WORK NAKED   Interview: Cynthia C. FroggattCynthia Froggatt http://www.worknakedbook.com/ "If the management is willing to let employees 'work in pajamas', the company will be getting the most of its organizational potential." This is the theme running through Work Naked, recently published by Cynthia Froggatt, a workplace strategy consultant. ECIFFO interviewed her at Manhattan Upper West Side to hear why she wrote this book which offers tips on how to improve performances at virtual workplaces. ECIFFO: First of all, why did you write this book? Froggatt: I have been doing consulting to many companies on the virtual workplace since 1993. I've seen companies trying to implement remote/mobile work strategies and being unsuccessful. After they failed, they wouldn't allow workers to work remotely. I started to do presentations of case studies of the companies which succeeded, and I realized that everybody was interested in the experiences of other companies. So I thought if I put all those successful stories together, that would be helpful to people. I wrote the book, hoping that somebody would look through it and mark off the pages that were relevant to his or her company and hand it to the CEO, or a CEO would hand it to the managers and say, "Look, this is a company just like us." The purpose of writing this book is to push forward what I think is a very valuable way of working. ECIFFO: What would be the advantages of virtual work, remote work and mobile work? Froggatt: Firstly on the management side, it can allow individuals and teams to collaborate on a global basis, which will cut costs. Further, it is a way to leverage technology they are paying for. And on the individual side, I start from the premise that most people want to do a good job and make a contribution. I believe virtual/remote/mobile work is the way for workers to improve their performance. They can reduce their commuting time, which reduces the total work time and allows them to enjoy work more. All this results in better services to customers and ultimately profits the company. There are overwhelming profits and it is interesting to me why companies have not embraced this way of working. That has to do with our mindset about work, but it is hard for people to overcome their mindset. ECIFFO: Would you explain the eight essential principles for peak performance presented in eight chapters in your book? Principle 1: INITIATIVE If you take the INITIATIVE to explore remote and mobile work strategies, you can accelerate your company's move into the knowledge economy. Froggatt: In general, the eight principles are not sequential but still related to each other in a particular way. If you are not willing to take the initiative to change the way you work, then none of the rest would be helpful to you. Generally speaking, change is difficult for people. I have worked on change programs and communication programs on the workplace, and I have seen people very fearful of change. So what I tried to do in the first chapter is to actually turn people's perspective around. Change can be a very positive thing, if looked at from a different perspective. One of the things which are likely to happen is this. A CEO decides the virtual workplace is the thing for his company and encourages his employees to work remotely. But individual managers don't feel comfortable doing that. What will happen is that they will call for many meetings so that remote workers will have to come to the office. The managers will blame every problem that arises on the fact that people work at different places. Sometimes they will make it pretty clear that if you want to get promoted, you'd better be in the office, being seen working by them. That's what appears to be the absence of trust. So you have to have a system which relies on trusting people. Principle 2: TRUST If you TRUST your employees to work out of your sight, they will be more committed, more productive, and more satisfied. Froggatt: The trust I talk about in Chapter 2 is not just about managers and employees trusting each other but also about customers trusting you and colleagues trusting you. Since business success depends on trusting people at various levels, I wanted to take people through exercises what will help them build that. I also tried to get people to actually think about how they use their time in the office. People have a misconception that if you work 40 hours a week in the office, you would be with somebody all the time. I gave all kinds of reasons why somebody is not in his or her workplace. That person may happen to be away from the workplace or wouldn't like to see people. These reasons help dispel the myth that people working in the office are infinitely accessible. Principle 3: JOY If you encourage JOY and satisfaction in the workplace, you can reap the true rewards of technology and mobility while avoiding overwork and burnout. Froggatt: People tend to determine whether somebody is working or not from visual inputs. You can't. With knowledge work, you can't really see it being performed. Somebody could be sitting in a cubicle for 60 hours a week in front of the computer. That person could be going out on the Internet, reading things that have nothing to do with work at all. And likewise, somebody who looks like not working could very well be doing knowledge work. But unfortunately when people describe to somebody that they have been working hard, they say, "I haven't been getting much sleep" or "I had to skip lunch." So this chapter tries to change your vision of what an effective worker looks like. Principle 4: INDIVIDUALITY If you celebrate the value of INDIVIDUALITY, you will encourage creativity, self-management, and stronger solo contribution. Froggatt: The main point of this chapter is that one workstyle does not work for everyone. There isn't one right way to work. By asking people to think about where they studied at college, I can