The politics of the out-of-office reply

Summer... ah the time of holidays and out-of-office replies to email. These automated messages are about communication - externally and internally. Yet, like so much in the workplace, there is a surprising amount of politics involved in the out-of-office/vacation reply for email and voice mail.

We believe it is both good etiquette and good business sense to let people know if you are away. In an international world, businesses cannot assume that there is shared knowledge about holiday timings, such as duration and length. International contacts may not know that, for example, July is the preferred holiday month and three weeks the usual length of break. Similarly, in our short attention span world, contacts may not be willing to wait three weeks if they haven't received alternative contact details. Managing those external communications includes setting up good out-of-office replies.

a space of one's own

We recently completed a treehouse for our 10-year-old daughter in our garden. It's about seven square meters of real estate located two and a half meters above the ground. It has two windows, one of which opens with a special mechanism and a door that locks from the inside, as well as being fitted with a padlock on the outside, of which our daughter is the only one with a key. She loves it and has already spent a significant amount of time out there with a friend, concocting Harry Potter-style potions.

This evident desire we as humans have for a space we can call our own got me thinking about the trend towards flexible workspaces that we're seeing in the work world. These flexible workspace initiatives often mean that people don't have an assigned desk and so desks are available on a first come-first served basis. I can understand this from a company perspective. If you have a department where people don't sit at their desks all day because, say, they're out servicing customers or teaching for most of the day, those empty desks are a waste of precious office space.  However, these plans often don't take into account the human side - how territorial people are and how they want to have a space they feel is theirs and where they feel they belong. These flex-desks can be a very upsetting thing for many people.

values and vision: creating happiness at work

Blue sky thinking

We've written about happiness at work a few times: when we wrote about flexible working increases employee satisfaction and about counting the right thingssuch as employee satisfaction. It is a subject dear to our hearts as we are convinced from the countless studies and personal observation, that employees who are satisfied with their work are better contributors and colleagues at work and that they are happier in general.

We are also quite excited about how thinking sustainably helps both the environment and ultimately the bottom line of business. What can we say, we like things that have dual benefits! It seems to make sense to us.

So, we were quite pleased to read a recent study by Cassandra Walsh and Adam Sulkowski published in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review. Using regression analysis and other statistical methods, they found in their survey of 113 companies, that, "there is a significant positive relationship between perceived environmental performance and employee satisfaction." Or, in more concrete terms: "having a reputation for being a relatively more environmentally-friendly company can result in having happier employees." This is great news of course!

Whoever is the last to leave, don't forget to turn the computers off!

Just a quick follow on from last week's post about green buildings and work cultures. This is a finding from a staff habits survey at the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency. According to the Scotland on Sunday, they found that of the agency's 1,700 computers, 400 were regularly being left on at night and of those only 100 were deemed necessary to do so. So, at least 300 computers were being left on when they didn't need to be. Of course, many people are aghast that the agency meant to protect the environment was wasting so much energy. I think though it shows how hard it is to change work cultures and how easily we slip into habits. Sometimes, it is as simple as people not realizing it is their responsibility, sometimes it is about scheduling whereby someone leaves their computer on thinking they will be back in the office before the end of the day but isn't, and sometimes it is simply a habit. SEPA discovered these habits through a staff survey and have now taken measures to turn their computers off at night. Seems like a good idea to me!

J2 Research can help you do a similar investigation in your business. Are your employees turning off their computers when they leave?

--Judith
back to J2 Research

Green buildings and work cultures

We have been thinking this past week about green buildings and work cultures. As we mentioned last week, green buildings are an important part of being a green company and should be a focus for any green minded business. While we both love the creativity and cleverness of the engineering and architectural solutions of green buildings, it occurs to us that the humans who use those buildings are often left out of the picture.  Indeed, even the United Nations Environmental Programme in their report, "Buildings: Investing in energy and resource efficiency"  note that "when considering the environmental credentials of buildings, the true measure of their performance only becomes evident with occupation, given the impact of factors such as behaviour (cultural habits, environmental expectations and life-style), climatic changes and particularities of the control of technical systems in buildings" (p.339). Although clearly the human side is important to measure, the UNEP points out that most do not.

So, since most people are not thinking about this, we will. In particular, we want to focus our thinking on green office buildings and work behaviours and cultures. Here is a list of some of the issues we think are important to consider:

Being green: thinking about product and production

Amongst all companies there is a growing awareness that taking account of the environment is important for business. Being green aware is good for the planet, the bottom line and can give a competitive edge.

We live in Denmark and quite rightly many Danes are proud of the wind energy sector and Denmark’s role in it. According to the Climate Consortium Denmark, Denmark is a specialist in producing offshore wind turbines. They claim that Denmark produces, “More than 90% of all offshore wind turbines worldwide” and “almost half the world’s wind turbines.” That’s a lot of turbines! And this is a growing market, growing at about 30% a year. This is an industry that in Denmark alone employs 25,000 people in about 350 companies.

But is it enough to simply produce things for the green economy?

Connecting Makes All the Difference

Frank, talking with his hands
in my box-filled dining room.

Frank Mejia is the eldest of eleven children. Like many eldest children, he is an over-achiever. During his long career, he has worked in government, learned the garment business from the sewing machine up, done import-export, did a stint as an economics professor, developed software, made creative audio visual presentations, shot wedding videos and now, after his ostensible retirement, he’s making eLearning for some of the largest companies in the world. He’s an entrepreneur who just can’t quit.

I invited him to my very old farmhouse for dinner recently and we had a very lively conversation on how it all fits together.

Fresh out of a Jesuit university in the Philippines, Frank went into government service. During those years of the Marcos regime, there were a lot of possibilities. One of which was the chance to study for two years in London. After that, Frank owed the government four years and in total, he stayed for ten. At the age of 27, he had married and a family soon followed. He began to feel that as an honest man in government, the salary wasn’t enough for his growing family.