The Work-life Insight
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: Why It Matters
Taking agile to scale is major departure from the traditional command-and-control style — and it’s becoming increasingly popular. But you can’t do this halfway. Here’s what to know before you dive in.
With talk of scrums and sprinting, corporate environments are starting to sound a bit more like rugby matches these days. But the terminology, borrowed from the popular English sport, actually refers to an alternative way of managing work: agile.
Kristine Dery, a research scientist with the MIT Center for Information Systems Research who is studying agile at scale, also known as agile management or scaled agile, as it relates to the employee experience, said making the switch represents a major overhaul for any organization.
But, by many measures, it appears to be a more effective way of working in a rapidly-evolving digital environment. Large companies like Spotify, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Riot Games have all adopted the method.
So what is agile, and is it the right fit for your firm? And what should you do to prepare for implementing it?
What is agile?
Agile, first introduced in 2001 in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, started out as a method used in software development that challenged the traditional, linear “waterfall” development model, in which entire projects are pre-planned, then fully built out before they are tested. Agile’s approach offers iterative flexibility, with small parts of projects being built and tested simultaneously.
Taking a more iterative approach makes it easier to keep projects aligned, on track and relevant, and it allows for the release of “minimum viable products” to gather more frequent user feedback from clients earlier in the process. That helps guide the team on what needs to be changed or altered to make the product more successful.
“The traditional method of managing, the waterfall method, which is very inflexible, planned-in-advance, linear, and not iterative at all, wasn’t lending itself at all to the flexibility and the adjustments that were necessary to make great software,” said Carine Simon, a senior lecturer and industry liaison at MIT Sloan, who helped lead a transition to agile at scale at Liberty Mutual Insurance. “[Agile is] iterating with customer feedback, prototypes, and tests, versus taking some requirements and issuing the product maybe a year later, when the customer’s requirements have changed or technology has evolved.”
The idea is to allow the end user to have a clearer view of their requirements for the finished product earlier in the process of creating it, instead of receiving a final product that may not end up looking exactly like what they had anticipated.
“It’s a series of experiments, as opposed to one linear project where you get to the end and find out if it works,” Dery said. “On lots of projects with long timeframes, once you get to the end, the problem has shifted and often you’ll be coming up with a solution that is now removed from the problem.”
What is agile at scale?
Seeing agile’s success in information technology and the growing prevalence of technology throughout business at large, many companies began to ask whether the method’s practices and philosophies could be scaled up to apply with equal success to other projects or even entire business functions, Simon and Dery said.
“[Companies] said ‘Let’s see if we could move projects forward, not necessarily faster, but to get better results out of some of the projects we have, given that just about every project involves technology to some extent. Maybe it’s an opportunity to work differently,’” Dery said.
Simon said companies that adopt agile at scale benefit from breaking down functional silos and pooling the talent from each function into teams. “In the traditional management, you have one leader for each function … but the coordination and collaboration between those functions is often difficult, whereas if you create one team that pools members from each, then the thinking is that the project will be more successful. All projects are going through a similar mode of management.”
During her time at Liberty Mutual, Simon said teams developing customer-facing products began adopting agile methods at scale to redesign the process for onboarding new customers. That required pulling together the various teams involved in parts of the process to bring their perspectives together: the marketing team who designed onboarding collaterals, the call center team whose agents are on the phones with the customers, the finance team who is dealing with the different payment methods.
“It brought a team together with all those perspectives, making them collaboratively work on redesigning the process iteratively to come up with minimum viable products,” Simon said.
The switch, she said, saw the team members empowered to own the product from beginning to end and led to better products.
But adopting agile at scale means more than just plugging a new tool into an existing framework. It requires a paradigm shift at the organizational level, Dery said. “The biggest downfall is not understanding what a vast departure it is, and not investing in the learning and support that’s required to build the environment that enables it to work effectively.”
Learn a new language
Dery said those who plan on applying agile to their organization will need to learn to work within an entirely new methodology that has its own lexicon of terms to describe its workflow.
During the process, known as a “Scrum,” work is assigned to cross-functional teams and divided into “sprints” — the basic unit of progress delineated by a specific timeframe, usually two weeks to a month.
Then, there are “scrum masters” who coordinate the team’s activities, and each day members meet for short “stand-up” or “daily scrum” meetings to provide updates on the prior day’s work, the work planned ahead, and any potential stumbling blocks.
“It’s a way of coming together to make sure those things are addressed. They keep the project moving forward,” Dery said of the stand-ups. Indeed, agile sprints were so-named to evoke a sense of pace.
Development is a trail-and-error, test-and-learn process, Dery said, and the product is rolled out in small pieces at the end of each sprint. Features that still need to be completed are added to a “product backlog,” with the most crucial taking highest priority.
Within a Scrum, team members are typically afforded more autonomy in how they approach tasks and resolve problems in a departure from a command-and-control structure of project management. The concept is that those closest to the work know best how to address issues.
“You’re working on the problem all the time, as opposed to working on the solution,” Dery said. “It’s a different way of thinking and organizing, and it requires a different set of disciplines. You’re constantly assessing where you’re at, what you’re doing, and what you want to deliver.”
Ready for this? Go in fully committed.
Dery said companies that decide to deploy agile at an organizational scale often find that the difficulty in doing so is much greater than what they had anticipated, especially when it comes to the impact such a shift can have on employees.
“There’s no just ‘dipping your toes in the water,’” she said. “The experiment is going in fully committed to see how this allows you to work differently and build value.”
