Author: Frederick Pilot

BOE headquarters: Falling plaster, shattered glass, even bats Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly: The Newspaper of California State Government and Politics.

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To the passer-by, the tower at 450 N Street is a downtown landmark, soaring assertively 24 stories into the Sacramento sky.

But for more than a decade, the Board of Equalization’s (BOE) headquarters building has been a nightmare to an assortment of state bureaucrats.  Glass panels fall out; water leaks; elevators stop between floors; there are potentially dangerous contaminants; plaster falls off walls; there are lawsuits.

Source: BOE headquarters: Falling plaster, shattered glass, even bats Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly: The Newspaper of California State Government and Politics.

Telework and community-based shared co-working spaces would provide a solution to the ongoing and needless exposure of state civil servants to the deficiencies of this troubled building.

Life ‘inside the box’: A Google engineer’s home in a truck at company headquarters – The Washington Post

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As his tagline goes, “home is where you park it.”

Source: Life ‘inside the box’: A Google engineer’s home in a truck at company headquarters – The Washington Post

This illustrates the absurdity of Google’s centralized commuter office (CCO) in the San Francisco Bay Area where housing costs are dear.

Telecom infrastructure deficits spur unnecessary commuting

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Priscilla Sodums, who works as a field representative for the Census Bureau, dealing with a lack of broadband at home complicates her job. “I have to drive out to the Danville Library hotspot and mostly that works. It doesn’t always work, so then I have to drive someplace else. I spend a lot of time just trying to keep up with the demands of my job,” says Sodums.For Sharon Sprague, no broadband means a 60-mile daily commute to an office, when otherwise her job as the director of a bachelor of arts program for an online university would allow her to work at home.“My employer would love it. They’d love to have me working out of my house. Most everybody else in this area works out of their home,” says Sprague.

Source: Some Vermonters Are Still Stranded In A Broadband ‘Wilderness’ | Vermont Public Radio

No elbow room anymore on Sacramento roads | The Sacramento Bee

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With the recession over, Sacramento-area freeways and roads are crowded again. Some say more than ever.

Source: No elbow room anymore on Sacramento roads | The Sacramento Bee

Is the daily commute to the centralized commuter office even necessary given that information and communications technology that connects knowledge work to knowledge workers is so widely accessible compared to room on freeways? Particularly in California with its green policy posture aimed at reducing carbon emissions?

Millennials can’t afford O.C. homes and would do well to look to the Inland Empire, study says – The Orange County Register

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Buying an Orange County home would be “a bad idea” financially for most millennials, while commuting from the Inland Empire may be a very good path to homeownership for them, according to a new study by the online real estate site Trulia.That may not be news to home seekers, but the study underscores the degree to which it makes financial sense for 25- to 34-year-olds to look to the east.

Source: Millennials can’t afford O.C. homes and would do well to look to the Inland Empire, study says – The Orange County Register

Not a likely outcome. Millennials aren’t keen on working set hours in centralized commuter offices (CCOs) or long commutes to get to and from them. And especially the super commutes of three plus hours a day that would come with the arrangement suggested here.

Shift toward self employment presents socio-economic challenges

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Supporting both stability and flexibility is good for workers, business and society. New platforms are providing workers with the flexibility and mobility that many have wished for but not found in the traditional labor market. However, self-employed workers choosing to engage in flexible work may also encounter unforeseen work disruptions or other hardships without the protections and benefits that may be provided through full time employment. We are in agreement that flexible work should not come at the expense of desired economic security.

Source: Common ground for independent workers — Medium

The above is from an open letter titled Principles for delivering a stable and flexible safety net for all types of work. It calls for a framework initiating a conversation on taking a new look at employment and benefits as more people become self employed, working on discrete, set duration assignments and projects versus being indefinitely employed by organizations with a package of compensation and benefits.

As I discuss in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century, the transition offers substantial benefits such as giving people more control over their professional and daily lives while affording them the freedom to both live and work in their communities rather than commuting to a centralized commute-in office located elsewhere. The primary challenge, however, is remaking the economy so that stable self employment opportunity exists for skilled, educated people versus the so-called “gig economy” wherein people attempt to patch together various forms of low income micro “gigs” that contributes to personal financial instability and impedes the economy as whole.

