Jonathan M Gitlin at Ars Technica has a good bit about the supposed evils of multitasking on your computer at work:

The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks and so on.

I’m the first to admit that there’s a lot be said for shutting down everything else and focusing on a single task when you just need to power through and get something done, but these days talk of ‘multitasking’ seems to take the form of huffy managers cruising through the office, looking over shoulders and trying to catch a glimpse of someone looking at something “non-work-related”.

This, quite frankly, is a lame thing to do.

Gitlin again:

Employers seek ever-greater productivity from their workers, which means getting more work from them for the same amount of pay. Faced with that situation, it’s hardly surprising the cube-dweller responds by spending 15 minutes an hour looking at LOLCATs. Besides, I’m just old enough to remember the days before you used to be able to multitask; people used to sit at their desks reading the newspaper instead.

Technology has definitely exasperated this issue. It seems entirely acceptable for an employee to spend 10 minutes chatting with co-workers about the movie they saw on the weekend or 5 minutes on a personal phone call, but apparently just a glimpse at Facebook is an instant productivity killer. The message, I guess — and this is coming from those generally clueless about everything online — is that you can’t be working if you’re also on some website.

The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them. “Why would you do this stupid work I’ve assigned you when you have fun internet things to look at?”

Could spending a lot of time on Facebook at work cause an employee to miss deadlines or produce sub-quality work? Absolutely. And those employees should face hell because of that. But you’re always smarter to criticize and (if necessary) discipline based on outputs, not process. The process is entirely subjective and unique to each person, whereas the outputs can be objective.

If the work is getting done, does it really matter if the worker is ‘multitasking’ all day, bouncing between windows and tasks like — as Gitlin puts it — a crack-smoking housefly?

Technology has led to a diversification of work styles.¹ There is no ‘right’ way to get things done in the computer age. Trying to establish one-size-fits-all processes, policies or rules — even for something as seemingly frivolous as ‘banning Facebook’ — is a losing battle.

Thanks to Ari Najarian for pointing me to the article.

Photo by Vedlia. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. I’m thinking of things like keyboard users vs. mouse; command line versus GUI; maximized versus juggled windows; open source versus Microsoft, etc etc. [↩]

We’ve hit a bunch of controversy in Toronto lately over tabled plans to tear down a small section the Gardiner Expressway. It’s brought to my city a debate over existing highway infrastructure that has raged or is still raging all over these days — from New York to Seoul to Oklahoma City. It can be characterized as new urbanists versus conservative planners, the city versus the suburbs, and livability versus big business. Mostly, though, it’s all about the car.

For those not familiar with the city, the Gardiner is the main east-west highway through the city, and it was built — rather foolishly — right across the waterfront at Lake Ontario. As a result, the city proper essentially comes to an end a few kilometers from the lake’s shore, with mostly industrial and (lately) hastily constructed condo towers filling the space.

Despite the crappy planning that plunked this highway in a prime urban location, it has become a very heavily used backbone to the city’s business infrastructure. If you’re a commuter, you’re likely to use the Gardiner. From the West, especially, it’s the fastest way into downtown.

They’re not talking about tearing down the whole thing — it’s been discussed in the past, but we don’t really have the political will to do that — but rather just a section on the eastern side that is the most lightly used of the whole stretch.

The protests against the plan have been predictable. One of the loudest voices in opposition has been talk radio mainstay David Menzies, who wrote a rather scathing editorial in The National Post, concluding:

Bottom line: tearing down any section of the Gardiner would be akin to dropping a nuke on the thousands of commuters (a. k. a. taxpayers) who depend on it daily. The time is now for all reasonable Torontonians to denounce such ideological madness before it’s too late.

He also sounds the horn for the continuing importance of commuter infrastructure like the city’s expressways on a level I’ve rarely seen. Check this out:

With the GTA’s population continuing to increase, one would think expressway construction, not demolition, would be the order of the day. Instead of tearing down sections of the Gardiner, the city should seriously think about adding a second deck. However, the powers-that-be at City Hall have no desire for projects that improve traffic-flow. Their cure-all advice for beleaguered commuters seems to be this: A. move downtown; B. trade car for bicycle.

