Author: Frederick Pilot

25 years later, traffic paradox continues to bedevil SF Bay Area

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A quarter of a century ago, I witnessed firsthand the emergence of a robust information and communications technology (ICT) industry in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of these companies were spawned by the then relatively young personal computer revolution that was making ICT portable and far more accessible.

Companies in the bustling region developed software that enabled tasks that were traditionally done on paper in centralized office settings to be performed on these microcomputers at a time when computer automated design and desktop publishing were the hot apps of the day. Other companies made fascinating devices called modems that made it possible to send work done on these innovative small computers to other computers, regardless of where they were located.

I saw the potential of the emerging ICT to alleviate one of the regions worst problems: suffocating, time sucking traffic congestion. I wrote an opinion piece published in March of 1991 in the San Jose Mercury News advocating widespread adoption of telecommuting using the new ICT tools as a solution.

Here it is 2016 and the situation that existed in 1991 is virtually unchanged. The region continues to paradoxically choke on traffic even though its leading companies innovated a way out of it many years ago.

First ever use of control group to measure effectiveness of workplace flexibility… — CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ —

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — New research released today shows that workers at a Fortune 500 company who participated in a pilot work flexibility program voiced higher levels of job satisfaction and reduced levels of burnout and psychological stress than employees within the same company who did not participate.This is the first time a randomized controlled trial has been used to measure the effects of workplace flexibility in a U.S. firm.

The results were definitive, say Moen and Kelly: employees who participated in the organizational initiative said they felt more control over their schedules, support from their bosses, and were more likely to say they had enough time to spend with their families. Moreover, these employees reported greater job satisfaction and were less burned out and less stressed. They also reported decreases in psychological distress, which captures depressive symptoms that do not amount to clinical depression. The study adds to a growing body of research showing that flexible work arrangements result in happier, healthier and more productive employees.

Source: First ever use of control group to measure effectiveness of workplace flexibility… — CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ —

This research upends the Industrial Age management mindset that staff won’t get any work done unless they are corralled into centralized commuter offices 8-5 Monday through Friday. Kudos to the authors for providing evidence that’s not the case and unlocking a much needed and low cost key to enhanced employee engagement and well being.

Suburban office parks are dying because young people don’t want to drive there | MNN – Mother Nature Network

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At a New Year’s Eve party, I was talking to a business exec running a tech company located in a suburban office building. He was complaining about the number of times he would interview a person who would say he wasn’t crazy about taking the subway and then a bus all the way out to the ‘burbs every day. The exec got increasingly frustrated and at one point responded “So get a car! That’s what grown-ups do when they get jobs!” The candidate responded that he didn’t know how to drive, didn’t have a license, and would keep looking for a job that allowed him to use a bike or transit. This scenario has played out more than once, so the company is now looking for new office space downtown. The suburban office building in his business sector is functionally obsolete. It may well become what we used to call a “see-through” — a glass box with nothing inside.

Source: Suburban office parks are dying because young people don’t want to drive there | MNN – Mother Nature Network

There’s actually a bigger story here. Centralized commuter offices are also falling out of favor because they come with substantial geographical access challenges in sprawling metro areas. Plus as the story notes, millennials aren’t keen on bearing the non tax deductible expense of getting to and from them by car in congested daily commute trips.

The solution here isn’t moving the office — a 20th century approach — but rather moving the work by leveraging today’s 21st century information and communications technology to make work more accessible without the time and money suck of the daily commute. That way, people can work in their residential communities rather than having two communities: one in which they live and another where they work, located in a distant suburb or downtown.

Conversation with Kate Lister, President, Global Workplace Analytics

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Global Workplace Analytics conducts independent research and consults on emerging workplace issues and opportunities, specializing in making the management case for workplace flexibility, well-being programs, mobile work, activity-based work settings, and other agile workplace strategies.

In this podcast, Kate Lister shares her observations on how the world of knowledge work is has evolved and continues to change under the growing influence of information and communications technology that’s dispersing it out of traditional 8-5, Monday through Friday centralized commuter office (CCO) settings. Lister also discusses how this trend lowers real estate and human resource costs for employer organizations.

While UK organizations are in the lead, a tipping point has not yet been reached and won’t until more knowledge workers demand change, according to Lister, and employers realize it is far easier to recruit and retain engaged employees by adopting agile work policies. Lister predicts that by 2020, 25 to 33 percent of knowledge workers will be working outside of CCOs as offices function more as meeting and collaboration spaces rather than full time workplaces.

Moving information — not transporting workers — is the new model for the 21st century

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In fast-growing metropolitan areas like the Bay Area, Boston and Seattle, sub-par infrastructure and pricey housing threaten to put the brakes on rapid economic growth. In struggling areas, infrastructure can be an important obstacle to growth. In either case, as these studies argue convincingly, coordinated regional strategies that include private participation would offer an important competitive advantage.

Source: Infrastructure and the Need for Regional Clout

The meta story here is the Industrial Age, metro-centered model is hitting the wall. As the Bay Area Economic Council report referenced in this article points out, housing market economics work to push people to the far reaches of ever-expanding metro areas. That in turn drives transportation demand and lengthens commutes. In response, regional and transportation planners keep looking for transportation-oriented solutions to bridge the widening time and distance gap. But they cannot work because the underlying template is fundamentally broken, having reached the point of diminishing returns.

