environment. It is design straight out of Nuts or Stuff magazine, the titles of which tell you all you need to know.
• They are installed in a mistaken belief that they appeal to younger workers. That’s fine if the target demographic are under eight. Thankfully most people entering the workforce, since around late Victorian times, are sixteen and over, and have long since abandoned the playground. Other than those who appear on the Apprentice. Who haven’t.
• They are installed in a mistaken belief that they support learning and development through play. This trivialises and fundamentally misunderstands what this means. A slide makes no contribution to L&D whatsoever.
• They are considered by their advocates to be liberating, but they are in fact the reverse, an inhibitor, a contribution to the compulsion of the occupants of a space to a prescribed way of being, living and working. A slide is useful for one thing only. By definition it tells you what to do and how to do it, and offers no possibility of interpretation or free expression.
• You are just not going to use it, are you? Especially in front of your team, your guests, or (extra especially) your boss. For the majority of occupants of the space, they are simply embarrassing, and so are ignored and left to quietly gather dust. You can tell the person who is still excited by the novelty: dusty trousers.
• They say something about your organisation. And it’s not a good thing. It reflects much of what is said above. And that means you personally are associated with it. “Oh you work in that place with the slide? Yeah, great. Hey, isn’t that Pippa over there? Must go and have a word, excuse me”.
• Finally, the metaphor is wrong. In the human condition, “upwards” is good and “downwards” is bad. Ladders go up, slippery snakes take you down. Underground, the underworld, under pressure. In an episode of Peppa Pig (bear with me – you are learning through play) the characters are dressed in national costumes, and are in the playground. The narrator tells us what each are doing in terms of the nation they represent, and first announces “The United Kingdom is on the slide”.

Like everything in the playground, it’ll end in tears.

 
We talk much of the “death of email”, a declaration as premature as the paperless office – or even the cordless office. Or post-Taylorism for that matter.

What is more interesting however, with the proliferation of alternative messaging channels – all of which as direct messaging systems mimic the essential purpose of email – text, the multitude of IM systems and apps, Twitter, Facebook, etc – is the essential character of the messaging they most frequently carry.

At times when I have been most under pressure at work, sensing a nausea at what I may find each morning when I switched on my growing number of devices, email has been the last thing I have looked at. That’s because email has become the trusted medium for bad news. The other, newer platforms carry the positive news.

Yet as with many modern alternatives, email was once itself a tool of fascination and excitement. I remember a student at University in 1990 showing me how she was communicating with a friend at another university using a DOS computer. There was a frizzle about the opportunity it presented that drove the positive, upbeat and personal character of the content from them both. It was exciting, it was the birth of something with the most amazing potential.

[Twenty three years pass]

But now – got some bad news? Want to ruin someone’s day before it’s barely begun? Invade someone’s evening, or hard-worked for holiday? Want to create needless angst and emotion through being misunderstood or misinterpreted, even though you believe that by “writing it down” it will be less likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted? Want to make sure everyone else knows too, even if they are barely involved? Say it with email.

Because if you’re going to learn the following, chances are it will be by email:

• Your project has been cancelled
• A customer has gone straight to your boss with a complaint
• You are needed in New York first thing Monday morning (its now Saturday afternoon)
• There is a compulsory conference call set for tonight at 1am (its now 9pm and you are three glasses of wine in)
• Your strictly confidential note was circulated globally, including to those you mentioned

Because we have fallen out of love with it, and are no longer excited by it, so we use it for bad news.

E-mail isn’t dead. It’s the coffin.

First published in OnOffice magazine, Workessence talked to Perry Timms (@PerryTimms), ex-public and Not For Profit Sector HR practitioner now independent, indefatigable and indeterminable. He believes in a new way for the thing we call work and that it starts with a movement best described as #PunkHR. For more excellent blogging from perry see his blog site.

W:  “I clambered over mounds and mounds of polystyrene foam” to be here – because when I first heard X Ray Spex back in 1978 my life changed. It was a seminal moment. It blew everything I thought I knew or liked out of the water. With the first few bars I knew nothing would be the same again – and when the late Poly Styrene (RIP) ripped in with the vocal, everything became possible. For most of us who experienced punk as teenagers, it has left a lasting impression. So the use of the term to describe your #PunkHR movement fascinates me. What’s the essence?