Making all highways double decker is a hilarious solution to traffic congestion, isn’t it? Let’s go even bigger with the highways! Sixteen lanes wide! Two stories tall! Let’s demolish buildings to make room! Instead of actually going to an office building, people can just drive around all day, talking on their cellphones, marveling at the spaciousness of the road. Badass.

I’m a commuter. I’ve been a commuter for almost a year now. I rely on that very section of the Gardiner expressway the powers-that-be are proposing taking down. If it comes to fruition, I’d have to drastically change the way in which I do my job.

But still I support the plan. Tear it down.

What people like Menzies and other opponents seem to miss is that we have not, by a long shot, established a ‘finalized’ mode of work. The suburban-to-urban commuter model has become the ‘norm’ only in the last 40 years because of a unique situation with regards to cars, gas prices and a business world based on handshakes, typewriters and the suit-and-tie.

We have changed much over the last decade, and we’ll continue to change. Generation Y is a huge factor, as is the computer and other networked technologies. And the biggest factor may end up being gas prices, as they’re already making people deeply consider their living and working situation in a way they never would have when gas was 60 cents a litre. (That’s $2.30 a gallon, for the Americans.)

In a changing landscape, you don’t just build that which worked before. We need to look beyond what we’ve done in the past and build structures that support new models for working and living — for Gen Y, for the environment, for our cities, and for the lasting success of businesses who will depend on all of those things.

Photo by Reza Vaziri. Licensed under Creative Commons

I’ve been seeing a lot of the Best Practices Guy lately. If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’re probably familiar with this person: he or she is the one at any and every meeting whose only real contribution to the discussion is to harp on the need to look at “best practices.” Before we can do anything, Best Practices Guy argues, we need to determine what everyone else is doing.

And then, presumably, we’ll just copy them. Because that’s how profits are made.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and making sure you’re up on the latest trends, conventions and breakthroughs, but the problem with Best Practices People is that they’re usually the one who isn’t at all. If they knew what the “best practices” were, they’d probably mention it. Instead, they just continuously request that someone else do the research and report back.

I keep putting “best practices” in quotes because it’s really one of those empty-headed phrases that sounds like it means more than it actually does. If I were to tell you the best way to make scrambled eggs, I’d sound informal, casual and cool. If I were to say I had with me the “best practices for scrambled eggs” I’d come off sounding not unlike a corporate wannabe tool.

Best Practices Guy isn’t always a tool. Usually the intentions are good, but in a roundabout way. The problem with the type of person I’m describing is that he or she is often motivated almost entirely by fear. It’s not so much research they crave, but safety. If we just do what someone else has done (and succeeded with) we thus have no risk of failure.

That’s boring. Maybe it’s a good strategy in a fiscally conservative kind of way. But it’s BORING. And boredom is not a desirable trait for a company. Boring companies already have trouble attracting talent, and, in the information age and with Generation Y being kind of difficult to work with (I hear), they’re likely not going to have much time for boredom either.

Innovation can’t happen when you limit yourself to ‘best practices’. The companies who have recently seen success have been the ones who have been willing to brazenly eschew established practices. Look at Apple with the mp3 player, Nintendo with the Wii, Google with Internet Advertising and even smaller companies like Moleskine with notebooks or Threadless with T-shirts. While these companies undoubtedly understand the marketplace, I guarantee that the top brass don’t sit around worrying about ‘best practices’.

Innovation can’t happen if you’re always looking to adhere to ‘best practices’. Let’s shut that Best Practices Guy up.

Being a giant Apple fanboy, I was pretty excited with all the iPhone news announced at Monday’s Worldwide Development Conference (WWDC). In addition to a wealth of new features — and availability in Canada, which I’m ridiculously happy about — the new iPhone also boasts GPS.

This isn’t a new feature for smart phones. Blackberry has it, as do some of the Windows Mobile models. But with the iPhone and Apple’s focus on entering the business market in a big way, I think we’re posed to see a real explosion of GPS-enabled employee smart phones across large businesses.

