Transform - Go wireless
Literally, are your knowledge workers enabled to move freely throughout your office, campus or enterprise? If not, why not? Upon returning to a previous employer, I took my laptop everywhere with me and received a lot of puzzled looks. I was the first person in an organization of 500 to actually undock my laptop and use it as a mobile computing device! This certainly broke some social norms in the enterprise, since people expected you to be fully present and alert at meetings, not tapping away on a laptop. The staff of the internet start up I had worked for all traveled with laptops, which initially I had thought a little bad-mannered until someone sat me down and explained that we all worked fifty-plus hours a week there; if I wanted to do seventy-plus, I could attend all my meetings without my laptop and spend all night playing catch-up on email! At that point, I figured a little rudeness was okay, because it was the social norm there, but it horrified my new colleagues. Rather than accepting the status quo, I believed my way was more efficient and practical, and started to adapt my laptop usage to my environment.
After frantically typing notes for thirty to sixty minutes, I would send them to everyone in the meeting to prove I was indeed present and alert. What happened next amazed and confused me. The email notes I had taken for personal consumption became the de facto meeting minutes and, more shockingly, the action items I assigned people were taken as gospel. So there I was, a new manager retuning to a previous employer, and assigning work to executives three to four levels up the food chain, without question or challenge. Now, do not get me wrong; the system worked. I was more productive in meetings, got better follow up, and the attendees loved the notes being at their desks when they returned. By boldly doing something different, embracing criticisms and tweaking my way of working, soon I had a model others could follow. Then others started taking their laptops out of their docks and using them, as well, instead of poking fun at me. It took a few months, and people were unsure at first, but after three to four months, both business customers and IT staff were embracing the change. This brings up an important point: customers do not always know what they want. If I had merely suggested taking my laptop with me, I would have been shot down. Sometimes you have to take action, and demonstrate to your customer what works and what does not. Why not find a small broken process, like a company purchasing the more expensive laptops just to be used at desktops, and tweak it a little, and see what happens? Many of my customers could not imagine going to meetings without their laptop now; it would just make no sense, but a short time ago, taking the laptop with them would have been just as ridiculous.
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