IT makes staff struggle in isolation

Staff development suffers in offices where technology takes precedence over human interaction

One of the most overused pieces of management-speak in IT is the concept of “space”. Every sub-market in IT, from mobile TV to business intelligence software, is held to have a “space” of its own.

Yet for all the dominance of spatial metaphors in IT thinking and practice, the real physical spaces in which IT-based work takes place are rarely given the attention they deserve.

It is not just sad that the space allocated to individual workstations has declined over the past two decades. According to Gill Parker, head of workplace designers BDGworkfutures, the physical IT set-ups can also conspire to segregate people from the classical situations in which workplace learning often takes place.

Parker notes that a typical organisation today gives graduate recruits a surfeit of IT hardware and software, but not a lot of quality, one-on-one time with experienced all-rounders. The guff about the need for managers to trust in their out-of-sight teleworkers, for example, is all very well. But the fact is that many of those high-bandwidth individuals may be rather poorly prepared to get their work done.

Today’s junior and middle managers, in short, are often overpaid, overworked, over-equipped, but under-experienced.

The modern workplace has evolved so that it is hard to find genuine personal leadership based on pressure, hard experience, reprimand and recovery from error. The training that does go on in contemporary organisations is mainly done in large firms’ corporate universities, where the emphasis is on formal transfers of knowledge, rather than the school of real events and decisions.

Given what Parker says, it seems to me that IT chiefs need to think again about the physical layout of their kit. In call centres, ironically, space planning continues to be rational, in the sense that teams of people are located in clusters with their supervisors, who can assist them on tricky calls. Yet in workplaces that are supposed to be a cut above call centres, many facilities are not organised on anything like the same principles.

Eye contact, so vital to call handling, in fact plays a key role in most workplace environments. Conversely, email can act as a kind of departmental silo all its own.

Everyone knows that emails can be missed, or read in a variety of ways, allowing slights to be inferred where none was intended. Nevertheless, many workplaces still organise workstations, rooms, floors and buildings so that email is, as a channel, preferred to unambiguous personal confrontations with colleagues in the flesh.

Of course, we know that neither proximity nor even eye contact guarantees collaborative harmony and teamwork in an office. There is also a need for personal and intellectual privacy in the workplace. However, the IT manager will not arrive at the right spatial configurations just by common sense. He or she needs to tabulate the business and IT processes that take place in each location, then map these onto physical facilities that both streamline action and enrich the possibilities for learning.