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when people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy
I’ve written here before about the alleged demise of the office, but the topic has raised its head again this past week so I’m off again.
We earthlings enjoy a fantastic range of communications devices these days, and we’re a couple of generations away from my early days at work where I would carry change to phone in to the office as and when necessary. Now the science fiction of my youth is a reality and I have a few of these devices at my disposal and am a happy, and fairly prolific, user of them.
The ability to keep in touch and to interact with others remotely has changed the way that we work, but that isn’t new; it’s just the natural process of evolution. The pace may vary, but change is constant.
The office as I have known it is a relatively new thing in terms of human history, and it has changed a lot in my time. At the end of the day it is a tool and we will adapt it as we need to. One of the buildings that I once managed is now an easyOffice and part of Stelios’ new venture. It still exists, which is more that can be said for some of the other flagships of my old 1990s empire; one has been demolished and an apartment complex now stands on the site, another has just been demolished and a third has been gutted and the shell absorbed into an industrial building. My team and I used to look after over 3000 people in those three offices and they were all key parts of the organisations that we worked on behalf of.
But we changed them radically over the time that we ran them and had them in a constant state of flux as the tenant businesses needs changed. There may have been an illusion of permanence, but it was only an illusion. The illusion is in the minds of the people though; the building is just a convenient place. Those of us who have managed big workplaces will know how lonely and dead they are when empty.
When people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy, and those provide a synergy that no amount of remote working or cloud collaboration can replace. The challenge for us within the industry is to provide those spaces, but in what form?
I remember the first Regus office locally and being very interested because they were doing on the open market what I was trying to do for an internal market. There was a time when it looked as though they wouldn’t make it, but the financial model has worked and others have followed, as with easyOffice in our old floors at Palmerston House, and all power to them for that.
Coffee bars, hotel lobbies, supermarket cafeterias and motorway services are all playing their part as alternative places to meet, but the thing that intrigues me is that there is still so much focus on city centres. With all of the moves away from pinning us down to the daily grind of going in to the office, most cities are working towards transport and infrastructure plans that are based on sizeable growth over the next 10-30 years. That implies that we will still have these great hives of activity for a long time to come.
Will we push the market, or will the market pull us? I don’t know that I have the answers right now, but it sure is a fascinating time to be in the industry isn’t it?
experience is as to intensity and not as to duration – thomas hardy
Quite rightly experience is valued. When we are recruiting an employee or engaging a contractor we look for relevant experience, and when we look at ourselves we talk about having paid our dues; done the hard yard and so on. Read more…
why do wives put up with it?
Lately I have been back on the train a lot, and have been reminded of a phenomenon I had largely forgotten. One of those strange ritual behaviours between the female and the male of the species that puzzles, even troubles me. So let me set the scene:
Join me on platform one at Swindon as I await an early Paddington train. As an avid people watcher I have plenty of material to work with in such situations; travel provides a fascinating insight into one’s fellow humans. The platform regulars are instantly recognisable, as is their pecking order.
But, just beyond the tracks, is activity in the north car park that has reminded me of a, to me rather sexist, behaviour that really should have died out in these enlightened times. A car will sweep into the car park, pull up near the station entry and from the driver’s side will emerge Mr Businessman, suited and booted for his day at the office. From the passenger side will emerge, well, for the purpose of this story, let’s call her Mrs Businessman, and she is dressed for doing stuff around the house.
Mr B will take his briefcase from the back and depart for his train, and Mrs B drives the car back to the 4 bed, 2 rec, 3.75 bath or whatever.
Now there are variations on the level of human contact in these vignettes, but most are pretty perfunctory at best, but one stands out: The Volvo estate is brought to a stop with some authority. Mr B emerges, takes his briefcase and strides away without a glance at his companion. She walks round the front of the car, seeming to distance herself from him as much as she can, and departs with a decent touch of wheelspin. It is a shame that she had to pause to adjust the driver’s seat and that the car is front wheel drive. If she had been quicker and had had rear wheel drive she could have sprayed him with gravel such was the violence of her leaving the scene.
What domestic strife had preceded this journey? What was the atmosphere in the car along the way? These are the joys of people watching, speculating on events.
But I digress. The point here is that this ritual, something that I have seen for as long as I can remember, still goes on. OK, it is none of my business how other people live their lives, but this behaviour is so alien to me and seems so insulting to the ladies, although they seem quite happy to accept it.
