Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Now in regards to the topic at hand, "work" - the presenter has a very simplistic view about work and most of what he suggests applies to knowledge work and not defined work. There are plenty of examples where his notion of work does not make sense. Try pulling a stunt like this in healthcare where every minute counts and can affect some patient at some level.
I think knowledge workers, especially in IT are a pampered lot in comparison to sectors such as healthcare where you are overworked and paid peanuts. I will not say that people need to be radical and suddenly change the office culture of the corporation overnight because it is not going to happen.
Managers and Meetings seem to be picked on because it makes for good video and sounds nice as M&Ms. It sounds lame to be honest.
What offices need to do is quite simply (1) reduce meeting times from one hour to 20 or 40 minutes and (2) create small rooms that are available on a first-come first-served basis where people can come to work and take these rooms for two to three hours of uninterrupted time. Most of us do this anyway; we steal a meeting team room and shut ourselves to get work done. it just needs to be formalized.
While I agree that steps should be taken not to interrupt people while they are working, 'quiet Thursdays' could become 'Johnny didn't get anything done because he needed to ask a question Thursdays'.
I do agree with email and IM instead of demanding that someone stop right now and pay attention to you while you phone and stare at them. No matter how urgent your question is, it can wait until someone has a natural stopping point.
Trust me, interruption or even conversation from known people is much more disruptive than a noisy train station because in a noisy-train station, there is probably a more scientific explanation for this; probably the familiarity of the person who is talking is what is more disruptive, I do not know. Secondly, you are obligated to be nice to people at work, even if they disrupt you. You don't have to do that at a train station.
At my place of work, people sing, play youtube, talk loudly and are completely oblivious of how it affects those who are in the next cube and are trying to get work done.
Although I was enjoying the talk, my wife (who doesn't know how awesome Jason is) pointed out that he was building a very big straw man when talking about the company where no one works.
She had a good point.