A traditional, static office design isn’t necessarily the best fit for an agile work environment, she said. They’re much better suited to a more flexible space, with movable furniture and design thinking walls. “You want it visual, for working out loud, to work it out where they are at,” she said.
Since the method requires significant close teamwork, organizations will need to ensure there are adequate video and telecommuting technologies in place for times when all team members can’t be in the same location.
Providing coaching for employees to change their work habits to better align with the agile management style is also crucial to success. “You need to be supporting not just their capabilities, but also helping build the type of work habits more suited to this way of working,” Dery said.
Scrum masters are usually responsible for ensuring that happens, and for attracting the right kind of talent to provide it.
Watch out for these friction points
Agile and waterfall methodologies are so different that they often end up butting heads when a project moves from one to the other, Dery said.
“They’re such very different ways of working,” she said. “If you’ve done one part in agile and then you throw it into waterfall, it’s a very, very different approach. It causes a lot of things to stall or get lost as [the project] is translated from one to the other.”
Dery said it’s still unclear what the best approach may be to head off such areas of friction as companies roll out agile to greater extents.
Simon said giving up the sort of control that agile requires can be threatening to some managers, and any company weighing a shift to the style should identify the functions or departments that lend themselves to it and implement them there first. If it’s successful, the track record of wins can help sway other functions to give it a shot.
Some functions whose processes are very certain and repeatable or governed by outside regulatory or compliance requirements may never need agile management, nor would they necessarily benefit from it, she noted. Even if agile looks great on paper, it won’t work if there’s too much resistance.
“In customer-centric processes where customer input is key, and in that sense it’s quite uncertain or fast-changing, then those would be the types of areas in a firm that lend themselves to agile,” she said. “You need some early wins, picking the top areas of your firm to try agile and get familiar with it, so that managers can get on board.”
Benefits of Renting a Training RoomIt has become very common for small businesses and entrepreneurs to rent an office or a work space for rent, but now many are also beginning to use training rentals. A training space for rent has become the latest trend now that more companies and businesses are realizing the importance of proper training for their employees.
Major Issues with Poor Training-Room Facilities
Training is an essential part of any company that has employees because it ensures that every worker has the skills and knowledge to do an exceptional job. However, many companies do not have their own fully functional training space and are forced to do their training using inadequate environments. Unfortunately, a poor training room can negate many of the benefits of training.Some of the biggest issues with poor training spaces include:
Lack of Necessary Technology
If a training room is not equipped with the right technology (such as video-conferencing systems, projectors, or multimedia displays), you may not be able to give your employees the information they need or train them to the level required.
Poor Conditions
Cramped spaces, excessive noise, and poorly furnished rooms (such as ones without desks, tables, or chairs) can end up being very distracting, thus causing your employees to lose out on much of the learning.
Bad Impression
Poor training rooms can make a bad impression on participants. This is particularly harmful when participants are clients, colleagues, or partners, as opposed to employees. An unprofessional space can quickly sour the experience and cause clients or employees to look elsewhere.
Benefits of a Training Room
With training rooms for rent in Jersey city there is no reason for any company—big or small—to use inadequate spaces. Training rooms for rent have a number of benefits.
Affordable
Commercial spaces are prohibitively expensive to buy. Not only are they pricey, but the costs of purchasing the right technology, furnishings, and equipment for the training space are very high. On the other hand, a training space for rent is a fraction of the cost, offering access to professional training rooms at affordable rates.
Right Infrastructure
Training rooms for rent come with the technology that you need—including projectors, video-conferencing systems, and whiteboards—for effective training and presentations.
Designed for Training
When you rent a training room, you can be assured that you are getting a fully functional space that meets your needs. Training rooms can be rented in large sizes to accommodate many participants, or in reduced sizes for smaller meetings. Furnishings, lighting, and design all adhere to professional standards.
Professional
If you want to make a good impression on clients, you need to use a professional space. Training and seminar rooms are professional environments that will help your small business or startup present a more professional image.
Secondary Services and Amenities
The best training rooms for rent will offer secondary services and amenities, including live receptionist services, administrative help, and access to other areas, such as kitchens or lounges. Look for office space rental companies that can offer you the services you need to conduct the best training possible.
WorkSocial offers mailbox services and virtual offices along with fully-furnished executive office suites and training rooms for rent in Jersey City, NJL
earn how to Designing Effective Meeting Rooms
The Room is Killing Your Meeting – Here’s How You Can fix it
We spend a huge amount of our workday in meetings. Middle managers are estimated to spend about 35% of their workday in meetings. Executives can spend as much as half their day in meetings. That’s a lot of time!
A lot of wisdom has been shared about designing and running effective meetings. Yet few resources offer advice on the meeting room itself. The meeting room is a core piece of the meeting experience. Effective meeting room design can impact and change your entire meeting.
Well-designed meeting rooms can put attendees at ease, encourage conversation, and induce creativity. Mindful meeting room design can drastically improve effectiveness of your meetings.
Tips to Design Effective Meeting Rooms:
The Purpose of the Room
The key to designing meeting rooms is to understand your team’s needs. Firstly, decide on size and location of the room. Some key questions to answer here are:
- What will the room be used for? Are these going to be smaller, collaborative rooms or do you need a full size boardroom?
- How does your team like to work? Do they work in small groups or do they work in large teams?
- Is this room meant to be client facing, or is it for internal use only?
- Does this room need to be within easy access from employees, or does it need to be located further away for additional privacy?
Taking a step back to look at use cases allows you to begin tailoring your meeting rooms to the way that your organization works.
