Simplicity, Access, Appreciation

8th Future Workplaces Summit Prague

1.

i started a new job yesterday. and already on the second day i'm not there. 

i now have a job called "head of innovation and business transformation" in a company called system180. some may know it. tomorrow everyone will know it.

to be honest, i've always wanted to work here because it's a pretty cool place. but since there haven't been any jobs like that in the last few years, i've been passing the time as a new work manager at Zalando and as a consultant at PwC. But now I'm here and the advantage is that I can afford to talk about work in general and not make a presentation about the company I'll be working for from Monday. 

2.

This is the basic structure of System180. 

You can give this picture the title - Structure - Restructure. I think it's not only an genious system in general, but also a fantastic image when I think about work. We use the same building blocks, tools and methodologies over and over again. But circumstances require us to restructure from time to time. The more experienced you get, the more pieces you got. Hopefully.

I had two weeks to chill and to think about work. The result is a text. I decided to do something which is very unpopular on conferences. I read out this text.

I have also decided not to use any stock photos. there are a few pictograms so that the pages are not that empty. and on one slide I have made a diagram. but that's it. 

Before I start with the content, I would like to show you a video. It's a music video by the band BrandBrauerFrick, which combines electronic music with life elements. The video lasts 5 minutes, which is at least 2 minutes longer than the average patience span of our generation of workers. While you watch the video, put down your cell phones and try to hang in there. You can do it. watch it and well. Think about work. 

VIDEO

https://youtu.be/-ePu8x5KxG0?feature=shared

3. work, what is it?

Since Haddaway in the 90th we know what love is. but what is work? 

Not everything we do is work, is it? 

But what exactly distinguishes work from non-work? 

Is work something that contributes to social development? 

Or something that generates revenue? 

Is housework work? 

Is volunteering work? 

Is workout work? Because it is hard work?

Is work an activity that contributes to the generation of added value? 

Is a consumer who scans goods himself also a worker? 

Or bees that pollinate an apple tree so that we can then buy the apple? 

And what about robots? They do something too. 

They even take our work away! Which means what they do MUST be work!

4. robots

Robots are a good example. 

A robot does not do anything. 

It works in the sense of „it functions“. 

It doesn't get paid either. 

But it does something that is useful and we employ it. 

But since the robot doesn’t get payed, it doesn’t pay taxes, so it doesn’t use its wages to help finance those who can’t work. 

If robots take away all our work and don’t pay taxes our social system could collapse. 

In other words: Is work only what we are paid for?

5. work is something that is useful

In the 20th century, the definition of work was to 

„produce useful things with effort, in a job from which one could live.“ 

But the concept of utility is causing us more and more problems. There are more and more useful jobs that do not involve employment. But there are also many jobs that are not useful or are even harmful. Then working people no longer describe their work as work. Because they see it as pointless. 

That is then a social debate. 

So the change in work not only leads to problems from a semantic point of view, but also from a very practical one - and we haven't even got to the topic of place yet.

How are we supposed to think about future workplaces if just one of the three words is not clearly understandable?

6.

Why is it important to understand what work is?

Institutional View 

because institutions define work: Labor law and social law. What is described and defined here is work. Domestic work is not included (at least in Germany). Neither are pregnancy and childbirth (to name just one example that may seem absurd at first) even though it is hard work and is useful. Anyone who does something that is defined as work is paid for it and also has a place (digital or physical) to do it.

Societal View is different. 

because more and more new forms of activity are emerging that people describe as work. Because they see them as useful. And many are perceived as useless because, for example, they only benefit one person (e.g. shareholder) but not society in the long term. 

Usefulness has been appropriated by economics, which reduces the word to economic benefit. 

However, there is a discrepancy between the production of economic benefit and the production of utility.

7. disruption

Of course we have to talk about corona. And no, not everything has been said yet. 

I was at this conference a few years ago. We talked about user-centered working environments and hybrid meeting rooms, about employee involvement, etc. I think many of us managed that quite well, all in all. But then 2020 came along and all the nice dreams were swept away. 

However, nothing has led to such disruption as the coronavirus pandemic. And I'm not talking about the fact that organizations with little digitalization suddenly realized that they didn't have laptops for the home office. 

This is not a disruption, but a gust of wind that has swept away the sand in which the ostrich had stuck its head. 

Nor is it a disruption that work has become more hybrid. Most employees may have known this beforehand, but employers did not. 

The real disruption is that masses of people around the world have rethought what work means. And not just those who are working from home. But also those who were still on the road every day to keep life going. From hospital staff to tradespeople. In Germany, there were cheers and applause for all people working in the healthcare sector. 

