The future of the workplace: innovation vs displacement activities

Paper to the 2007 conference of the British Institute of Facilities Management

Lesson 1: Climate change hysteria will grow

Whatever the uncertainties that attend the future of work and the workplace, we can be sure that irrational policies and procedures on carbon emissions are likely to grow. First of all, to question the endlessly cited scientific consensus about climate change, or interrogate just exactly what workplaces can sensibly do about it, is now beyond the pale.

To oppose today’s climate change hysteria has already begun to be regarded as an excuse to ‘just close our eyes and cross our fingers’, as environment minister David Miliband puts it.[1] Dissent ­– on the grounds, for example, that anthropogenic climate change is not the same thing as climate catastrophe – is already rare.[2] Critiques of the EU policy focus on liberalisation of energy supply more than the principle of carbon trading.[3] To differ from the Stern report is the privilege of distinguished academic US economists;[4] for the rest, one need only nod to Sir Nicholas, still less read the 700 pages of his report, to establish the irrefutable case for Green Action.[5]

As the Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment bit of the Government’s March 2007 Draft Climate Change Bill notes:

The Government recognises that small business account [sic] for significant quantities of emissions… it is likely that SMEs will be affected potentially by both specifically targeted measures as well as wider policies, such as the Renewables Obligation, designed to reduce the carbon intensity of key energy services. These are likely to raise the costs of energy, with subsequent risks to output and employment. However, these risks are likely to be very limited in the case of service sector SME’s.[6]

Apart from the illiterate prose and the insouciant attitude to the impact of climate change legislation on output and employment, HMG’s point is clear: even more than large enterprises, SMEs – particularly in manufacturing – are likely to face higher costs because of government carbon budgeting, banking and borrowing. Meanwhile, environmental consultants and City bean-counters will prosper.[7]

For facilities managers in SMEs and multinationals alike, the ‘enabling’ powers proposed in the draft Bill will allow government to impose new emissions requirements without having the bother of drawing up primary legislation. In short, new bureaucratic measures will be imposed at the drop of a hat. Paragraph 5.74 of the Bill would enable the Government to:

• introduce trading schemes to uncover carbon savings;
• define persons to which the scheme applies;
• set targets / level of obligations;
• define units to be traded;
• allocate tradable units to participants without charge;
• define trading periods;
• create compliance mechanisms and appropriate penalties;
• establish an appeals process;
• appoint an administrator and / or regulator for the scheme;
• set out provisions should participants exit from the scheme;
• link to other domestic and global trading schemes;
• allow the administrator to obtain data to verify emissions.[8]

Lessons 2 and 3: innovation, not risk management – and a need to anticipate regulation

In the face of the government’s shopping list of savings, targets, tradable units, trading periods, compliance mechanisms and penalties, facilities managers have a duty of resistance. They need to uphold the need for independent innovation in FM, and eschew today’s fashionable but obsessive focus on the risk management of everything they do.

In addition, facilities managers must recognise that feeling bad about the environmental damage caused by facilities is accompanied by a similar anomie about what workplaces do for health.

There’s a need for organisations to establish reconnaissance units so as to anticipate regulation. They must learn to stay ahead of the state not just on climate change, but also on workplace food, epidemics and noise. Knowing the next move of the Department for Health and the Health & Safety Executive – that will be a key task for facilities management leaders.

Lesson 4: Don’t abdicate from ambitious IT

One of the key provisions of the Climate Change Bill is for an ‘independent’ Committee on Climate Change to hold government and organisations to account for their conduct. This device follows in a long line of New Labour measures in which the outsourcing of government responsibility, and preference for unelected bodies, are the hallmarks. Gordon Brown in particular is not just an advocate of PFI, but also the architect of Monetary Policy Committee control over the UK economy, and a proponent of an independent Board for the NHS.

Such an approach is not just bad for democracy. It also displaces responsibility for innovation elsewhere. Its consequence is clearly seen in the government’s disastrous performance in IT projects, where all innovations have to be gold-plated to avoid risk, and so end up discrediting public sector innovation in general (NHS patient records are just the most obvious example here). Its consequence is also seen in Project Nomad, the Government’s terribly ‘transformational’ programme of local authority projects in mobile IT. Nomad’s budget? Since February 2005, just £4m.[9]

What this means for facilities managers ought to be clear. While risks of outsourcing are more often imagined than real, it is often an excuse for abandoning the kind of aggressive approach to IT innovation that is required in public and private sectors alike.

Lesson 5: The need to switch staff on

The discourse on ‘addiction’ at work has lately been extended from ‘Crackberries’ to gambling.[10] That underlines how all the talk about the need for staff to learn new etiquette, and ‘work-life balance’, so as to cope with IT, merely disguises a burgeoning medicalisation of work. Work, like cities, is supposed to make you sick.[11] The idea that the UK’s useless transport infrastructure might lead to what is today called ‘stress’ – implicitly, the December 2006 Eddington report on the future of UK transport has repudiated this.

In ‘eliminating standby’ in the home,[12] Gordon Brown also shows that penitent, labour-intensive actions on climate change are preferred to electrical and electronic innovation. His policy would have the average British household take perhaps 365 minutes a year to turn off the nine electrical items it possesses. Add to that similar amounts of time spent turning things off – and on – at work, and UK society will have to add hundreds of millions of extra and perhaps genuinely stressful man-hours to its workload: the price, in toil, of losing the convenience of ‘always on’.

In facilities management, as generally in the workplace, staff need be switched on, not cocooned in the therapeutic psychobabble that is now de rigeur in HR departments. The argument for telework, then, should not be about business continuity in the face of Al Qaeda attack, or the eco-merits of not traveling anywhere ever again. Telework has merit, but principally as a means to replace commuting with the chance to think up and refine decisive innovations.

Lesson 6: What innovation is about

In facilities management as elsewhere, innovation is about the development of new knowledge, not just the transfer of ‘best practice’. It is about following the needs of users – something that facilities managers have simply failed to do, according to Frank Duffy, the doyen of workplace design; but it is also about exerting leadership on one’s own account.

Innovation means taking risks, investment in R&D, and a practical desire for experiment. Above all, it means challenging consensus, not invoking it. For facilities managers, real improvements in the future of work and the workplace will necessitate proving the state wrong – on carbon, on health, and on the etiquette of IT.

References and footnotes

[1] David Miliband, quoted in DEFRA, ‘Draft Climate Change Bill published’, 13 March 2007

[2] For an exception to the that rule, see the opinions of UK meteorologists and professors Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier, reported in Pallab Ghosh, ‘Caution urged on climate “risks”’, BBC News, 17 March 2007

[3] For an alternative, see James Woudhuysen, ‘The EU’s post-industrial revolution’, spiked, 11 January 2007

[4] See for example William Nordhaus, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 17 November 2006

[5] See for example David Miliband, Foreword to Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Draft Climate Change Bill: Consultation document, March 2007, p3

[6] DEFRA, Draft Climate Change Bill: Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment, March 2007, para 6.33, p55

[7] Op cit, paras 1.5., 4.4.5, 6.34, pp3, 25, 55.

[8] Draft Climate Change Bill: Consultation document, op cit, p42.

[9] Andy McCue, ‘Funding holds back public sector mobile working’, silicon.com, 12 October 2006

[10] For a discussion, see James Woudhuysen, ‘Gambling addiction: a panic at odds with reality’, spiked, 22 January 2007

[11] For a discussion, see James Woudhuysen, ‘In praise of big cities’, spiked, 8 March 2007

[12] Quoted in ‘Homes must be greener, says Brown’, BBC News, 12 March 2007