I would never have dreamt of behaving like this with any of the ladies I have shared my life with since I flew the nest over 40 years ago. I know I’m not unique here as the guy who lives opposite is equally as happy to have his wife drive him as he is to drive her, but he and I do seem to be in a very small minority judging by my observations.
Maybe all of this is covered in the Handbook of Inter-Gender Relationships, I don’t know. Perhaps the ladies concerned are quite happy to have things this way. Maybe it means that they don’t have their driving criticised by some chauvinistic oaf. Possibly one of them might read this and enlighten me.
I hope that they do, because I would love to know. Whilst I’ll never find out what the story behind Mr & Mrs Volvo was, my natural curiosity is aroused and do I like to learn something new every day.
the day the town stood still – another adventure on the facilities front line
Picture a typical English market town of around 70,000 people. Like many such places it developed around a crossing of main roads north/south and east/west. To one side of the town centre the two main employers had neighbouring offices and each had satellite sites around and about.
It is a hot August day and the FM team for one of these big sites are coping with the usual issues. In their corner of the ground floor sit the three ladies who comprise the site management, one of whom has the Duty Manager hi-vis tabard draped over the back of her chair. They have just been joined by the big boss who is up for the day to talk finance with the client senior team. Their conversation continues as the Duty Manager turns to answer the telephone, but tails off as the others pick up on what is being said on the phone. They wait as the call is concluded. “We have a suspicious package at the annex” she tells the others. The well oiled machine swings into action.
Crossing the road we find that someone who has been away from the office for several days has come back to find a pile of post and messages. As he has been wading through these a colleague has mentioned one from an “Irish guy” who had seemed very anxious to establish if this was the right address and this, plus a strange padded envelope in his mail, has aroused his suspicions. He has taken the package down and given it to the security guard before explaining his suspicions and the guard has placed in carefully on the ground outside the front door before raising the alarm.
We called the Police as we evacuated the site and tried to find somewhere for 100 or so people on a scorcher of a day. The police arrived and evacuated the neighbouring building of our hosts; now we had around 1100 people to worry about as the only place we could move them to safely was our main car park. Then Special Branch arrived and closed down the block and the roads around it, including the main east/west road through the town. In the distance we could hear more emergency vehicle sirens, but they didn’t seem to be making any progress.
Then one of our runners arrived with news that we had a fire at another of our offices nearby and could we provide assistance. A phone call to them revealed that the catering team, whilst making their own lunch after completing serving the tenants, had set fire to the kitchen. Quick reactions on their part had put the fire out as far as we could tell, but we could not take a chance without the Fire Service checking things out, and the sirens we could hear were the fire engines stuck in a gridlocked town.
Military experts turned up and dealt with the package which turned out to be harmless, but we were told that we were right to have acted as we did; there was enough wrong about it to have not taken a chance. The fire brigade found a long way round and were able to confirm that there was no further danger in the kitchen down the road and the town’s roads slowly unblocked themselves.
We dealt with a couple of people who fainted in the heat, and a few bad tempered individuals, but otherwise things went well for an afternoon of simultaneous emergencies.
One of those days on the FM front line when the planning, training and practice paid for itself.
feeling lost? there is always an answer, and you can always ask the way
At the time of writing this I know that I am about six and a half miles up in the air and that it is Thursday 12th May, but otherwise don’t know what time it is or where I am. Well I know that I am in seat 36K on a Boeing 747 registered in the UK as G-VFAB, but I don’t know where the ‘plane is if you see what I mean. Below me is solid cloud and so I have no sight of the ground to help show where I might be.
The last few weeks have been very hectic and fraught. I have had to be here, there and seemingly everywhere at someone else’s beck and call. Pretty much every waking moment has been devoted to doing something that I have had to do to avoid letting someone else down. Not all of it has been a chore, but I have been driven by other people’s needs rather than my own clock. A quiet potter in the garden fiddling with the horticulture when I feel like it is nice and relaxing; having to fit in getting the beans, spuds, tomatoes etc planted now because it has to be done now takes the pleasure away to a large degree.