There were calls for higher wages and better working conditions. A lot was promised. Little has happened so far. 

But what has remained is the door that the pandemic has opened. People are no longer so easily told that they have no choice. 

Questions arised like:

Why did families have to bang their heads at home? 

Why is my work less relevant?

Why isn't that work? 

Why am I not paid for it? 

Why aren't the conditions better? 

Why do I have to do more bureaucratic tasks in a social profession than the actual work? 

Why can a consultant work in Bali, but not a street sweeper? 

In addition to the financial inequality, there is also an inequality of free choice of location - although the social benefits are different. Higher benefits in social perception do not equal higher pay or a higher degree of individual freedom or more status. 

8. back to office?

We are familiar with these discussions and don't need to repeat them for the 100th time. But what is interesting is what is happening right now. Employers are demanding a return to the office. Employees are refusing. Not everywhere, of course, but in many places.

Why do organizations do this? Because the economic benefit must be fulfilled. And the economic system of most organizations has not changed over the course of the pandemic. 

At the same time, however, the usefulness of work in a social context has changed significantly. Or rather, the perspective has changed, as people have suddenly asked themselves existential questions. 

So the discussion has many more facets than just the question of where we work. 

This is where the word meaning / sense comes into focus. We describe something that has meaning for us as meaningful. This can be very individual. 

meaning = direction / signpost

Sense = ability to perceive / I have a good feeling for something

Sense = I can tell stories about what I have just done. Telling stories that make sense. For example, you can tell stories about your working day. If you can't explain what you're doing, you experience it as meaningless.

If one of these three meanings is missing, people perceive their work as pointless. David Gräber has used the term "bullshit job" here. The exciting thing about this term is not the concept, but how quickly it has caught on. People around the world were able to identify with the term. 

There is therefore a great deal of public criticism that questions the usefulness and meaningfulness of many professions.

We all have or know reasons for working from home. 

Have you ever wondered whether people prefer to stay at home because they see their work as pointless?

So if we work for an organization in which people work because they do an activity for which they are paid. 

Then we have to make sure that this work is also perceived as meaningful. And that has little to do with Generation Z or Alpha being self-absorbed hedonists, 

but rather with the fact that unfortunately there really are an incredible number of activities that are pointless 

and at the same time so many that are perceived as meaningful and useful, but are not remunerated or respected very much. 

Meaningfulness is therefore not a hygiene factor, but really important. Entrepreneurially and psychologically and also socially.

9 Workplace as part of the game

We are here to think about workplaces of the future. The considerations made here about the meaning and purpose of work are essential for this. 

For rarely in history has the outcome been so open (if there is an outcome at all. It is actually a development). 

The biggest challenge of our work (which we hopefully find sufficiently useful and meaningful) is that we alone cannot determine what work is. The definition of what should happen in the workspaces arises from the market situation, the societal debates and the strategy of our own organization. At best, the strategy must be determined on an interdisciplinary basis. 

In the best case scenario, IT, HR and Real Estate are also at the table. 

So how do we go about it?

10. user centricity

When I look back and review the debates of the last 5-10 years, I am struck by how often we have talked about user centric design, which for a long time seemed to be the solution to everything. 

We understand the user and then we have a guideline for the design of the space. But who is the user anyway and are they really always right? 

And why should we design for one or more users at all, when we have just considered that the meaning and benefits of work should be understood in terms of society as a whole and ecologically? 

If we refer to our employees as users and design according to their noses, then there might not be much left of what employers today call work and also need in order to survive economically. 

If you only focus on the individual, you might also create a world of overconsumption and convenience. 

User centric should actually be something else: I enable the individual to still be alive in 20, 30,100 years' time. 

Because I look at the market situation, the social debate and the entrepreneurial strategy. And the global planet. That is planet centric thinking. 

I repeat: we are here to talk about spaces. But we can only shape them if we understand what they are for. 

If there is one more thing that has become clear during the pandemic, it is the growing importance of digital space for the public debate, but also for the market situation. 

With all its advantages and disadvantages. I don't want to go into this in detail here. There are separate conferences for that. 

I would just like to point out that space is no longer just physical space. 

But I find it interesting how the meaning of physical space has changed since so much has become possible digitally. We already heard it several times today. It’s about making friends, creating experiences. 

Still, It sometimes seems to me that these analogue old-school „on-site is king“ office people today have to legitimize themselves in a similar way to a municipal theater fighting against Netflix. 

I ask myself: If people weren't paid for their work and no manager forced them to go to the office, would the offices suffer a similar fate and only analog-offine freaks and academics with morbid preferences would come? 