PT:  That same sense of “something radical needs to happen” without necessarily forcing a movement to be created. Rebellious spirit, positive deviance, attitude with acumen, credibility but chaos.  I loved Punk for what it did to the musical world and it seemed natural to tag something needed in HR that felt similar. The sense of excitement is so lacking in HR yet we have the most gifted element of any part of business – people and their contributions that we call work.  So it’s so beige it pains me.  Hence having a Rebel Yell…

W: So what does that mean for HR – and more importantly what does it mean for the people of an organisation if their HR function is “punk” ? Will they see something different, will their experience in the workplace be different as a result?

PT:  Great follow on! More complexity, more challenges and yet more of the same simply does not compute. The “model” is outdated and despite attempts to install a new version of HR (Ulrich Model and Next Gen HR) we still find ourselves looking and feeling, acting and delivering in a largely 1990’s version of work – an undynamic professional era – struggling to assert the right level of influence in the right areas. So, if HR had more attitude and acumen, was braver, more innovative and impactful then the result upon “work” will be profound.  It would be like Punk rockers wearing tweed jackets, corduroy trousers and listening to Yes. The fundamental difference a shift like PunkHR would bring to the workplace is bounce, belief and a sustainable future.

W: The danger is interpreting this “punk” attitude in workplace design is that we rush headlong into the dire world of novelty, where we thing that adding coloured vinyl and the modern equivalent of safety pins creates engagement and life. It might do for all of five minutes, like a pair of Christmas socks, but the downside is like coming off a sugar hit – a loss of energy and inspiration, and a deathly feeling of disappointment. So how do you think we might see a “punk” attitude translate into the physicalities of the workplace?

PT:  Physicalities is a really interesting angle and you’re right about dissipation and vaporising of the positive impacts.  So I think we HAVE to create a feel that the workplace is the opposite of cubicles, beige chairs and grey carpet with values posters and motivational rowing pictures on the wall.  Massive clear glass graffiti boards where we put thoughts, images, drawings, words of wisdom and taxing issues to inspire, stimulate and generate discussion linked to online capture of these boards onto the open-source, ever-updating corporate “fliptranet”.  Where no-one has the same furniture and any resemblance to 1984 is overcome by a random collection of locally built, recycled/reclaimed or beloved chairs, and desks come together like something from Steptoe & Son’s yard.  Character over Ikeafication.

W: I am loving this, can you keep going?!

PT:  Fluid not hard wired. Where there are no rabbit warrens, where meetings are held around coffee-shop like locations/warehouse decorated zones, where creative capture mechanisms are everywhere like iPads, white boards, mics, video cameras and editing software for instant film/Vine/Vimeo production, where a video wall plays the latest curated content from internal twitter feeds, where people consider the look and feel as their own and where they take pride in the place they call work as if it were their favourite gig haus where Punk and Ska bands play. Where and how people are organised and sit is important. Punks would have hangouts that varied but they chose a few places to “worship and collude”…. 

W: Wow that’s like a Dickies song. So – in a nutshell?

PT:  We need to be more radical about our physical space than anything else if #PunkHR really is about a lasting alternative to bland working life. Make the working environment the most poetically chaotic possible to create the most outrageous feel, and the attitude will flow. 

W:  I think we can agree on that….now, I’m going to get my ukelele.

This is the second post from the CIPD HRD Conference.

Employers are from Mars, Young People are from Venus is the title of a CIPD publication, subtitled “addressing the young people/jobs mismatch”. There is an immediate presumption that somehow there is a mismatch. Is it just that it is difficult for young people to find jobs because society, education and employment have changed – or is it simply the way it has always been and always will be? Or that we expect to have learned something, and so could use the benefit of our hard-won experience to try harder to ease young people into the workplace?

While listening to a panel of speakers committed to the exercise, followed by a short debate with the usual and expected blame oscillating between SME’s and large corporates, and then between young people themselves not wanting to work and corporates not understanding them, the mists closed and I recalled my own personal search for my first proper job in the middle of a recession in 1985.

Firstly I prepared to leave with a fairly useless piece of paper under my arm, a degree in politics and international relations. Which is good for a career in – well, nothing, not even politics and international relations. It’s great now for blogging – it’s never been more of a resource. Give me Plato over any of the MBA glitterati anyday. If only I could have claimed that at the time.