In addition to understanding how employees prefer to collaborate, it’s also important to understand where they like to collaborate. Meeting room analytics such as average meeting size and room utilization rates will help you determine the size and number of rooms you need.
Once you decide on placement and size, you can use your understanding of the purpose of the room to further enhance its design.
Equipping the Room
Essential equipment should be evaluated before moving onto more creative aspects of meeting space design. Fleshing out these essentials, based on user needs, will help provide a base for your creative choices.
Here are some considerations to keep in mind when building out your equipment requirements.
Furniture
It’s important to understand how the room will be used and identify key requirements. For example, will people need to move the chairs around and swivel to look at a screen? If so, a requirement might be chairs on casters that can swivel. Alternatively, if the room is meant for creative work, you might want to provide alternative seating that encourages more freedom.
As for tables and surfaces, consider not just size, but usage. Would people be primarily standing or sitting in their meetings? If they use the room for standing meetings, you might require a standing or height-adjustable table. Do the tables need to be moved?
Additionally, think about power and power access. Do you need power access through the table for other equipment? What about charging outlets for attendees with mobile devices – this could include USB charging ports or wireless charging.
Beyond choosing the right table and chairs for the meeting room, there are some other furniture considerations. For example, do you need in-room storage for meeting supplies? Do you need whiteboards?
Check out the Google Ventures design war room in the video below and see how the purpose of the room changed the design and furniture requirements.
Technology
As our world becomes increasingly digital and mobile, audiovisual equipment is now key to the meeting experience. Some core pieces to include in your technology selection include screens/displays and communication devices.
Again, consider how that technology will be used in each room. Not every room requires a screen or a communications device, and rooms should be appropriately outfitted based on their purpose. Some rooms might benefit from a traditional whiteboard and marker, while others might require advanced teleconferencing tools such as high quality cameras and microphones. Most rooms might simply need an easy to use AV presentation system.
Meeting rooms are typically high demand spaces in the office. Poor planning regarding booking processes can lead to unnecessary tension and conflict in the workplace. Beyond displays and communication, an important aspect to consider is how meeting rooms are booked and used.
Tools such as digital displays installed outside the meeting rooms and sensors to detect room occupancy can help alleviate some of these conflicts in the workplace and improve productivity.
Lighting
Lighting is crucial to the meeting room experience. Excessively soft lighting might result in participants dozing off. On the other hand, harsh lighting might not be conducive for reading and viewing of screens.
Once again, understanding the purpose of the room is crucial in building lighting requirements. For rooms that are designed to be comfortable, cozy spaces, softer lighting is often necessary. Large boardrooms might require more brightness, and rooms with projectors might require dimming lights.
Lighting is also heavily dependent on the location of the room. If the room has a lot of natural light, you might have to look at reducing lighting with blinds. For rooms without windows, light must be a primary consideration in room design.
Sound
Sound management is often one of the most neglected pieces in meeting room design. Meeting rooms that are designed without consideration for sound often result in unwanted side effects.
This could include echoing and reverberation, scraping from moving furniture, or feedback between microphones and speakers.
Acoustic controls are now available in a variety of designs that add to the feel of a meeting room, rather than take away from it. Wall mounted acoustical panels are effective at keeping sound in, as are ceiling mounted baffles. If it’s sound from outside the meeting you want to keep out, look at using similar solutions throughout your office to reduce sound reverberation.
Fleshing out the rest of the meeting room experience
Once you’ve finished designing and implementing the physical environment of the meeting room, the next step is to consider and design the full meeting experience. You will want to think about how people use the room, from start to finish.
Firstly, how do people reserve and book the meeting rooms? Are only specific teams allowed to use specific rooms? Do you require a dedicated staff member to manage these rooms and requests? We recommend using a meeting room booking system such as Workscape to make booking rooms simple for your team. This will help you avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure smooth processes in using the room.
Second, how do people use amenities that are in the room? Are your audiovisual tools easy to start and use, or do you need a technical team member available to set up these meeting rooms beforehand?
Some other ideas to consider:
- Would you stock refreshments in each room?
- If the room requires additional privacy but has glass walls, would you need to add privacy blinds?
Finally, how would you know when the meeting ends and the room is available? Do you need a team member to clean up the room after each use? What if a meeting ends early? Would you be able to use that additional time for other meetings? Workscape can help with this by using smart sensors. It is simple – just plug the sensors in and Workscape will inform you when a meeting ends early, or if not one shows up for a meeting.
Get Creative!
Once you firm up the hard requirements for your meeting rooms, you can get creative in your meeting room designs.
The key here is to enhance your corporate culture and identity with your meeting room experience. Keeping your equipment requirements and room goals in mind, choose furniture, paint, and decorations that match your corporate culture and the image you want to convey.
Struggling to get creative? Here are some ideas on how you can inject your company culture into your meeting room design:
Color scheme
Color can change the experience of a room. Using official company colors is a classic way to match the meeting rooms and echo the company brand experience.
For more formal boardrooms and conference rooms, neutral colors are always a good choice. Despite being formal, you can spice up the room with a kick of color. For example, Resignation Media’s office in Texas maintains formality in their meeting rooms with neutral gray, white and black. To add a bit of personality to the room, the firm opted to go with with multi-colored chairs.
Unconventional color choices can be used to express company culture and influence meetings as well. Strong colors such as red and orange can evoke excitement and even aggression, and might be suited to encourage teams working towards competitive targets.
Other colors such as green and blue can be calming and refreshing, and help alleviate some of the tension in charged meetings. Yandex’s meeting room in Kazan uses yellow-green to create a refreshing, soothing space for relaxation and more casual conversations.