So besides the question of what work is or should be, we also have a unsolved issue of the analog vs. the digital. 

Who should do what? 

What can we actually work as human beings. 

What should we work?

What do robots?

11. what to do with this?

We human beings are funny. We want to be productive. We want to be fast. We want to be better machines. Instead of becoming better people again. 

But that's impossible because digital development is exponential. But human development is linear. In other words, we are not developing at all. But we don't need to. We can actually do quite a lot. 

And almost everything we can do is based on our senses. They distinguish us from machines. This means that if machines do more and more of our work for us, we are left with everything that machines can't do. That's actually pretty cool. Because that's certainly not what we currently perceive as pointless. Things like filing documents and so on.

But the problem is that we've been trained for decades to work like machines and we've forgotten how to use our best abilities. Our senses. Our Empathy. 

When we work purely digitally, we use our hearing and our sense of sight almost exclusively. However, we also need our other senses to fully grasp the complexity of a situation. 

The problem is that when we sit at our computers at home, we also smell and feel. But not the same things as the people we are sitting with in the video conference. There is no shared situation. The situation lacks complexity and therefore also the depth that it could have. Interpersonal relationships can only reach their full potential if we share a place together.

Let me summarize once again: 

If we strive to enable and do more useful and sensual work, so that we also inspire people to work and thus secure the existence of our organization. 

And if machines take over work that people tend to perceive as useless and we can thus create more space for work that is meaningful and deeply human (since everything else can be done by machines), then we need more physical places where people can be human and do human things. 

I believe that physical meeting places are important from a variety of perspectives. The VUCA world forces us to face complexity and find solutions together. I am equally convinced that organizations need spaces that inspire people and encourage them to act as human beings in the long term. I would like physical spaces to help us humans learn to appreciate and serve what makes us who we are. 

But sadly, I am also convinced that not the best designed high-tech office in the world can conceal the fact that people feel their work is useless or pointless. 

It’s like NO fruit basket in the world is a reason to accept a job.  

But as shown in the graphic - the only one I had - we as workplace creators can be part of the game to design a working environment for meaningful work. If somebody in the room understands the power of the physical place, it’s us.

12 Space as a protagonist

But what role does the place play then? 

A workspace - whether in the office, on the street, in hospitals or in Bali - is not just a service provider or facilitator of work. 

The space is what pedagogy calls "the third educator". Or in theater studies it’s called "protagonist". The space provides the framework for what happens in it. The space shapes the play. No matter which room. A workspace fulfills a bit of the function of the stage in a theater. The image is probably more appropriate than that of the pedagogical one. We are not a school or a kindergarten.

Why theatre?

Because at the end of the day, work is a game that follows a story and whose rules are constantly being renegotiated. 

We workplace creators at this conference have the responsibility to create spaces that are "protagonists", that provide a framework. That are flexible and can adapt, but also set long-term standards. See yourselves as stage designers. 

13 Simplicity, Access, Appreciation

We can't solve everything. But I would like to share a little anecdote from one of my favorite projects from my previous PwC job. It was about the working world of the future. From a physical, cultural and technological perspective. Blue and white collar. Relatively rare on this scale. We talked to people and asked them what was important to them about the future and about work. And unlike the corporate strategy, which of course uses completely different terms, the employees agree on what is important. 

Simplicity: I want to understand easily, I want to be able to find knowledge whenever I need it, I want simple processes

Access: I want to be able to access information and people. I want to be able to access buildings. 

and finally Appreciation: say thank you. say hello and goodbye. 

That is work being perceived as useful. That is work being perceived as meaningful. Let’s be the stage designers and make this kind of work visible. Because it deserves to be remunerated. 

It shouldn't be that difficult. 

Thank you.

Mach dir keine Gedanken darüber, professionell zu klingen. Klinge einfach wie du selbst. Es gibt über 1,5 Milliarden Websites da draußen, doch es ist deine Geschichte, die diese von allen anderen unterscheiden wird. Wenn du deinen Text laut vorliest und in deinem Kopf nicht deine eigene Stimme hörst, ist das ein gutes Zeichen dafür, dass du noch Arbeit vor dir hast.

Sei klar, sei selbstbewusst und denk nicht zu viel nach. Das Schöne an deiner Geschichte ist, dass sie sich immer weiter entwickeln wird – und deine Website mit ihr. Dein Ziel sollte darin bestehen, dass sie sich im Hier und Jetzt richtig anfühlt. Alles Weitere kommt von selbst. Das tut es immer.