The good news in the new century is information and communications technology (ICT) is permanently disrupting this struggling model and its time and life sucking daily commutes to distant, centralized commute-in offices over congested highways and inefficient public transit systems. It’s no longer necessary to move people back and forth daily between home and the CCO. Workers can now easily leverage ICT to work at home or in regional co-working centers located in their home communities. Their work gets done, they can skip the daily commute and pressure on the overburdened transportation system is relieved.

Look to the future now – it’s only just begun … Our predictions for the world of work in 2016 | Andy Lake | LinkedIn

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Source: Look to the future now – it’s only just begun … Our predictions for the world of work in 2016 | Andy Lake | LinkedIn

This is a must read from Andy Lake on the powerful forces reshaping when and where knowledge work gets done in the 21st century and how they will play out in 2016. All point to a shift out of what I term in my eBook Last Rush Hour as fixed “centralized commuter offices.”

Lake’s prognostications also touch on the tension such large scale change naturally provokes and the tug of war between the future and past practices such as a “rear guard” rebellion by cubicle rats sensing an existential threat to their nests.

Prediction: Centralized commute-in office will be gone by 2030

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The Disappearing Corporate Office By 2030, professionals will work mostly from home using super-fast data terminals. Most companies will have nixed their permanent physical office locations in favor of chains of interconnected hubs with different plans for individuals to access space. Meetings will routinely occur virtually and across geographies and time zones, rendering air travel to visit clients or partners unnecessary. And if the office isn’t necessary—why are set office hours

Source: Flexible Work Schedules Are the Future – The Muse

This prediction isn’t new. It was also made half a century ago in the mid-1960s by Walter Cronkite and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke as I mention in my recent eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century.

Facebook’s 10-Mile, $10,000 Solution to Workers’ Long Commutes | Boomtown | News Fix | KQED News

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We know all about the legions of tech workers who live in fun, urbane San Francisco and commute to work in Silicon Valley. They’ve been blamed for driving up rents in the city. And the luxury buses that carry them to and from Google, Apple, Yahoo and other tech campuses have been likened to “spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed” to rule over the locals.Now, one big Silicon Valley company is trying to get its employees to move closer to work. Facebook is offering payments of $10,000 and up to workers who relocate to within 10 miles of its main campus, just off Highway 84 at the western end of the Dumbarton Bridge.


Source: Facebook’s 10-Mile, $10,000 Solution to Workers’ Long Commutes | Boomtown | News Fix | KQED News

Wouldn’t it be far easier and less costly to both Facebook and its employees to simply go virtual to end the time wasting three hour daily commutes endured by staff living in San Francisco? And do employees really need to be sitting in a cubicle to do their jobs and have co-located face time collaboration Monday through Friday?

The irony here is these Silicon Valley companies innovated information technology tools that erase time and distance in business communication and collaboration, yet remain mired in the pre-information, Industrial Age economy where knowledge work is centralized in commute-in offices. Those tools enable collaboration without the commute.

Another option Facebook should consider along with other Silicon Valley companies is bringing the work closer to the workers by using on demand “office as a service” providers in San Francisco and elsewhere instead of building massive commuter campuses and deploying bus fleets to bring the workers to the work.

The ultimate killer app: Ending the slog of the daily commute to the office

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The robust development and distribution of information and communications technologies (ICT) has been accompanied by the innovation of applications. Thirty years ago, it was word processing to replace typewriters and dedicated word processors and spreadsheets to replace calculators and paper accounting ledgers. Ever since, tech entrepreneurs have been seeking the next “killer app” with potential for widespread adoption, such as today’s growth of “med-tech” devices to monitor biometrics.

Now with pre-ICT-era traffic congestion still clogging many metro areas and impeding access to jobs, a major killer app is finally scaling up to solve the problem: utilizing the Internet and remote data storage in the cloud to bring information and information workers closer together. ICT disrupts the commute (a long overdue and welcome disruption) by distributing work out of high cost office towers to communities where workers live. As transportation demand exceeds capacity and commutes have gotten longer in many metro areas, ICT has become the ultimate killer app to overcome the time and distance (and related access costs) separating them.

Jerry Brown ponders the high cost of the car as he departs Paris climate confab

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The California governor had spent five days in the city promoting measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lobbying world leaders as they met to negotiate a global climate pact.On Thursday, with those negotiations entering their final stretch, Brown sat with a sweater on his shoulders, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich’s concept of counter-productivity on his mind.“He said if you count the cost of the hours that you have to work to pay for your car and the insurance and the gasoline, and then add that, kind of translate that into time,” Brown said, “you could go faster on a bicycle.”But looking out the window at the traffic rushing by, Brown said he didn’t “know what to do with all of that, because everybody is working all the time for their car.”“That’s why this is so challenging,” he said. “What we’re doing relative to what needs to be done leaves open a lot of things to be figured out.”

Source: Jerry Brown leaves Paris: ‘We’ll see how we do’ | The Sacramento Bee

One place Brown can begin is asking why there’s so much dependence on automobiles. It’s hard to get people out of their cars when they need them to earn a living. Bill Davidow, author of the book Overconnected, writes on how the rise of the automobile and modern highways following World War II made it possible for people to work in a community far distant from the one in which they live. Now decades later, we are virtually “locked in” to commuting to work by car, Davidow asserts in his book.

But the last two decades have seen the rise of a new information and communications technology infrastructure that obviates the need to drive to a centralized, commute-in office every work day. People can use that infrastructure to bring their work to them rather than the traveling to a distant workplace, working at home or in distributed co-working shared office facilities in their communities. The latter option is also far more accessible by the bicycle commute Brown envisions.