An interesting article in CIO magazine about Peter Drucker – who first coined the term ‘knowledge worker’.  It’s not a soft piece. In The comeback Charlatan David James is critical writing;

He talks about knowledge as the organisation’s vital “resource”. It is not a resource (resources are inanimate; knowledge is an act of animate humans).

Likewise, his use of the economics-derived term “productivity” is doubtful. It is not how much knowledge is “produced” but how well it is applied.

In an interview with BRW, Drucker dismissed these concerns, saying that “eventually, we will have to work out the proper methodology for both defining and measuring knowledge, work and the knowledge worker”.

The comeback Charlatan

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Software is often a work in progress. Just as you’ve mastered an application and found ways to work around its quirks, an upgrade comes along fixing the problems.

Developers often add new features; introducing new quirks and new workarounds. And just to complicate matters there are regular security updates and patches.

Desktop PC applications evolve at a breakneck speed but web-based applications change at an even faster rate. The main difference between the two types of software is that you can easily choose not to update a PC application you’ve fine-tuned to perfection; with web-based software you are force marched to the updated version. This is good.

One of my favourite productivity applications updated last night. When I launched Remember the Milk this morning it told me I was now looking at the Smart Add edition.

In simple terms, Remember the Milk is an on-line to-do list manager. That’s like describing Microsoft Excel as a calculator.

Smart Add allows you to enter new to-do list items in plain English. It’s similar to the way you can enter information on Google Calendar. But the software removes any doubts you may have about the exact meaning of your entries. This comes into its own when you use the program from a mobile device. There’s a full explanation of how Smart Add works at the Remember the Milk blog.

Because it is online, the software allows you to integrate your to-do list items with maps, pictures, digital calendars, personal information managers, mobile phones and just about everything else that’s web-enabled.

You also share lists with colleagues and slice or dice the information to meet your ever-changing needs.

The basic version of Australian-developed application remains free, but there’s now a US$25 pro version which comes with priority support and the ability to synch to mobile devices including the Apple iPhone and iPod touch, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. You also get priority support – though I’ve only needed to contact support once in the three years or so I’ve used Remember the Milk – and I had the answer I needed within hours.

Remember the Milk now integrates with Gmail, Google Calendars and Twitter. You can also install a iGoogle Remember the Milk gadget if you use Google’s home page. There’s a list of official and third party add-ons at the Remember the Milk site. I use I Forgot the Milk as a Windows 7 gadget on my desktop and notebook.

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Mark Shead at Productivity 501 writes:

The Hawthorne effect refers to some studies that were done on how training impacts employees’ productivity at work. The studies found that sending someone to training produces employees that work harder. The funny part about it is that you still get the productivity increase even if the training doesn’t teach them how to be better at their jobs. Sending someone to training helps them feel like they are important, like the company is investing in them and they are valuable. Because of this, they work harder.

There’s an explanatory note at the bottom of Shead’s post pointing out the original tests were to do with changing light levels. You can read Shead’s original story at Hawthorne Effect : Productivity501.

It’s also worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the Hawthorne effect. There’s also a good definition of the effect at Donald Clark’s site: The Hawthorne effect.  Clark writes:

The Hawthorne effect – an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being singled out and made to feel important.

Clarke links The Hawthorne effect to work done by Frederick Taylor who gave birth to the idea of industrial psychology.

My own common sense experience as a manager says you should be paying attention to workers as a matter of course. Sadly this isn’t obvious to everyone and it certainly wasn’t back in the 1920s and 1930s when these ideas were fresh and new. My view is that if the Hawthorne effect is apparent among knowledge workers at your workplace, it’s a sign you aren’t managing people correctly.

See also: Taylor’s scientific management doesn’t apply to knowledge work

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Take a break - image by Meredit Farmer via Flickr

As someone who started their working life in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the hardest adjustments to make is that because Christmas coincides with summer, antipodeans take all their holiday in one big helping. Or at least they did until the late 1980s.

When I first arrived in Wellington, New Zealand I found the summer break hard to cope with. In those days the city more or less closed down between Christmas Eve and Waitangi day (February 6). For roughly six weeks it was nigh on impossible to buy a cooked lunch, get one’s teeth fixed or car repaired. Trains and buses ran reduced timetables. It was even harder to get anyone to make a business decision. Woe betide anyone who didn’t get their budgets signed-off before December 24^th.

Australia, at least Sydney and Melbourne, weren’t so comprehensively sleepy over summer, but you’d still have difficulty getting in touch with people between Christmas and Australia day. I suspect, but don’t know for sure that regional Australia was as shuttered as New Zealand. We’ll avoid the temptation for wisecracks about Canberra.