Materials
Similar to color, materials can change how a space is perceived. Glass and chrome can often push a modern, clean look. On the other hand, wood is extremely versatile and can be used in many applications. The right wood can bring warmth into the room and add some rustic charm. X3’s office in Romania converts an attic into a charming, cozy space with the use of wood beams and tables. Comfy chairs further add to the cozy warmness.
By blending colour and materials, you can shape how the space feels. True North Mortgage in Dallas uses glass and white to portray a clean, modern meeting room.
On the other hand, Rocket Fuel Chicago uses a similar design, but selected a fun lime green as their primary color. This creates excitement and energy, contrasting with True North Mortgage’s clean white.
Tie Your Space to Your Company
Tying the space to the company doesn’t necessarily mean emblazoning your logo everywhere. While that design element might work for some spaces, other spaces could call for subtler elements.
One way to creatively make the space your own is to tie the space to what you do. Red Cross Blood Processing Service in Melbourne achieves this by decorating the walls of their meeting rooms with blood type lettering. This gives a shout out to the mission and goals of the organization, and makes the meeting room truly a Red Cross meeting room.
While Adidas Shanghai prominently includes the Adidas logo in the conference room, the highlight is actually the 3 strips of white that evokes Adidas’s iconic brand. Combining that with the brand’s classic black and white combination really strongly ties the meeting room to the brand, making it a great space for client meetings.
Other rooms in the Adidas Shanghai office maintain the black and white motif, but depict images of athletes as well as value statements. The decorations are still strongly tied to the brand identity and very clearly mark the space as Adidas.
Don’t be afraid to have fun!
Meeting rooms and spaces do not have to be stoic spaces devoid of personality. Adding elements of fun can help transform a dry boring meeting into an engaging, exciting one. What’s important here is to keep in mind your workplace culture – embrace it and do not be afraid to include the more outlandish ideals.
Red Bull’s Mexico office embraces fun, transparent meetings with this meeting and lounge space. Not having any walls creates a space that’s open and inviting, as well as connected to the rest of the office. The playfulness fits with Red Bull’s unconventional brand.
Facebook is infamous for the miNY room in New York, popularized through Instagram by celebrity guests. A miniaturized room, it features tiny furniture and a parody of Facebook’s workplace culture. While more fun than functional, the room’s purpose is to make a statement and create a strong memory for guests.
Have Excellent Meetings
Meetings are a huge part of our working life. Effective planning can improve the content of a meeting, but it is extremely important to consider your meeting environment and processes. Having a well-designed meeting space, that has fully considered how meetings will run, will help to significantly enhance the meeting experience for you and your attendees.
Designing a meeting space and want to simplify meeting room booking? Workscape can help – sign up for a free consultation now.
Credit: https://www.workscape.io
How Do I Improve My SAT [or any] Score?
As always: study, study, study.
Get a handle on the underlying academic concepts tested on the SAT, and bone up on the areas where you’re deficient. Then, you might want to consider signing up for a prep course, like those offered by Prep Expert.
Prep Expert’s courses will teach you test-taking strategies – how to notice trap answers or read passages more effectively, for example – and can go a long way toward improving your score.
200 Points is No Joke
When it comes to particular schools, the average scores for admitted students will change from year to year, and the trend is almost always up – If a particularly large number of students apply to a school in a given year, the average SAT score of admitted students could go way up, making that school much tougher to get into. So when you make your list, it’s probably a good idea to have at least a few ‘target’ schools where you’re closer to the 60th-70th percentile of SAT scores.
3 Steps to Breakthrough
Develop a(1) Strategy (Develop a Strategy of Success)(2) Story (Visualize Success)(3) Be in a Peak State (Exercise & Practice)How to Develop a Strategy of Success: Click Here
With questions? Surprisingly…no!
Not with questions. At least, not with open-ended or questions that are meant to be answered with a “yes.”
Your best tools are statements based on observations. Labels and cold reads. They extend thought processes, helping people open up the flow of what they are thinking and causing them to say it out loud.
Is it crazy to think this would work for you and your unique situation?Here’s one label that Los Angeles area real estate broker Kendyl Young and her team are using in open-houses for residential real estate. They will use it after a twosome has walked through a house discussing it:
“It looks like you had a lot to talk about.”
Kendyl has described this approach as opening up the floodgates of truth talk.
Before they would ask a good calibrated (open-ended) question such as “What did you think?” or “How does this house work for you?” This would often be met with some information. But not a lot. Certainly no opening of floodgates.
When she and her team switched over to labels / cold reads such as the one above – they’ve started getting responses like: “Oh yeah!!!” and then a deluge of what the prospective buyer’s thoughts were.
The Black Swan Group is defining a “cold read” as an observation you can make of the situation before anything is said by your counterpart. It can be an observation of physical actions, body language, or predictable responses to the circumstances at hand.
It can be adding up the facts as known and stating a hypothesis, as opposed to asking if something is true.
A number of years ago, I was interviewing an informant with my partner in the FBI. The informant had far too much detail about the robbery of a video store to have not been a participant. He was telling us the story, claiming that it had been told to him by the target of our investigation (the robber).
When it occurred to me what the truth was I didn’t ask a question, I stated, “You know this much about the robbery because you participated in it.”
I didn’t say it as an “aha!”. I didn’t state it as an accusation or a “gotcha!”. I just said it quietly as a simple fact, with a downward intonation in my voice.
He hesitated for a moment and quietly said, “Yes.” I still remember the shocked look on my partner’s face as he stared at me.
