Tag: decision making

A Short Post on Air Quote Reduction from WFH Cynics

As working practices change, many decision makers are ‘telepresent’. I have at least two customers that operate a two desk for three policy so are clearly assuming a third of their workforce are simply not in the office on any one given day.

The decision makers cubicle is empty or more likely gone along with many others. The whole office may well have been emptied and now home to a new Starbucks.

Decision Makers spend are spending more time working from home or working from hubs. Ironically, they might even be in the Starbucks where all the cubicles used to be.

Which brings me to the reduction of air quotes.  if I have seen one set of air quotes to accompany the phrase ‘working from home’ I have seen a thousand. Stop it. Your inference offends me and the overwhelming majority of workers use home working as an opportunity to get stuff done, often late into the night.

 

Some also use it to take the opportunity to drop off/collect children or carry out some other family commitment that would otherwise be a pain in the proverbial, require time out of the office or both. It’s a gift from their enlightened employer that they return two or threefold at the beginning or end of the day. What I hear most often from home workers is that their overall output improves once they have worked out a sensible work pattern. They get into the ‘flow’ of increased productivity which would otherwise be interrupted by, amongst other things, the chattering water cooler crowd overusing air quotes.

Informed Decisions are Fairer Decisions

I have spent a fair amount of blogspace this year discussing how good business decisions need more than information. That the evolution of Business Intelligence tools need to extend beyond crosstabs, charts, scorecards and dashboards to collect and share social intelligence. However, this does not mean that decisions should be made without information, it means that information is the absolute but mandatory minimum for a good decisions. More than that, I would argue that we have an obligation to our customers and our workforce to base our decisions about them on good, solid data.

Informed and Fair

Take consumer credit for example. In the 1920’s and 1930’s it is unlikely that you or I would get credit. Credit was awarded to businessmen. And I mean men. The decision to offer credit would be based on criteria that we would find objectionable today like race and gender. Curiously, according to Larry E Rosenberger, John Nash and Ann Graham authors of ‘The Deciding Factor’, the decision would also be based on factors that included ‘punctuality’ and highly subjective assessments of ‘honesty’. Few of us could argue that a system which assesses an individuals eligibility for credit based their previous repayment behaviour, their income and their employment history not only represents good business but fair business too. Sure, it’s not perfect. In the 1980’s I found it difficult to get a mortgage in spite of being a well paid independent IT specialist with as predictable an income as any of my peers that were ‘permanently’ employed. At the time, I might have argued that ‘it was a pain’ but a little additional dialogue and process and it was sorted. Compare this with the brick walls of the 1920’s built around the subjective prejudice of a few controlling individuals and I would conclude that we have made a step, even a leap forwards.

Informed and Innovative

Informed decisions can be the basis of innovation too. Take, for example, the Swedish Company Klarna. Klarna make it possible to shop on-line and pay only after you have received your goods. They are providing a service which means that consumers can shop on-line but can see and feel their goods before they pay for them. In order to do this, they pay the store and take on the credit risk and they can only do this by efficiently analysing mountains of data that assess creditworthiness.

Informed but Rounded

Organisational decisions do need more than hard data. They need to be openly debated, controlled and they need to be informed by tacit, hard-to-communicate knowledge as well as analytics. However, information is the first step in taking organisations closer to unbiased, objective and therefore fairer decisions.