This is cool, of course, but it’s also kind of alarming for one big reason. Something that Steve Jobs himself mentioned in his keynote introduction of the GPS abilities: tracking.

Here’s Steve talking GPS:

The Big Brother Effect

Forgive me for getting a bit paranoid here. I’m not railing against the feature itself. It’s definitely not going to keep me from embracing the technology. But given that:

• The iPhone is being heavily marketed to large corporate users
• The iPhone has GPS that can do ‘live tracking’
• Companies can write proprietary applications and ‘push’ them out to their employee’s iPhones
• Those proprietary applications can use the iPhone SDK’s location services to access real-time GPS data

…doesn’t it seem possible that a company could rather easily create something that would allow them to see where all their employees are at any given time, assuming the employee had their phone on and was within satellite range?

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

If I were a person obsessed with privacy, this might bother me. But I tend to take a more open view on privacy matters in this age of facebook and social networking. Still, though, it has to be said that a situation where it would be rather trivial to create a real-time ‘employee’ tracker has far-reaching implications for how we model ‘work’ in the twenty-first century. Suddenly the boss can know if, say, Bob went directly to the meeting or — god forbid! — stopped for a long lunch, or if Joanne, who was supposedly ’stuck in traffic’, actually just overslept.

Technology brings with it changes, some obvious and some more surprising. The iPhone and other smartphones are likely to bring with them a lot of positives, but there are some potential negatives. After all, how would you feel about your employer literally being able to ‘track’ you during work hours? Is that something you, as an employee, could feel comfortable with?

I keep seeing articles like this one (featuring quotes from the talented Penelope Trunk) saying that Generation Y isn’t all about the money. The conclusion, often, is this:

•Work is not about the money. Young people watched their baby boomer parents work hard and get laid off, Trunk said. “Consequently, they really do believe life is about relationships,” she said. “It’s insulting if you offer to pay them to work the weekend.”

I tend to agree with this, as it’s certainly true in my case. I seriously wonder about my friends going to lawschool - I know they’re after the high-paying salary, but do they really want to end up working so much?

I worry, though, that the stigma that Gen Y is after more than a salary will translate into some employers think they can pay us nothing as long as they let everyone leave the office early on Friday. It is not, as some might think, that we’re willing to sacrifice a high salary for increased flexibility — rather it’s that we’re not willing to let a high salary dupe us into devoting our whole lives to work.

And then there’s the fact that we tend to be savvier when it comes to money, and how it works. Since we get married later, have fewer kids later in life and tend not to have the same kind of giant-house-in-the-suburbs dream as our forebears, we’re not as likely to end up in the same need-a-giant-steady-paycheck-above-all-else situation. (That’s not to say Gen Ys don’t have their own issues with debt — it’s just a different kind, what with credit cards and all.)

And, finally, there’s charts like this — from this article — , showing that the relationship between your job, the hours you work, and the money you make isn’t as clear cut as you might think:

Interesting stuff, isn’t it?

I’ve talked about Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) before. It still continues to be something I’m fascinated by, especially as it evolves as a practice at Best Buy, a Fortune 100 company. Tim Ferriss at Four Hour Work Week has an interview with Cali Ressler, one of the architects of ROWE, that sheds some light on how it’s working:

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

Read both part one and part two. I really think this ROWE has a lot to do with the future of work, especially as more Gen Ys take up careers.

I don’t know a whole lot about being a police officer, likely because I am badly out of shape and kind of a wuss when it comes to the idea of tackling criminals or what have you, but officer.com has an article on Gen Y and the Millennials coming on to the police force that’s very interesting. There are parts I agree with and parts I strenuously disagree with.

Let’s take this point-by-point.

On demographics

Generation Y and the new Millenials that will be crossing your doorway looking for a job. Yes I said job, not necessarily a career, but a job. They may not stay; in fact it is likely they won’t. In the 1980s when I graduated from high school there was one job for every four students. Going to some post secondary school was a better option to wait and see if more jobs opened up. Today, there are four jobs for every student and the new graduates of high school and post secondary institutions have their pick. You may or may not be one of them.