Although the politicians somehow still manage to score extended summer breaks, these days Wellington and Auckland start buzzing (albeit at a slightly reduced pace) a few days after Christmas while Sydney and Melbourne barely pause at all. I know from experience that many employees, particularly in retail jobs, are pressured to work longer hours at this time of year.

Yet even now many companies and departments close down for two or three weeks. Some newspapers stop publishing, TV channels run reduced schedules and some businesses offer reduced services. It might not be the four, five or six week shut down enjoyed by earlier generations, but there’s a distinct feeling the city is depopulated and the resorts are crowded.

Most Northern Europeans take no more than a week or so around Christmas. In England, people generally work until December 24^th and are back at their desks by January 2^nd, or maybe the following day if the public holiday falls on a weekend. Scots get an extra day’s holiday for Hogmanay.

Poms typically get a couple of weeks off in their summer along with a healthy swag of public holidays (“Bank Holidays”) throughout the year. Generally they have enough leave days left over to take a third small break. The French still have a tradition of taking a month in mid-year. During August Parisians leave town en masse as invading hoards of plaid-clad American tourists invade.

On the whole Poms work roughly as many days as Australians and, thanks to recent law changes, New Zealanders. Other Northern European countries work fewer days. Interestingly these other nations tend to have higher worker productivity rates.

In my view, the antipodean habit of having one long annual break over Christmas is not as useful or as productive as the Northern European tradition of taking a short mid-Winter Christmas break and a relatively short summer break. I also suspect that the one long Christmas break is easier lost to a demanding job than the two breaks enjoyed by Europeans.

Speaking from a personal, rather than a researched point of view, the good thing about Europe’s two or three break system is that it enables one to keep fresher. I’ve found that working 11 months then resting for one month is much harder than working a few months en bloc and taking shorter breaks. This is particularly true if your work involves creative thinking – and let’s face it, most Knowledge Workers need to think creatively.

I’d like to see New Zealand embrace Matariki, the Maori winter solstice, as a short mid-winter holiday. It would also be a good excuse for an additional public holiday – New Zealanders go for too long without a break at that time of year. I’m sure Australia can think up a suitable excuse for a similar festival.

With all the talk of 24 times 7 operations, Knowledge Workers are finding it increasingly hard to take any leave at all. That’s simply not wise. It hurts your effectiveness. You might not be able to get away from your desk for a whole fortnight at once, but you should endeavour to escape for two or three weeklong breaks during the course of the year. You’ll be more productive for it.

In Why Productivity is Bunk Charlie Gilkey zeros in on the problems with productivity in one short passage:

… people spend hours and hours finding new ways to be quicker at things they don’t need to be doing in the first place.

There’s lots more in this vein. And on his about page Gilkey writes his blog is:

… for recovering productivity junkies who have had enough of Getting Things Done and want to start getting things done.

As someone who has long been bemused by the cult of Getting Things Done and who can’t believe the guilibility of people who fork out small fortunes for electronic gadgets and software designed to help them get organised I find Gilkey’s approach refereshing.

However, I suspect Gilkey is only part way into the recovery process, there’s a lot of material elsehwhere in his blog looking suspiciously like productivity tips.

Three knowledge worker blog posts with interesting (or alarming) perspectives:

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Productivity

Jon Miller from the Lean Manufacturing Blog suspects knowledge workers might be more productive if they laugh more often. There’s almost certainly something in this. I recently sat through a seminar in Auckland run by someone promoting much the same message (her name escapes me).

Are Intellectual Knowledge workers eventually prone to Alzheimer’s?

I suspect the best way to read this story from the Smart Economy blog is to view it as a wake up call. It basically says knowledge work makes you fat (the post uses the word obese, but let’s forget the euphemisms) and at the same time there’s a link between obesity (which sounds better in this sentence than ‘fatness’) and neuro-degeneration.

To Learn Lists – What My Grandfather Taught Me

Developing To Learn Lists sounds like a great idea to me. It’s not that new a concept, the Design of Knowledge’s author Bill Brantley  got it from Benjamin Franklin via his own grandfather. Basically, write down a list of things you want to know, then go and study them. Like the ideas it’s extremely simple. (To Learn Lists have been all over the Internet in recent weeks, this post has the ring of authenticity even if it isn’t the original source.)

Tim’s Vista: Measuring or Judging.

An enlightened accountant’s take on how to measure knowledge worker output. Tim’s approach is to focus on the results rather than worry about how work is completed. If only more accountants could understand this – they should, after all, bean counters are knowledge workers themselves.

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