San Francisco Bay Area’s growing traffic paradox

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The Bay Area is one of the brightest sparks in the nation’s recovering economy but feeding its vitality means residents will have to give up a lot of local control, dig deeper into their wallets, and make room for tens of thousands of new neighbors, according to study released Friday

Source: Bay Area needs powerful regional government, study says – ContraCostaTimes.com

In my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century published earlier this year, I discuss the puzzling paradox of the San Francisco Bay Area. It innovated much of the information and communications technology that effectively obsoletes the daily commute to the office but is nevertheless choking on burgeoning traffic.

Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process? – The New York Times

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Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells, a new study finds. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.

Source: Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process? – The New York Times

The message here is don’t spend time commuting and sitting all day. Work — and exercise — at or close to home. And if you must commute, walk or bicycle.

Silicon Valley stuck in the Industrial Age

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“I think back to the situation when Yahoo disbanded telecommuting,” Allen says. “Marissa Mayer caught a lot of flak for that. I’ve been doing research on flex-work arrangements and work family issues for many years and knew it was not a panacea for individuals to better manage work and family lives.”Other tech giants, such as Google, have moved away from work-from-home policies in favor of creating sometimes quirky but amenity-rich campuses where employees are likely to strike up conversations, Allen says.

Taking this principle to its logical conclusion, the ideal would be for staff to reside on campus as many did in college. Then there would be time for even more conversation over dinner and breakfast instead of getting onto buses and into cars twice a day in the Bay Area’s notoriously congested freeways to shuttle back and forth to home. But most knowledge and information-based organizations still operate today in the Industrial Age model where their members split their lives between the office and home in a distant community. Is all that time spent commuting really worth the daily face time and opportunity for spontaneous conversation that can also take place with a phone call or teleconference? Or is the opportunity for co-located conversation being offered up as a pretext and justification to hang onto the Industrial Age way of working in centralized commuter offices?

Carol Sladek, a partner and work/life consulting leader at Aon Hewitt, says the journal article shines a light on one of telecommuting’s most difficult aspects: the difficulty in measuring outcomes.

Substitute knowledge work for telecommuting in this sentence and the challenge remains the same. Telecommuting is irrelevant. As suggested elsewhere in the article, the real challenge is managing knowledge workers relative to desired outcomes. That remains the same regardless of where people work.

Source: Human Resource Executive Online | Telecommuting, by the Numbers

It’s official: Working from home is the worst

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“If it’s just about you banging out emails or writing a report, sure, you can do that wherever,” Waber said. “But the vast majority of stuff we do at work today—teamwork, not individual work—that is the stuff that really measurably suffers.” For big companies, that decline in productivity can be worth millions of dollars a year.

In a 2012 poll, 62% of employees said they found telecommuting to be socially isolating. And “jobs where individuals are most likely to be telecommuting involve sitting in front of a computer,” Allen said, so it makes sense that people working from home would get less exercise than those who have to commute.

Source: It’s official: Working from home is the worst

For many if not most knowledge workers, that is exactly what they do most of the day: sitting in front of a computer and writing documents and emails. And in many workplaces, they are expected to do that with minimal interaction with others, which is viewed as socializing and break time in the tradition of the water cooler — not working. The cultural ethic is nose to the grindstone in the style of the Industrial Age assembly line.

Tolan is certainly correct that in organizations that encourage collaboration, being face to face is ideal. But as Tolan suggests, most knowledge organizations do not operate as full time focus groups or think tanks. Constant co-located and spontaneous interaction among their members isn’t an organizational expectation. Tolan is also right in pointing out that not all knowledge workers have a suitable home office environment. A growing industry is stepping up to address this need with shared co-working office space in communities where knowledge workers live.

In addition, Tolan ignores the enormous business and personal cost to both knowledge organizations and their constituents to maintain what I term in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century as centralized commuter offices (CCOs) that involve hours of wasted time spent each week traveling between home and office, often entailing significant distance and time. CCOs are unnecessary with today’s information and communications technology that is rendering the Industrial Age daily commute trip obsolete.