Today I had to be at the airport in time to check in, and had to be at the gate in time to board, but thereafter I am just sat here for 9 hours, or whatever, whilst a couple of folk up the sharp end take me to another continent and some of their nice colleagues bring me food and drink now and then. All I have to do is to sit here and behave and so I decided that time and space can all be relative until the moment that I have to get off and face the immigration officials.
So last night I turned off the clock display in the toolbar of this laptop and, as I don’t wear a watch these days, I am sat here with no knowledge as to what time it is or where I am.
Well that’s the theory, but in practice I do have some clues. I know that my destination is south west of where I departed from and I know what time the ‘plane was due off the ground. Going the way that I am I am racing the sun across this day and, at this height, can see the sky up here above the cloud below and can see the subtle change in colour. The shadow of the fuselage that was falling across the wing beside me has gone, but I do not have the sun through my window, so we are heading towards that orb.
Knowing the time difference between where I started from and where I am going and I know what time I am due in, so I know where the sun should be in the sky then. Given all of that I would say that we have little more than an hour to go before arrival.
In aviation circles we have an expression “temporarily unsure of position”. It doesn’t mean lost as such, just that you know where you should be, but not exactly where you are.
This is quite often the case in business; we’re not exactly sure of how things are for a whole range of reasons, but there will be information that we can use and clues that we can follow to help make an informed decision on, and you can always make enquiries. You only have to ask for help.
back to the floor – the sequel
I am a big fan of bosses going back to the floor and have written about here a few times, one of which, on my adventures in logistics, was picked up by Truck & Driver magazine. It is an opportunity that quite a few senior managers spurn entirely, and a in poll I conducted a couple of years ago around half of the responses were a resounding No, so why am I so in favour?
One crucial reason is that it allows you to see what life at the front end of your business is all about. Now there are those that will argue that you don’t need to know that, that you have layers of people along the way that can worry about those sorts of things for you, but knowing your business makes such a difference to the way that you operate. Those that truly walk the talk are, in my experience, the ones that have done the job and can still get in the trenches and pull their weight.
Steve Jobs at Apple has a superb story about the difference between a Vice President and a Janitor, the punch line of which is around the Janitor being able to give reasons why things aren’t done, but the VP has no such room for things not being right. I don’t know whether or not he has ever done the janitor’s job, but he understands the issue and, let it not be forgot, he was once on the front line himself.
My own enthusiasm came about gradually. My early efforts to climb the management ladder were with organisations that insisted on management trainees working in every department of the business to get a grasp of what they would eventually control. Later, as I got to run operations of various types there would sometimes be a need to solve a problem when all hands to the pump was the order of the day and so there were always opportunities to get involved.
As I got into more senior roles and began to devise and implement major improvement projects, being able to get in have a go at the job was often a powerful tool in firstly working out the right solution, but also in understanding how to implement the solution to best effect and to get my people behind the change. The other thing that back to the floor delivers is a clear understanding of what is really happening. As my pal Ian Berry puts it, are they walking in the halls what is says on the walls (is your mission statement really reflecting what goes on in the business)?
Often it isn’t, and that disconnect can destroy a business quicker than anything else. So in all of my senior roles I have committed time to working on the front line occasionally; I’ve driven fork lift trucks, vans and lorries, I’ve been out with the security team, spent time on reception, cleaned the toilets and more. All of that has helped overcome problems and make improvements that might well not have happened otherwise.
So it is with great pleasure that I’ve been reading of Lionel Prodgers’ experiences of going back to the front in FM World lately. Lionel is a top man in our industry; he’s done it all and has nothing to prove to anyone, so all credit to him for putting himself about to such good effect. I hope that others who read of his exploits are inspired to have a go themselves.
Pick a job and put a day in the diary; I’ll bet you enjoy it.
Perception and reality; are they mutually exclusive? Discuss.
It’s a funny old world at times. People talk about their rights; their right to be told; their right to the truth and all that, but what is it that they want to know? What is the truth, and will they believe it?
Over the years that I have trod the planet I have had, at times, to judge. I have been a soccer referee, I have done jury service, I have investigated accidents, I have investigated complaints and grievances, I have interviewed people for jobs and promotion, I have judged for awards and I have been a parent.
In all of these roles I have had to arrive at decisions and to decide what I believe to be right, or wrong. Judgement and experience play their part and, yes, I have made mistakes. At least, in the case of some decisions that I have made, I know in hindsight, that I made my decision on the basis of something that I now know was not as I believed it to be at the time.