I see these “4 for 1″ stats a lot, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the source. It seems pretty accurate, though, at least in the sense of all that it implies: this is a generation of employees that isn’t going to bend over backwards for you just because they want to keep their job.

On stereotyping

In comes Generation Y (1978-1994). These are our junior constables or new recruits. They have a casual attitude towards superiors and are opinionated and challenge the rules. Their parents were older when they had them and were more babied by their parents. They lived at home late in life - and may still live at home while working for you. They belonged to schools where you were never failed, there was no winner or loser and everyone got a “participant ribbon” just for showing up.

Some good and some bad here. Yeah, Gen Y tends to live at home longer. Often because their parents suggest they do until they can buy a house — there’s a pervasive “renting is throwing your money away” myth at work here. But I think this “participant ribbon” article falls fully into the realm of fantasy myth: I do recall there being things like that at various events, but even as an 11-year-old I knew not to take them very seriously. And there were still ribbons for first/second/third place, too.

I think you’d find it really difficult to find a member of Generation Y who doesn’t, when you get right down to it, have a good sense of what competition means. I think the difference is that we’ve been conditioned to see ‘winning’ as something else entirely than what the Boomers/Gen X are used to.

Here’s a hint: it’s not all about money.

On Gen Y’s future in policing

So now what? Flexible Management Leadership. Demographics don’t lie. Birth rates are down, retirement is up. There is more demand for people in management roles and a dwindling pool of talent for policing. 3% of young people think of policing as a career. 63% never would consider policing as a career. That leaves 34% undecided. It’s time to wake up and reposition ourselves as the employer of choice. Change is not a sign of failure and the failure to change in this case is not an option.

I think by and large policing is going to see the same problem that the skilled trades do now: teachers don’t tell their students about it, so students don’t consider it. There’s also the pop culture stigma: chart the evolution of the cop TV show from the 70s to now. It’s a lot grittier, and I can’t really think of a television police officer who is actually, you know, happy with their jobs.

But the change part is so critical. If I’ve hammered home anything on this blog since I started writing it is that change is at the foundation of real intergenerational progress in the workplace. It’s a bit of give & take, sure, but fundamentally I think most of the change has to come at the management and organizational level.

Photo by nyc arthur. Licensed under Creative Commons

Presumed Australian Valerie Khoo has a great blog post over at My Small Business. The title itself — “Harness Gen Y talent — even if you hate them” — amuses me to no end. And there’s some really smart stuff in here:

Many Gen-Ys have very different habits, interests and skills. Instead of ignoring them - or doing things like banning Facebook in the workplace - think about how you might be able to draw on them. I have a Gen-Y staff member in one of my businesses who watches Youtube in her lunch hour, loves her ipod and is interested in technology. About a year ago, she said she wanted to learn about creating audio and video. These tools had nothing to do with my business, which offers courses in writing. And I was concerned that she needed to be challenged with new ideas that piqued her interest at work.

So I asked her to come up with ways she could incorporate her interests into the business. After many brainstorming sessions, we created online courses (incorporating online audio and video) which now generate a whole new revenue stream for the business. When other businesses realised we were doing online audio (which are essentially podcasts) they came to us to create custom podcasts for them. So now we have yet another revenue stream for the business.

That’s a terrific example of where Generation Y has a huge amount of potential that is often overlooked. Gen Y employees are considered frustrating because they tend to ignore — or blatantly flaunt their disregard for — a lot of the ‘rules’ of the workplace, which in some cases have been around unchanged for more than fifty years. It’s a me-first attitude that can drive you up the wall.

But there’s a lot of potential in it, because — in contrast to the stereotypically bored, uninterested and unmotivated ’slackers’ of Gen X — Generation Y is noted for their huge interest in all sorts of things, particularly technology. Their interests — which are decidedly non-work-related in old-school thinking — can actually prove incredibly useful at work, especially when it comes to left-field thinking in advertising and community outreach.

The trick, of course, is finding that place where Generation Y’s interests turn into revenue tools and become of value to your business. The outcomes are not always easy to see — and I guess that makes some hate us — but the potential is hard to deny.