divide them into three basic groups. The first one is the people who studied in their dorm rooms or their own rooms in their houses. The second group is those who went to the libraries to study. The third group is the people who found some other public settings such as a diner, a Starbucks, a student union or an outdoor place. The first group, "dorm studiers," like to have a lot of control over their environment. They intentionally blur the boundary between work and personal life. They work a little while and then get up and do a little laundry. They then work for a while and get up and cook dinner. They purposely intermix those activities. They are the ones who are most productive when working at home. The second group, "library studiers," on the other hand, purposely segregate work from personal life and they do this by using a physically different setting. They like a quiet place similar to the library. But they also get a lot of energy by being around people engaged in a similar task. So they are actually comfortable being in the office environment, although there are very few office environments that actually accommodate these workstyles. And the third group, "public setting people," are pretty similar to the library studiers, except that quietness is actually distracting to them. The important thing is that the office environment doesn't do a good job of accommodating all of these workstyles, because it assumes that everybody has the same workstyle. The other thing that's important is that some companies actually go to the extreme of embracing working from home, which I don't think is a good thing. This book does not celebrate working from home but it insists that we should have the freedom to choose where to work. At some company there is a telecommuting policy which has a check list to find the qualities of a good telecommuter. And it starts off with "Are you self-motivated?" Who would actually say "No, I am not self-motivated. I need somebody else standing over me telling me what to do?" The ability to work from home is seen as a reflection that you are a higher level worker and have great self-management skills, which is as dangerous as making everybody come to the office. Principle 5: EQUALITY If you emphasize EQUALITY more than hierarchy and status symbols, you will remove barriers to communication and avoid wasting money on outdated trappings. Froggatt: The freedom of choice is granted to only some. That is the problem I have in a lot of companies' programs, which have checklists to decide who can be given this freedom to choose their workstyle. Only the workers who are high performers are allowed to work this way. But my premise is that everybody should be given this freedom to make a choice. You could still choose to go to the office from 9 to 5 everyday. The fact that you chose that workstyle by yourself would give you a totally different motivation and morale about being in the office. ECIFFO: How does the management measure employees' performances when they work outside of the office? Froggatt: Many companies say they have results-oriented measurement programs, although they haven't fully implemented them. As soon as they let people work differently, they would start saying, "The amount of time somebody is seen in the office affects his or her promotion." It has nothing to do with the result. If you contract somebody to do a service for you, you don't pay the person if he or she hasn't fulfilled the goal. You don't say, "Well, you've worked on it for a long time, I will pay for it, even if you couldn't get it done." I'm just saying that you should judge your employees in the same way. Principle 6: DIALOGUE If you are willing to engage in open, honest DIALOGUE, your global workforce will be better informed and more collaborative. This chapter discusses what it means to have a real two-way conversation. A lot of what companies describe as communication is a one-way communication. It is often a newsletter or a broadcast e-mail, and there is no way for employees to ask a question back. The chapter also discusses knowledge management programs, which allow employees to share their ideas with colleagues. Principle 7: CONNECTIVITY If you optimize CONNECTIVITY between all the stakeholders in your business, you will strengthen business relationships and improve your ability to attract and keep valuable workers. Most people would think this one would be about technology. No, it addresses technology tools only in a very minor way, because technology changes all the time. I don't want to write a book that needs to be updated all the time. What I wanted to do is to encourage people to look at how they can use face-to-face interactions and electronic tools to collaborate in the best way and to get the benefits of getting themselves away from the idea of co-location. Principle 8: WORKPLACE OPTIONS If you allow access to a wide range of WORKPLACE OPTIONS, your employees will use their time more effectively and be well-supported for both solo and collaborative work. In the last chapter, I wanted to say that not only corporations provide different kinds of workplaces, but we need to think more broadly, for instance, to think how we can use existing places as workplaces. I also mention in this chapter that there is a big market for meeting places---places where large groups of people can come together and concentrate for a certain amount of time. Matt and Gail Taylor developed the places which can be used for two-day sessions. They provide not only spaces but also facilitation skills. They help you run a good sort of brain storming sessions and look at a problem in a different way. So you can get enormous amount of work done in a short period of time. ECIFFO: Thank you very much for sharing a lot of interesting stories with us. We are sure they will help our readers get an insight into the virtual work. (an excerpt from ECIFFO 39 October 15, 2001)