I’d done this wrong in the past. I once participated in an interview of a drug dealer. We were looking for his brother. We showed him a picture of his brother, and I asked him if he knew who was in the picture.
He said “No.”
“This isn’t your brother?”
“No.”
“Who then, is it!?”
“I don’t know.”
Later, in the same interview, I got frustrated and simply said:
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, I know this is your brother.”
He said, “So?”
People react differently to statements than they react to questions.
Both the good thing and the bad thing about a good calibrated question is that it makes people stop and think. (Calibrated questions are primarily questions that begin with “What…?” or “How…?” – they are not questions where we are hoping for a confirmation of a “yes”.)
The process of getting them to stop and think will often have the opposite effect of “unlocking the floodgates” of truth telling by virtue of getting them to stop and think.
You can apply this idea to any situation where you want to encourage who you’re dealing with to simply open-up.
Brandon Voss does this all the time with people who call The Black Swan Group to inquire about training.
Prospective client: “So give me your sales pitch.”
Brandon: “It seems like you got a lot of problems you’re trying to solve.”
Prospective client: (Whoosh! 45 minutes of outlining challenges.)
Kendyl and her team even brainstorm cold-reads together. They talk about typical things they frequently see when buyers come through houses and then come up with cold-reads to use.
They use them and then report back to the rest of the team the results. Very smart!
After a while, no matter what your circumstances are, you can probably pretty much describe the 5 – 7 types of potential clients you see the most frequently. That’s what intuition and experience are all about – getting a good feel for your typical challenges.
Come up with some and try them! Find your own ways to unlock the floodgates and create great relationships.
Relationships = Revenue
Good luck!
Click here & Learn to negotiate like no one other
So you're tasked with planning a strategic offsite for your team. If you're new to planning or just need a refresh, you've come to right place. We know there are a ton of moving parts, so we built a guide that outlines everything you should consider when planning an offsite.From finding the right venue to choosing a crowd-pleasing menu, ensure everything goes according to plan with these tips below:
1. Lock down the date.
First things first, make sure the whole team can attend. After you've double checked that everyone is free, send out a calendar invite as a placeholder before anyone books a trip or schedules a meeting.
2. Budget wisely.
Budget will be the determining factor on whether you can splurge or need to save on the venue and catering. Expect to spend about 70% on the venue, 25% on food and beverages, and 5% on transportation and miscellaneous supplies. Fees at WorkSocial are less than any hotel in the area.
3. Finalize the agenda ahead of time.
Ask the team lead for the proposed agenda in advance. From there, you'll know how long to book the venue for, how long to set aside for meals, and can let the caterers know when to arrive and cleanup. This will help determine if you have time allocated for setup, breakdown, all agenda items, and some buffer time for breaks and potential delays.
4. Choose a venue that is both functional and inspiring.
Consider the primary purpose for the offsite — is it to spark new ideas, motivate the team, increase team unity? If the answer is yes, look for a venue that offers natural light and breakout areas. Bonus points if you find a spot with outdoor space and close to the waterfront in Jersey City.
Find the perfect venue for your offsite in the New Jersey and New York City metro area.
5. Order food that fuels.
Think outside the boxed lunch and bagel route and choose catering that will keep the team satisfied so energy levels don't drop midday. These sample catering menus are a great place to find inspiration.
6. Hydrate and caffeinate.
Even if you're not supplying breakfast, let the smell of fresh coffee welcome the team to kickstart the day. Supply the venue with enough water bottles and other beverages to keep everyone hydrated until happy hour. All included at WorkSocial's training room venue.
7. Designate someone to be your eyes and ears.
If you're not attending the offsite, make sure the point person knows the catering company's contact info, how to get inside the venue, and any other logistical details. Check in with them throughout the day to make sure everything is going according to plan.
8. Dot your I's and cross your T's.
The day before the offsite, get the finalized headcount and confirm all last minute details with the venue, catering company, and team leads to avoid any last minute surprises. Which will all be handled by WorkSocial's team!
9. Ask for feedback.
After the offsite, ask the team leader for feedback on the venue, catering, or if there was anything you could have done differently. Even if the offsite was a smashing success, there's always room for improvement!
Credit:
Oscar Peerspace
Website: https://www.peerspace.com/
Training rooms are much more than spaces where employees come to sit and learn – they’re dynamic environments where people meet, learn, share ideas and collaborate. When designing a space to accommodate such a wide range of activities, it can be hard to decide which aspect of the design should take priority.Our advice? Flexibility. Just like at WorkSocials premier training roomThe following considerations will help you create a flexible and effective training room space.
1. Get Physical
The best place to start when designing a space is with the actual physical room itself. Is it large enough? Is the HVAC sufficient? Will it allow compliance with ADA accessibility for wheelchairs, and additional space for guide dogs, assistants and equipment? We recommend 15-17 square feet per participant, and at least 10-foot ceilings to allow the use of visual aids. HVAC controls should be accessible inside the room, and allow a minimum air velocity of 12 to 15 feet per minute. The space should be designed to meet specific ADA guidelines, such as accessible doors, ramps, hardware and signage.
2. Flooring
The perfect flooring can be found at the intersection of form and function. Look for low-pile commercial carpeting with a pattern that will remain stylish until the next renovation (approximately 10 years) and will not highlight the inevitable coffee stains and muddy shoe prints. Low pile is also ideal for improving acoustics and muffling noise from moving chairs and foot traffic.
