than the inevitable working from home! Fueled by a lot of buzz, the New World of Work (NWOW) or in dutch “Het Nieuwe Werken” (HNW) is gaining more momentum every day. In a few weeks there will be a NWOW Week where workers will be challenged apply the New World of Work for themselves.
Trouble is that 99% will try to work from home and wonder where all the fuzz is about. Working from home does not boost your productivity ceteris paribus and chances are already doing it in some form or the other. Or you just do not want to work from home (as I do for half of the week)!
Catalyst for this narrow view are general remarks like: NWOW has shortened traffic jams, we are “applying” NWOW at our company or NWOW is working anytime or place you want. The numerous folks that are working on NWOW projects are either defining projects to narrow or way to big. NWOW is not IT. NWOW is not working from home. NWOW is not confined to a subset of the workingclass like the VKbanen argued a few weeks ago. NWOW does not discriminate workers nor work it self! NWOW is not entrepreneurship nor innovation. When reading the twitter feed on #hnw you will see an impression on where talk is about.
the WOW is about innovating the way people work to increase productivity on the long run. It is not about a single factor of work, it is about a disruptive change that makes improvements on a large scale covers all factors of work. Innovation on the way you work requires out of the box rethinking of your processes, procedures and individual workstyles. This means looking at the individual, teams and the organization as a whole and taking into account all facilitators of work: the physical, technology and the human aspect of work. What will the role of the office be in your WOW? How will you manage employees that make their own choices in work? Does your technology enable flexibility but avoid certain risks?
The World of Work is so much more than just flexibility in working hours and locations, it is a big puzzle with a lot of pieces. This puzzle is different for each organization and even for each individual. Only if all the pieces are there and placed at the right spot your NWOW will make you more productive. There are a lot of people on the puzzle board: you, your boss, your IT departement, your Real Estate / Facilities departement, your HR departement and your CEO/Management Team. These guys have a lot of puzzles to solve but your WOW has to be one of them!
What is your opinion on all the fuzz about (N)WOW or HNW?
PS notice that I dropped the New piece on The (New) World of Work because the ‘new’ word predicts an end state but renewal is continuous! (N)WOW projects do not finish they only start.
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