Throwing Out the Office Model

This National Public Radio story about how the Human Services and Public Health Department of Hennepin County in Minnesota has moved to a results-only work environment is fascinating, and as a portrait of the first municipal agency to truly throw out the office as a key concept for work, I think important. What the agency's done is figured out exactly how many people need to be in the office to deal with face-to-face meetings at any given time, created a rotating schedule to meet that that need--and essentially taking everyone else off the clock and a requirement to be in the office at any given time.

It's a dramatic, if not radical, development, to be sure. The state government of Minnesota signed up for the program, designed by a private company, with the intention of decreasing commuter traffic. But it's turned out to be a productivity boost instead. And the story addresses a number of key issues, among them:

1. Favoritism: I hear this as a concern with telework agreements very frequently. The Human Services and Public Health Department dealt with this by moving everyone into the program, and working on problems with performance or adjustment as they arose, rather than holding the program out as a carrot.

2. Adaptation issues: The piece interviews an employee who was a skeptic, an office traditionalist, who ended up won over by the program. I think the idea that there are folks who are going to be intractable and impossible to win over to new methods of working is probably untrue except in an extremely tiny minority of cases. The idea that everyone will adjust to new ways of working immediately is silly, too. Agencies need to understand that these changes are transitions and plan accordingly.

3. Synergy: The story does acknowledge that face-to-face interactions between employees need to happen sometimes, particularly when the agency's discussing new ideas. I don't know that anyone believes that the workplace should vanish entirely for moderate-sized employers and larger companies. But it can definitely be used in an extremely different way, and to much more specific ends.