3. Lighting
Because for rent training rooms in NJ are flexible, lighting should be easily preprogrammed or dimmed, and designed for even illumination. Choose ambient light over direct down light sources, as it eliminates glare on screen surfaces and fills in the shadows on faces so people look well on screen. Windows are the best ambient light sources, but make sure they have easily adjusted shades or drapes.
4. Technology
To deliver multiple lesson delivery options, the room must have it all: white board, ceiling-mounted projector with remote, large-format screen, DVD player, speakers, wireless microphone, laser pointer and a lectern from which all this technology is easily managed.
A good design includes additional outlets in the floors, walls and work surfaces to power this technology as well as participants’ laptops. A great design strategically places tables with flip top outlet boxes directly over these power outlets. This will eliminate cords in the walkways and associated trip hazards.Tables are a major factor in how a room can be used, so it’s crucial that they are high-quality and durable to withstand daily use, and easily rearranged and stored to allow as many possibilities for different layouts. Tables’ folding or nesting mechanisms should feature tool-free operation. Choose 60-inch tables with C-shaped legs for added knee room, at widths up to 24-inches – just deep enough for a laptop and book.Chairs should be constructed of material that doesn’t conduct heat or cold, and ergonomically designed for superior comfort. Consider padding, pneumatic seat height adjustment and swivel capability options.
5. Room Configurations
While formal classroom and auditorium configurations might work well to accommodate town-hall meetings and/or video presentations, we recommend a more relaxed style to better facilitate free-and-easy communication among participants and between the instructor and participants. Round, U-shapes and arcs promote the Socratic teaching method, which emphasizes student/teacher dialog. Smaller configurations, such as six sets of five, are also ideal for encouraging peer-to-peer teaching and group problem solving.
While a good instructor can overcome any obstacle in a room’s set up, a well-designed and flexible training space helps them be their best in Jersey City.
Credit: www.falconproducts.com
There seems to be something special about coworking spaces. As researchers who have, for years, studied how employees thrive, we were surprised to discover that people who belong to them report levels of thriving that approach an average of 6 on a 7-point scale. This is at least a point higher than the average for employees who do their jobs in regular offices, and something so unheard of that we had to look at the data again.
It checked out. So we were curious: What makes coworking spaces – defined as membership-based workspaces where diverse groups of freelancers, remote workers, and other independent professionals work together in a shared, communal setting – so effective? And are there lessons for more traditional offices?
To find out, we interviewed several coworking space founders and community managers, and surveyed several hundred workers from dozens of coworking spaces around the U.S. A regression analysis following our survey revealed three substantial predictors of thriving:
People who use coworking spaces see their work as meaningful. Aside from the type of work they’re doing – freelancers choosing projects they care about, for example — the people we surveyed reported finding meaning in the fact that they could bring their whole selves to work. They’re able to do this in a few ways.
First, unlike a traditional office, coworking spaces consist of members who work for a range of different companies, ventures, and projects. Because there is little direct competition or internal politics, they don’t feel they have to put on a work persona to fit in. Working amidst people doing different kinds of work can also make one’s own work identity stronger. Our respondents were given the opportunity to frequently describe what they do, which can make what they do seem more interesting and distinctive.
Second, meaning may also come from working in a culture where it is the norm to help each other out, and there are many opportunities to do so; the variety of workers in the space means that coworkers have unique skill sets that they can provide to other community members.
Lastly, meaning may also be derived from a more concrete source: The social mission inherent in the Coworking Manifesto, an online document signed by members of more than 1,700 working spaces. It clearly articulates the values that the coworking movement aspires to, including community, collaboration, learning, and sustainability. These values get reinforced at the annual Global Coworking UnConference. So in many cases, it’s not simply the case that a person is going to work; they’re also part of a social movement.
They have more job control. Coworking spaces are normally accessible 24/7. People can decide whether to put in a long day when they have a deadline or want to show progress, or can decide to take a long break in the middle of the day to go to the gym. They can choose whether they want to work in a quiet space so they can focus, or in a more collaborative space with shared tables where interaction is encouraged. They can even decide to work from home, without repercussion, if they need to meet a repairperson or deal with a family member need.
And while coworkers value this autonomy, we also learned that they equally value some form of structure in their professional lives. Too much autonomy can actually cripple productivity because people lack routines. Coworkers reported that having a community to work in helps them create structures and discipline that motivates them. Thus, paradoxically, some limited form of structure enables an optimal degree of control for independent workers.
They feel part of a community. Connections with others are a big reason why people pay to work in a communal space, as opposed to working from home for free or renting a nondescript office. Each coworking space has its own vibe, and the managers of each space go to great lengths to cultivate a unique experience that meets the needs of their respective members. Grind, for example, is a growing network of coworking spaces in New York and Chicago. Anthony Marinos, who oversees Grind’s marketing, community management, and member services, shared with us, “When it comes to cultivating our community at Grind, we’re all about the human element. We consider ourselves as much a hospitality company as we do a workspace provider. Our staff knows all of our members by name and profession, and we’re constantly facilitating introductions between Grindists.”
WeWork, which recorded a valuation of $5 billion last December, emphasizes how it “seek[s] to create a place you join as an individual, ‘me’, but where you become part of a greater ‘we.'”
Importantly, however, socializing isn’t compulsory or forced. Members can choose when and how to interact with others. They are more likely to enjoy discussions over coffee in the café because they went to the café for that purpose – and when they want to be left alone elsewhere in the building, they are. And while our research found that some people interact with fellow coworkers much less than others, they still felt a strong sense of identity with the community. We believe this comes from coworkers knowing there is the potential for interactions when they desire or need them.