I had no idea what I wanted to do, because I didn’t really know what was available. I still don’t, but at the time I did what all undergrads do and whistled in the wind with the Carers Advisory Service at my university. If ever an hour were so worthlessly spent. I really didn’t want to be an actuary, actually. I even wrote a song about the experience  a while ago with Doug Shaw, Human Resource.

I did what I was told and prepared a CV. Name, address, I didn’t have a phone so that part was blank, as then was the rest of the page. Sure I had been a prefect and played football and cricket and was interested in international travel (which was actually an aspiration as without a job I couldn’t afford it) and photography (I didn’t have a camera). I concluded early that CV’s were great when you had actually had a job. Without a job, I was being forced to make an adult concept fit a juvenile problem.

Then there was the Milkround. I would actually have been better off doing a milkround. I filled in countless forms for jobs I didn’t want with companies I had either never heard of or made me itch, and wondered if l my pie-eyed dreaming had come to this sorry state.

I even bought a suit. But I couldn’t help myself, the black on with the tint flecks in, slim strides and pop-out silk hankie from a very cool indie shop in Brighton seemed so much more interesting than the navy on in C&A. It just wasn’t quite the right look for an interview, even if I did feel cooler than Perry Timms. Not that I knew Perry then of course. And no-one was there to tell me I looked cool but unemployable.

I had some interviews. “So what experience have you had?” – well none actually, I am looking for my first job. We had a competition in our shared house to see who could accumulate the most rejection letters – hampered mainly by those organisations that didn’t bother to send one.

I ended up taking the civil service Executive Officer exam and getting my first job that way – in a way avoiding he usual perils of navigating my way through recruitment in the commercial sector. So I never did compete with all of the other graduates with equally useless degrees pouring out of provincial cities, trying to avoid having to return “home” to live. I then spent several years trying to get out of that job, albeit I did have the comfort of being paid at the time, and learning a few things.

To ensure I experienced the same disillusionment all over again, having returned to university in 1990 to take a MSc in IT, I left in 1991 with a vocational qualification but in the middle of another recession – and my experience was even more soul-destroying than the previous time. I even had a CV with decent managerial job experience on it, and a plain suit.

Either time did I get any feedback? No. Did I receive any mentoring or training, or vaguely useful careers advice? Not that I can recall. Did I find employers willing to listen, sympathetic to the needs of young people, treating us as vulnerable human beings full of energy and talent? No, I don’t think so. Did I fin the education system provided excellent grounding in preparing me for the world of work? I can’t believe I just asked that question.

New Model Army released a song in 1985 – when I first left university – entitled “Young, gifted and skint” – it could just be about the challenges faced by young people today. We expect with the benefit of time to be able to resolve things, so that the experience should be better for our children than it was for us. The circumstances are different, but the situation is the same – moving from education to work is tough. Yet the very reasons why it’s more a problem today may just be the reasons why it’s not.

The labour market may be more complex with a far greater variety of jobs in play but while it may be more difficult to determine what you actually want to do the variety presents a richer choice. While the technological basis of the economy has led to the creation of a greater proportion of more highly skilled jobs, there is greater access to learning than ever before. The offshoring of many entry level jobs has created new jobs required by that offshoring. As employers have developed higher expectations, there is easy access to far more and high quality guidance and advice on how to prepare to meet those expectations. While you still have to prepare your credentials, a CV is by no means the only option – there are so many more creative outlets. As the workforce ages, the opportunities for younger people are opening. And if the prospect of being employed jus just too depressing, starting your own business has never been cheaper or easier – still as risky, but the barriers are lower than ever.

I can’t tell you if it’s any more difficult to get started in work now than it ever was twenty eight years ago. Or twenty two years ago. The CIPD report will certainly spark some debate and has had excellent media coverage. It will probably do some good as a result.

Luxury.

I have been privileged to be asked to blog from the CIPD HRD event on April 24 & 25. There follow a short series of posts from my observations in areas of interest. This blog site makes a point of not discussing specific organisations, so the names have been changed to protect those who were happy enough to stand up and talk about themselves anyway.

Session: Managing junior & senior stakeholders through change

Eloquently and enthusiastically presented, both A-Org and R-Org walked through their transformational projects, sucking in culture, structure, management style, policy, process, expenditure, technology, communication, reward and recognition to the extent that it was difficult to ascertain what had been omitted. In such instances there is an ease in which it is possible to be drawn into the bristling enthusiasm and unshakeable sense of purpose, just the occasional sigh giving a hint to the inevitable battle scars and retreats.

