Work – Page 8 – Harold Jarche

dwindling jobs

2023-01-202020-10-18 by Harold Jarche

In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors note that one phenomenon of machine automation and augmentation is a decrease in entry-level jobs.

“We seem to have automated away the first few rungs of the traditional career ladder. In automating the routinized work that people used to cut their teeth on, they have also eliminated the means to pick up ‘soft skills’ to be effective with customers and within a large organization … In order to enter step-in jobs at early levels in their careers, students will need to acquire as much knowledge as they possibly can while in school, and as much on-the-job training while in internships.”

Tom Graves, in — Where have all the good jobs gone? — digs deeper into this phenomenon in a recent blog post.

“But as machines and IT-systems take on more and more of the routine rule-based and analytic decisions – the ‘easily repeatable processes’, the ‘automatable’ aspects of business – a key side-effect is, almost by definition, that the skill-levels needed to resolve the ‘non-automatable’ decisions will increase … To put it the other way round, the machines do all of the easy work, and (usually) do it well: but that means that all the hard work is left to the humans.”

supporting workplace performance

2021-03-182020-10-09 by Harold Jarche

Many workplace performance issues cannot be solved through training, such as:

Poor communications
Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
Inadequate resources
Unclear performance measures
Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

The barriers above can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge is training required. Even a trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, may still not perform up to the desired standard. Allison Rossett states that “… performance support is a repository for information, processes, and perspectives that inform and guide planning and action.” There are many cases where performance support is needed to help workers, even if they are trained.

when training is the wrong solution

2020-10-08 by Harold Jarche

Training is too often the proverbial hammer in search of nails. It’s an easy check mark to show that action has been taken, assuming that improving individual skills is the core issue that needs to be addressed. But training does not improve diversity.

Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers … The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. … That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind. —HBR 2016-07

In another experiment with 10,000 employees of large global corporations, diversity training had little impact where it mattered.

We found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall—the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions. —HBR 2019-07-09

weird stuff

2020-10-052020-09-22 by Harold Jarche

Fiction sometimes explains reality in a much better way.

Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard [CEO] had answered simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people”, was “weird stuff”. It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff”. As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. —Neal Stephenson (2019) Fall: or Dodge in Hell

writing in your own voice

2020-08-152020-08-05 by Harold Jarche

A good portion of the workforce has now had a taste of distributed work (I prefer this term to ‘remote work’ which has a connotation of a central location and a number of remote workplaces). And most people, for the most part would like to have an option to work away from the office, as reported in a recent Citi GPS Report — “In fact a survey by Gallop has found that three in five U.S. workers who have been doing their jobs from home during the COVID-19 pandemic would prefer to continue to work remotely as much as possible, once restrictions have lifted.”

stories for the network age

2020-07-30 by Harold Jarche

The TIMN model [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] developed by David Ronfeldt has influenced much of my own work in looking at how we are moving toward a network society and must create organizational forms that are beyond national governments and beyond markets. Even combining the efforts of civil society, governments, and markets will not be enough to address our greatest challenges — climate change and environmental degradation.

These have been my assumptions to date.

The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
Each form builds on the other and changes it.
The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (witness the emerging pandemic-induced recession and its influence on national governance)
A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
This form has also been called the noosphere.
I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
I believe we are currently in between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.
This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.

David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla have recently published an update of their original 1999 work on the ‘Noosphere’ — Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft.

the new normal of remote work

2024-01-132020-06-24 by Harold Jarche

“Working from home is not an option for every job, but there is clear evidence that it can have major advantages in the right applications and with the right workers. And as we show in this report it also can have a positive impact on the environment.”

So concludes the June 2020 report, Technology at Work v5.0 — The New Normal of Remote Work, published by Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions [Disclosure: Citi is a current client]. The report has many contributors and is focused on what remote work now looks like in view of the ongoing pandemic. Like most companies, Citi has had to adapt to “the new normal of remote work” but is in no hurry to return to the previous work situation.

“We will use data, not dates, to drive decisions: Any decisions about returning to the office will be dependent on data, including local medical data. We are not, nor will we be, focused on hitting specific dates …

One approach won’t fit all: The timing and ways we come back to the office will vary based on location, office setup, resources and medical guidance. For high risk or vulnerable colleagues, we will continue to take extra precautions. For those with family and childcare needs, we will remain flexible.” —Citi HR Operating Committee

zoom is not the problem — meetings are

2020-06-082020-05-11 by Harold Jarche

When all you have is Zoom, every work-from-home office looks like an endless face-to-face video call. I have been working remotely since 2003. Video calls have been a regular part of my work and I have used pretty well every platform available. In the early days my favourite platform was Marratech, until they were bought by Google and some of the technology created Hangouts. But video communication was only part of my work.

Asynchronous communication — threaded discussions, blogs, and wikis — was always part of my work conversations. Writely — which became Google Docs — was a great tool and helped our distributed team, from British Columbia to New Brunswick, write the specifications for the Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal. This was the first time that all the Ministers of Education had agreed to do something together. But CMEC cancelled the project after a vendor was selected. It would be interesting to see how the current pandemic would have been handled by schools, with a national online learning resource already in place and with over 10 years of experience. But I digress. Let’s just say that technology is not usually the issue in the workplace — it’s how the technology is used.

optimizing distributed work

2024-01-132020-04-22 by Harold Jarche

Now that distributed work has become the norm — permanently for some and temporarily for others — there are two things any organization can do to work, learn, and innovate in internet time.

Optimize meetings for a digital workplace
Help all workers become knowledge catalysts

Back in 2008 I noted that cooperating, reflecting, and supporting each other are necessary for groups of knowledge workers to collectively achieve common objectives. That year, my colleague Jay Cross surveyed 237 workers from various countries and in different sized organizations. They identified a number of key issues preventing them from doing their best work.

a lack of cooperation
no time for reflection
no ability to create DIY tools for work
no communities of practice for support
lack of professional development
poor training
working in organizations that are slow to change

I have no doubt that the same survey today would yield similar results.

introduction to working smarter

2024-01-132020-04-08 by Harold Jarche

The nature of work has continuously changed over time. Factories and manufacturing are no longer where most of us work. We work in offices, at home, and often remote from our team mates. Today, much of what we do at work is networked via digital technologies.

Here is a useful model of working smarter by connecting our work teams with our professional communities and networks. It is based on three practices: seeking knowledge, sensemaking, and sharing our knowledge, or simply put — seek > sense > share.