So what are the implications for traditional companies? Even though the coworking movement has its origins among freelancers, entrepreneurs, and the tech industry, it’s increasingly relevant for a broader range of people and organizations. In fact, coworking can become part of your company’s strategy, and it can help your people and your business thrive. An increasing number of companies are incorporating coworking into their business strategies in two ways.
First, they’re being used as an alternative place for people to work. Michael Kenny, Managing Partner of San Diego-based Co-Merge, told us, “In the past year and a half, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the use of the space by enterprise employees. We have seen teams come in to use various on-demand meeting rooms. We have users from global companies of size ranging from several hundred to several thousand employees who use the space not only to allow their distributed workers to get productive work done, but also to attract employees who demand flexible workplace and work time.”
Grind is also witnessing growth in the number of remote workers who are becoming members. “We haven’t had to reach out to larger organizations, they actually tend to just come to us,” Anthony Marinos says. “We’ve had employees from Visa, journalists from the Chicago Tribune, and even people affiliated with large financial institutions all work out of Grind.”
Spending time away from the office at a coworking space can also spark new ideas. Rebecca Brian Pan, the founder of COVO and former chief operating officer of NextSpace, explained how Ricoh’s innovation team worked out of NextSpace Santa Cruz for several months to observe how people work and where they hit pain points. Based on member insight and feedback, and their own observations, the Ricoh team explored several new products that could help members in their daily work and chose the most highly rated product to pursue. From this effort, Ricoh later launched this product globally as their Smart Presenter, a paperless meeting solution.
Second, the lessons of coworking spaces can be applied to corporate offices. Just as it’s important to encourage flexibility and support your mobile workforce, there is an equally important reality of creating the right kind of work environment inside your own walls. But this doesn’t just mean creating open plan layouts or adding a coffee bar.
In reality, people need to be able to craft their work in ways that give them purpose and meaning. They should be given control and flexibility in their work environment — many companies are increasingly adopting the best planning practice of providing a 1:1 ratio (or close to it) of desk seats to seats in shared settings used for either collaborative work or quiet work.
Companies are also trying to enable more connections, helping people to interact and build community beyond work meetings. Coworking spaces are one place to look for guidance, as they regularly offer networking events, training programs, social events, and even summer camp. Some companies are going even, further, however. Rich Sheridan and James Goebel, founders of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, recently expanded their office space by 7,000 square feet so that so that start-ups and early stage entrepreneurs can work alongside Menlo programmers to spur community and innovation.
In a way, the company is reverse-engineering its office into a coworking space.
Our research — which is ongoing — suggests that the combination of a well-designed work environment and a well-curated work experience are part of the reason people who cowork demonstrate higher levels of thriving than their office-based counterparts. But what matters the most for high levels of thriving is that people who cowork have substantial autonomy and can be themselves at work. Our advice to traditional companies who want to learn from coworking spaces is to give people the space and support to be their authentic best selves. The result will be employees who feel more committed to your organization, and are more likely to bring their best energy and ideas to the office each day. Even if it is corporate headquarters.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2015 issue (p.28, 30) of Harvard Business Review.
A big change in accounting will put $3 trillion in liabilities on corporate balance sheets
- A big change in lease accounting rules effective Jan. 1 requires companies to record operating leases on their balance sheets.
- Operating leases include everything a company rents to run its business, from office space, equipment, factories to planes and cars.
- The accounting change will result in an increase in company leverage, a key measure when evaluating a company’s risk.
A new corporate accounting rule is about to pull an estimated $3 trillion out of the shadows.
Starting this year, companies are required to record the cost of renting assets used in their operations, such as office space, equipment, planes and cars, on their balance sheets rather than bury that expense in the footnotes of their financial statements, thanks to a new accounting standard now in effect.
The result will be trillions of dollars added to liabilities on their books. Until now, only leases that led to the purchase of the asset were accounted for in this manner. The change, by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, is supposed to make it easier for investors to evaluate a company’s financial obligations.
Sheri Wyatt, a partner at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, said “It’s going to affect all companies’ leverage. They will have more liabilities on their books than they had previously.”
Morgan Stanley expects the consumer discretionary sector to experience the largest increase in debt because of this change, and it estimates the leverage ratio for the retail sector to grow to 3.4 times from 1.2 times.
U.S. public companies are committed to a total of $3 trillion in operating leases, according to International Accounting Standards Board. Companies with large amounts of operating leases include retailers and restaurants that lease properties and airlines and shipping companies that lease airplanes, cars and ships.
It may force investors, including quantitative funds, to change the way they measure certain financial criteria they use in making their investment decisions. Leverage — measured in the ratios of debt to earnings or debt to equity — is a fundamental number used when evaluating a company’s risk.
Analysts and sophisticated investors hadn’t really ignored the large amounts of lease obligations when calculating debt ratios. For many years, they have been capitalizing leases by multiplying the annual rent expense by 8 times to get the estimated value of the remaining lease payments. However, the numbers companies now have to put on their balance sheets may look very different than those estimates.
“I do think people will have to adapt to new metrics – and they may be surprised. The liabilities and assets that companies report may look very different from the ad hoc estimates that people have used in the past,” Todd Castagno, equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, told CNBC.
“Those very common metrics that people look at to value equities, to look at performance, to screen for high quality stocks, all those ratios are going to change,” Castagno said.
Quant fund surprises
The change in company leverage will directly affect some quantitative funds that use leverage as a screen.
For example, the MSCI Quality index uses debt to equity as one of the metrics to rank companies. If a company’s debt to equity ratio changes significantly due to the new accounting standard, it will get screened out of the index.