A-Org the sage parent to R-Org’s youthful effervescence, both followed the timeworn DMAIC approach – define, measure, analyse, improve control. We were bon into this cerebral method, and so to shake it off is not like removing an overcoat it’s like shedding an only skin. There was no discovery of a positive core, no determination of what was working – instead a problem orientation, and a resultant language of problem. That is not to detract from the success of the projects, just to reflect on how they might have been differently positioned. And we can only wonder whether there is a company left in the world that has not had a “One [Insert Company Name]” initiative to underpin their transformation.

There were times too when the R-Org project sounded like an assignment in the Apprentice, using the clichéd jargon of business (especially in its vision statement) that sounded as natural and comfortable as chewing a golfball. Fortunately some refreshing terms like “Brain Candy” (a suggestions scheme) emerged to get us away from competency frameworks and cascades.

As a credit to the presenters and their passion, I wanted to know more principally around two questions that apply to most such projects:

• What was actually working before the project started? The degree of transformation deemed to be required indicates that the previous situation was verging on the critical. How does an organisation manage to get itself into that situation? How did it lack the awareness to change, such that only a transformation would suffice? So what was actually working that enabled it to realise a transformation was necessary? The answer is probably embedded in the second question.
• Where to now? A-Org left with a Darwin quote about the need to adapt to survive, but there was little time to explore how the transformation in each case could become a perpetual journey, and the new organisation embody this. There was a sense that the transformation delivered the new reality, and the team and the energy had been demobilised accordingly. Yet that’s probably how and why the original situation arose in the first place. As “all is flux” the key to change is to ensure that the organisation embodies it, such that transformation is rarely, if ever, required. Both case studies have the best chance they will ever have to set this right.

But conferences love a heroic transformation case study. Featuring case studies of organisations that understand that change is a journey comprised of many smaller journeys, and that live, breathe and flex change in every sinew, probably wont draw in the punters. Its time they did.

 
In a previous module of my life I had the privilege of working with a rare talent, a musician and songwriter of incredible gift, who happened to be my late former father-in-law. I was involved to a degree in the management and administration of his successful career in Ireland, including PR and tours (and on one memorable evening as guitar tech). My two songwriting credits are courtesy of his faith in my lyricising – technically I believe I still have a publishing deal. Yet the overriding memory of this time centres on the creative process.

He would share with me his demos. They were recorded on cassette, using one of those ubiquitous  A5 sized machines I remember from my childhood with the built-in speaker and where you pressed the Record and Play buttons simultaneously dislocating your elbow in the process. It was just he, his guitar and voice, no other tech. The reason they are so memorable was for the honesty, the vulnerability and humility. They contained probably 95% of the creative process involved in the final disc – melody, lyrics, meaning and emotion. It was the medium through which the songs were invariably initially heard – the first contact, the first goosebumps. The errors, the background noises, the uncertainty, all were central elements of the charm. The version of the song that left its imprint was always the Demo. It actually didn’t matter whether the music was to my taste or not.

And then what happened, was the studio. The enormous mixing desk, the whitewalled Yamaha NS10 monitors, a conveyorbelt of session musicians on MU rates, a recoding budget flushing faster than a megaflow, columns of used silver takeaway cartons, and layer upon layer of overdubs and tracks that finally yielded a sugared, micron-perfect cashmere-codpiece of a recording that was suitable for broadcast and retail. It’s interesting that the person responsible, with their feet on the desk and cans around their neck, was the Producer, managing a process called Production. Yet it had already been “produced” in the first place. And so gone was the honesty, the vulnerability and humility. I often asked hopelessly naively “why can’t we just release the Demo?” – everyone looked at me in a way that simply confirmed my hopeless naivety. But I meant it.

In most aspects of creative life I still just want the Demo tape: fragile, raw, unpolished. Its why I prefer my workplace plans hand drawn, artwork with the pencil lines still showing, handwritten notes and sketches, and fountain pens over tablet computers.

When you create your own work, don’t polish, layer, edit and re-edit the heart out of it. Its invariably not the process of improvement you believe it to be, but a destructive dismantling of what made it creative. Remember and preserve that which brought it to life in the first place.

No overdubs here.