People will believe what they want to. Take the flat earth mob; there was clear evidence that the world could not be flat, but they believed it for a long time after some had realised the truth (it isn’t round either of course). Conspiracy theorists love to ignore the reality that many others hold true, and there are those who will always believe in an ulterior motive for any action.
People’s expectations can colour their judgement significantly. Take the Obama situation. He was swept to power on a wave of optimism and yet now is rated possibly the worst US president. Is he really that bad? Almost certainly not, but compared with expectations the gap is so big. The bloke probably didn’t have a chance from the start; he was never going to live up to the hype.
When we put in place business deals, we set out all of our expectations in the form of a contract, we have key performance indicators and service level agreements and all those fine things, so we are going to be basing our monitoring of service delivery against reality aren’t we? Well we usually think so, but how many times does it all go wrong? We’ve seen a high profile one in recent weeks where two big organisations have parted company only a couple of years into a contract.
So what is the problem? I see it as one of not having used the right base for the agreement. The usual basis for working things out is on the basis of prior experience plus what we think that we want in future. The first problem is in measuring; that hackneyed old phrase “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage” gets trotted out without any understanding of what that means. Measures get taken from what can be measured rather that what should be measured, and then, because there is the desire to compare year on year, and to prove that the new contract is an improvement, it will be the same measures as last time.
I’ve been placed in the position of being drafted in the manage contracts like this. You can turn up at the review meeting and show that you’re delivering what the contract demands, but in the full knowledge that it isn’t what the client needs, or that you are delivering the latter, but failing the contract.
Perception and reality. They can be the same, but only once we get clients and suppliers working towards the right sort of deals and measures. We’re not there yet.
if we want the best to choose from, someone has to make a difference
We often choose something; sometimes because we want to, and other times because we have to, but how do we choose? There has to be some form of measurement that helps us to compare. It may be as subjective as colour or style or more objective as in, say, performance or size. These choices may be personal or business, but we all make them every day.
Those who try to influence us in these choices will strive to pander to those choice triggers. The world of advertising had a field day in the post WW2 eras as the production capacity switched from military needs to consumer goods and fed an increasing affluent society.
From the 1970s onwards a series of events; oil crises, financial downturns and such saw the boom years come to an end and competition to persuade us has become more and more sophisticated, these days with social media and the like playing their part in parting us with our cash.
Some of all that is on a personal level, but business has seen a parallel experience although the choices here are normally much less subjective. Whether we are in facilities management, logistics or any other business discipline we are much more performance related in our decision making and so those who would sell us have looked to raise the bar in that area.
We talk of excellence in what we sell and what we seek. Consider this quotation; “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away” Antione de Saint-Exupery sums it up well there, but what is this state to which we aspire?
Does competition drive excellence? To some degree it does, but if we take sports as an example of competition, there are those who will demonstrate how to win with minimum effort; Sir Jackie Stewart will tell you all about winning at the slowest pace for example. Following this example there are a lot of companies that are content to just be better than the rest rather than to excel.
Am I suggesting that we abandon the quest for perfection just because of this? No I’m not. The point I’m making is that what happens when we look at competing solutions is that we pick what we see as the best to fulfil our need as we see it at the time. Now that may not be a great solution, but better than what we have now and better than anything else so we choose it. If it helps us achieve something then it may well be worth accepting but, if not, we probably won’t, or shouldn’t bother. Hobson’s Choice, as we used to say.
What we want is to have great things to choose from, and that is what those of us in the service industry try to create and deliver. It is what competition should be all about in this context, and there will be times when we have the right thing for the moment; when we catch the wave and ride it in. It will be a transient moment, sure, but getting it right and creating the thing of choice is such a buzz that you’ll want to do it again and again.
If we truly want to make a difference we have, as my friend Ian Berry down under will tell you, you have to change what is normal.
Perfection made be hard, even impossible, but doing something extraordinary is within reach of us all, so why not try? Make a difference.
putting it right when it’s all gone horribly wrong
The fact that most of the major retail success stories are down to managing that margin so well is something I admire. The evolution of retail logistics, information systems and facilities management have been entwined with my own working life for the last 40 odd years and have fascinated and involved me.
