Waving Goodbye to Wedgewood’s Factory in HR
I was doing it well before then and there’s clips of me online going back as far as 2010 or so, railing against the idea of human resources as a label and the insistence by HR managers or CEOs that only people who work ‘in the office’ are going to be productive. It Is A Lie. And even more research is proving it
As more research questioning the assumptions of serendipity of human interactions and workplaces occurs, we start to see a very different view of productive workplaces and the superior outcomes of ‘alone’. In fact one of the approaches that the Accelerated Scenario Process I designed with Maree Conway​ back in 2004 uses the very model this research now refers to as ‘bursty’. In that process a period of intense close contact communication and thinking is broken up with around a fortnight of nothingness before another final day of intense group thinking and activity. The results are excellent.
The outcome of all this is to hopefully put a sword to the reliance/insistence on the 1760’s Wedgewood model of factory overseer that still infests our HR and management approaches. What this last year has shown en masse is that your work teams CAN and should be trusted to work from home, that productivity is often improved, and that adaptation to this idea is not as difficult as claimed.
It also ties into the ‘whole pf person’ model I’m writing about at the moment. It’s time for HR managers to drop the ‘R’, move to the ‘C’ and wave good-bye to Wedgewood’s factory in their own workplaces. It should also give comfort to those people who’ve assessed any holding in commercial property trusts and decided to thin their portfolio. It should scare the hell out of Councils that rely on revenue streams inside large cities. NO ONE is coming back. (okay, some will) 🙂
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