Work, in Plain English

It may be common sense to you, but your cube neighbor with the changed-weekly-top-40 cell phone ringer may believe he is enriching your world.

FMLink’s Facilities Management News posted this guide today, from Cambridge Sound Management’s white paper. To see the full text, complete with detailed tips, read the FMLink article here, or download the white paper from the Cambridge website.

1. Never use a speakerphone. Duh!
2. Develop a softer telephone voice. Did you know your telephone may have a “sidetone” adjustment? It controls how loudly you hear your own voice, which effects how loudly you speak.
3. Adjust telephone ring loudness.
4. Set cell phones and pagers to minimum ring volume, or better still, vibrate mode.
5. Take cell phones to a break room or other private space if a call is likely to be protracted.
6. Listen to any music over headphones, not loudspeakers. And don’t hum. Like I do.
7. Use Instant Messaging.
8. Don’t make unnecessary noise in the office. Are you a gum-cracker? a coffee-slurper?

Cambridge Sound Management produces and installs sound masking technology. Nice! On their website, I saw case studies for some tough (read cavernous, brick- or stone-walled, and other acoustic nightmares) work spaces. Can they please do something for urban apartments?

Thinking about jump-starting a living knowledgebase at work (or elsewhere)? Some readers like nice, long explanations. Most like that and a quick bottom-line read. Here are seven quick sparks for “Getting Your Hands on Wisdom”:

1. Look for and value chances for cross-departmental interaction
The more relaxed, the better.

2. Get yourself and your team out of the office regularly
Not just to the café — fresh air and (light) exercise works for grownups, too.

3. Relentlessly build trust
I found a whole bunch of excellent links on this subject while researching the Competition Myth (go figure)!

4. Find ways to temporarily forget the deadline
Bet you’re doing this already when you start checking your email. You can always set a timer if you’re worried you’ll never go back…

5. Find ways to at least temporarily suspend politics
Call it what it is, and if possible, poke a little fun at it.

6. Don’t forget the off-site folks, by any means available
Do they know everyone on the team? Do they know the go-to folks when you’re not around? Who has their IM address?

7. Wisdom-sharing works best when it’s fun
…otherwise, it’s stale and impotent. If you can’t figure out how to make it fun, lean on an expert!

We learn so much from challenging projects. As thinking beings, we take those lessons and apply them to the next project, as well as (hopefully) to other areas of our lives. How do we share what we’ve learned so that the information and experience is available when and where it’s needed?

Elizabeth over at A Girl’s Guide to Managing Projects gets us thinking about how important it is for lessons learned to be saved, remembered and transferred across department boundaries. She mused about a product that might do this, and improve project success rates.

My response: Is it a product? or a culture? or a combination of both…?

Making Wisdom-sharing Something We Do

Sharing knowledge and experience across project boundaries requires both the time and space to process those lessons. In most parts of the world that use the term “project management”, those resources are harder to come by.

It takes a disciplined and determined individual to carve out the time for themselves and for the team, and to create real value in a “post mortem” or “post-implementation review” (not to mention while the project is ongoing). We can hold the meetings, but what good is it if we just file our findings somewhere on the network?

Elizabeth posted once about a “Meeting room C” (quoting her twice!) — a cafe outside the office. While it’s important to keep in mind that public places require discretion, the bottom line is that this sort of atmosphere allows us to relax and bounce ideas and impressions off colleagues, and across departments. In settings like that, formal “lessons learned” have a chance to become internalized, to become wisdom, and to give rise to positive professional relationships. Those relationships become vast and pertinent assets that cannot be matched by anything written.

Whether or not it’s a cafe, the secret is simply getting out of the familiar office environment. Another ingredient is temporarily suspending the rush, allowing people to take the time they need to mull ideas and respond to them frankly. Of course, this also requires a little freedom from office politics, and a whole lot of trust— a topic worthy of its own post (or five, or six, or more).

What about Parisha in Porbandar? or Fran out in Fairbanks?

This hasn’t occurred to me before, which is funny, since I’ve been a long-distance player many times.

If off-site and long-distance team members can make it to an occasional meeting, that is ideal. If they can’t, it’s still important to involve them in wisdom-sharing.

There are many ways people learn. Beyond simply absorbing information, we can bring learning to life by taking the time to engage each other. Video conferencing is becoming more and more accessible, and instant messaging isn’t too shabby either. Sure, IM is missing the face-to-face ingredient, but there is lots of space in it for play and spontaneity.

Once again, it’s about reaching out, having a conversation, giving any and all team members the space to ponder, ask “stupid” questions, vent, brainstorm, and more.

Speaking of play, here’s that product you may be looking for:

Post-mortem: The Online Game

This little nugget is to be continued, but in the meantime here’s a dictionary.com definition for you to ponder:

wis·dom [wiz-duhm] –noun

5.	(initial capital letter) Douay Bible. Wisdom of Solomon.

American Psychological Association (APA):
wisdom. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved July 23, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wisdom

Chicago Manual Style (CMS):
wisdom. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wisdom (accessed: July 23, 2007).

Modern Language Association (MLA):
“wisdom.” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 23 Jul. 2007. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wisdom>.

The original article (and associated comments) that sparked this post can be found here.

As a word-of-mouth marketing enthusiast, I’ve always wanted to post a list somewhere of my personal favorite things — what I’m routinely buzzing, day-to-day. I thought it would be interesting to experiment on one individual’s personal word-of-mouth world.

I’ve added a tab to this blog’s header, called My Buzz. There are just a few items on the page now, but as I think of things, I’ll add them.

It would be even more interesting if others would create their own list, particularly if we could ensure that these are genuine, and not “sponsored”, or even “peer pressured” (“You mean you didn’t include my brilliant product? But you said you loved it!”). I would link to them from the My Buzz page. If things got big, I’d give the links their very own page.

Anybody want to play?

This Jeff Han video (see the first one I posted here) demonstrates more specific applications to show how the multi-touch interface is evolving. This presentation was part of Adobe’s TED2006. Han is a research scientist for NYU’s Media Research Lab, and the inventor of an “interface-free” touch-driven computer screen.

According to the folks at Blackle (who were inspired by a post on ecoIron), presenting the Google search pages on a black screen would conserve something like 750 megawatt-hours a year.*

There is an argument that the cost in readability, as well as the very small actual savings per view (74 watts for an all-white page, 59 watts for an all-black page), make this a questionable idea. On the other hand, the Blackle folks suggest that, if nothing else, using their version of the Google engine is a daily reminder that “we need to keep taking small steps to save energy”.

The DOE’s EnergyStar site has a nice little chart displaying the power use differences of various screen colors. If you are involved in web development, you may want to take that data into account.

*LCD screens use a permanently-on back-light; Their energy use remains the same, no matter the screen color. As of January 2007, 74.7% of all computer monitors are LCD. The above savings estimate of 750 megawatt-hours takes that information into account. If you’d like to learn more, go to ecoIron’s January archives and read the fascinating research and responses that followed the original “Black Google” post.