So I hold retail as a sector, and retails units as a specific, up as paragons and an example of how to really do it when I write here and talk to groups and, in general, I can see no reason why I should need to change my mind. I think that the retail sector will continue to lead the way in many fields of business.
So it comes as something of a smack in the face when my nearest hypermarket provides a shopping experience that reeks of massive neglect and also demonstrates how not to do it in so many directions; the chillers and freezer cabinets are always on the blink with leaking water all over the floor and that means lost hours mopping up, wasted product, lost sales and frustrated employees and customers (last Sunday most of the freezer area was empty and cordoned off). The place is generally scruffy and it is easy to sense the people problems that knock on from a site in trouble. These are not just the occasional clump of moaning employees blocking up an aisle while they vent their spleens on the management in front of customers, but also in the attitude to customers.
Further signs of leadership not being up to scratch include empty roll cages blocking aisles , shelf pricing and offer information not being consistent and often missing and poor shelf stocking. Almost everywhere I look there will be something that is a classic example of doing it the wrong way.
The place is pretty much a model of everything that could be wrong, and yet this is one of the country’s leading retailers, and at a site that is busy with both regulars and, because of its location, somewhere that must get a fair deal of passing trade.
Enough of the problems, how do you turn this sort of situation around? The first stage is to work on the people. Morale is hard to lift when people see the place running down, so you have to instil some belief in the leadership so that they will start to follow. Getting the basics right and enthusing your team is a leadership fundamental, but requires some support from above in a big organisation. The people are not stupid and will not get behind someone who they think will not be around for too long.
Next you do need to be able to find some money to spend on the place. This is not just about lifting your team, but also about that other group of people that you rely on; your customers. This particular store has had some money spent on it, but for a store within store operation who no doubt contributed towards their pitch.
Turning things around takes time, effort and cash, but the results tend to pay back handsomely if you can get it right. We know a lot of the people who serve us at the emporium I refer to above and would love to see them have somewhere better for them to work as well as for us to shop. This weekend, we’ll be somewhere else though, and they’ll find takings are down by a few more bob each week for a while, because we can’t rely on them having what we need.
Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.
This is often bandied around as a motivational quote, but like many such quotes, it has its detractors. I don’t pretend to know what William Jennings Bryan had on his mind when he said this, but I have my own thoughts.
On the one hand I often argue here that the choices we make influence what we end up as, and that I’m unlikely to change my mind on. My own experience, both of what has happened to me and what I’ve seen happen to others, is that your choices have a big impact. Of course there are circumstances not of your making that will affect how your life turns out. I wrote last week about the fickle finger of fate and how none of us know how long we have here.
So no, we don’t choose everything that comes our way. The trick for me is in how we react to the slings and arrows through our lives. As with the quotation that started this off, there are loads of old adages, all of which have a modicum of truth in them. One that suits my line of thought here is “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”. You can roll over and moan when things go wrong, or you can try to turn something positive from the experience.
On that basis I have no time for the arguments of those who would reject the premise as not being a law of life. Of course we have no choice in many aspects of our existence; we don’t chose to be brought into life and many choices are made for us by others during our formative years, but we do have the choice of whether or not we learn at school for example, and we have choices about how we approach whatever job we manage to find ourselves.
Not everyone is going to make big sums of money, but that isn’t the only measure of success in life. You can either sit around and wait for something to happen or you can make an effort. You won’t win them all, but you have to be in it to win it, so if you don’t try you don’t have a chance. Even a lottery winner made the effort to pick some numbers and buy a ticket.
Having dreams is fine, but they need a little work to make them come true. It’s fine to look up in wonder at the heights and want to be there looking down, but those who go for a ladder have the right idea.
It doesn’t matter how hard things look there is always an opportunity to try something. One of my schoolboy heroes in the late 50s and early 60s was the great Swedish rally driver Eric Carlson. A bear of a man he could make those little 2 stroke Saabs dance over the ice and through the forests, and at a time when such cars were just modified production vehicles with little of the safety aids of today. There was also no route reconnaissance or pace notes, but when he was asked about what went through his mind heading over a blind crest at night in the forest at 100 mph, he shrugged and said, “Well, the road must go somewhere”.
For all of us we have these blind crests on the road of life; destiny may not always be in our hands, and whatever WJB had in mind when he uttered his words I don’t know, but for me they do make a connection. I’d rather go down trying than crying.
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