“You might have different companies moving in and out of what you define as quality depending on how these ratios change,” Castagno said.
To be sure, the additional liabilities on the balance sheets shouldn’t have an effect on company credit ratings as they had already been taken into account.
“We don’t expect a significant rating impact,” said Kevyn Dillow, accounting analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “The credit quality is not changing. Moody’s estimate of a lease obligation is pretty precise in that we calculate a present value based on company’s disclosures.”
Data vendor inconsistencies
To add to the complexity, some data vendors haven’t incorporated lease liabilities into companies’ total debt amounts, and won’t in the future. Depending on what platform investors use, they will get very different numbers.
For example, Refinitiv will not treat operating leases as debt for U.S. companies, only as non-debt liabilities on the balance sheet, to “allow clear comparability of reports across companies, markets and accounting standards,” a spokesperson told CNBC. It will only add the leases liabilities to debt for companies filing under International Financial Reporting Standards, mostly in the European Union, Asia and South America.
Bloomberg Terminal is already incorporating lease liabilities in company debt.
FactSet told CNBC that it has not updated the data for early adopters yet but will capture the operating leases as part of the debt in the next reporting season.
“Some of the data vendors are adjusting and some of them aren’t. Depending on what data vendor you use, you are going to get very different metrics. I think people are concerned with that,” Castagno said.
by: Yun Li
Employees don’t like them. Research proves they’re ineffective. Why is it taking so long for us to get rid of them?
First, you tear down the walls and dispense with the soulless cubicles. Then you put everyone at long tables, shoulder to shoulder, so that they can talk more easily. Ditch any remaining private offices, which only enforce the idea that some people are better than others, and seat your most senior employees in the mix. People will collaborate. Ideas will spark. Outsiders will look at your office and think, This place has energy. Your staff will be more productive. Your company will create products unlike any the world has ever seen.
That is the myth of the open office, a workplace layout so pervasive that its presence is taken for granted, and its promises–of collaboration and innovation–are sacrosanct. According to a 2010 study by the International Facility Management Association, 68% of people worked in an office with either no walls or low walls–and the number has undoubtedly grown.
There’s just one problem. Employees hate open offices. They’re distracting. They’re loud. There’s often little privacy. “The sensory overload that comes with open-office plans gets to a point where I can barely function,” says one 47-year-old graphic designer who has spent more than two decades working in open environments. “I even had to quit a job once because of it.”
For as long as these floor plans have been in vogue, studies have debunked their benefits. Researchers have shown that people in open offices take nearly two-thirds more sick leave and report greater unhappiness, more stress, and less productivity than those with more privacy. A 2018 study by Harvard Business School found that open offices reduce face-to-face interaction by about 70% and increase email and messaging by roughly 50%, shattering the notion that they make workers collaborative. (They’re even subtly sexist.) And yet, the open plan persists–too symbolically powerful (and cheap) for many companies to abandon.
As with so many things today, we have Google, at least in part, to thank. Open floors have existed since the secretarial pools of the 1940s, but when the then seven-year-old Google renovated its headquarters in Mountain View, California, in 2005, the lofty, light-filled result was more than a showcase for the company’s growing wealth and influence; it signaled the dawn of a new professional era. Architect Clive Wilkinson eschewed the cubicle-heavy interiors of the company’s previous office for something that resembled a neighborhood: There were still some private spaces, but also lots of communal workplaces and small, glassed-in meeting rooms. “The attitude was: We’re inventing a new world, why do we need the old world?” Wilkinson says. With Google’s rise, his vision for a collaborative workplace took off. “We had [companies] come to us and say, ‘We want to be like Google.’ They were less sure about their own identity, but they were sure they wanted to be like Google.”
Around the same time, a more radical version of the open office was emerging from other startups founded during the dotcom boom of the late ’90s. As these companies proliferated, they looked for cheap ways to differentiate themselves from each other and their predecessors. They found inspiration, Wilkinson says, in the more playful offices that had long been common in the advertising industry. Some moved into the unfinished lofts of San Francisco’s South of Market district–and left them that way. Walls only make things complicated when you’re rapidly adding (and eliminating) staff. “Those places were terrible,” says Joel Spolsky, who cofounded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and is currently the cofounder and CEO of Stack Overflow. “They were so loud, because there were no drop ceilings. It was painful for everybody. But [dotcom startups] were doing it because they had literally no choice.” Out of necessity, an aesthetic was born.
By the time Facebook opened its Frank Gehry–designed Menlo Park headquarters in 2015, the open office had become not just the face of innovation in Silicon Valley but a powerful metaphor. Facebook now houses roughly 2,800 employees in a 10-acre building that the company claims is the largest open floor plan in the world. “The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote when he announced the design in 2012. Famously, he has a plain white desk in the communal area, just like everyone else. (He also has a private “conference” room, where he is rumored to spend much of his time.)
The whiff of disruption that open offices carried became irresistible to startups and established companies alike. “When you talk to leaders in corporate real estate or CEOs about why they designed their space [in an open plan], most will give some fluffy answer,” says Ben Waber, cofounder and CEO of workplace analytics company Humanyze, which uses sensors to track how people use offices and interact with each other. “But when you dig down, it’s because this is what the workplaces look like at a couple of highly successful tech companies.” Calvin Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who studies how people work, takes an even more skeptical view: Open offices have become a way to indicate a company’s value to venture capitalists and talent. The goal is “not to improve productivity and collaboration, but to signal that the company [is] doing something interesting.”
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