Aug 22 2023 - Work from Home

 

I am still thinking about the $500,000 cubicle in Switzerland.   Couldn't they build a live/work community and the workers living space at the campus would allow them to work from home? Wouldn't that be perfect?  But somehow, employees still have to commute every day from their homes to the work place. Could this be a corporate behaviour where the gap between living and working realities must be "hammered in" every day?  Alternately, the executives want to have their palace and what the employees do in between time is their own worry. Let's take Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.  It has an estimate of around 12,000 employees at an estimated cost of $5 billion.  That's $417,000 per employee with 2,3000 square feet each. I return to the notion that this turns out to be a house a person.  That includes research and development facilities as well as office space, so perhaps reduce it a bit for real laboratory work that has to happen vs all those meetings and presentations, etc. What else is there in that 2,8 million square feet of space? A "Main Atrium", 1,000 seat underground auditorium, fitness and wellness centre (how would you get to it give you might be over a million square feet away), cafes and an organic farm, green roof, rainwater harvesting systems, visitor centre, the Steve Jobs Theatre.  They don't mention it, but there is a picture of the Aqua Park.  On site is a hair salon and dry cleaning service.  Many things for every day living, just not the living quarters. And the conclusion?  From its website: "Apple’s massive $5 billion “spaceship” headquarters is a truly impressive building, designed with innovation, sustainability, and employee well-being in mind. With its beautiful architecture, landscaping, and state-of-the-art facilities, it is a fitting home for one of the world’s most innovative companies." So it is a "home for the company" and not what makes up the company - its employees.  The questions on Quora and Redditt are about where Apple employees live while working at the Cupertino facility?  Here's some advice for a person who has just got a job at the Cupertino location:  "Buy a good home in Cupertino. The interest rates are low. You can get a decent house for $2M" We'll be in Denver next week for the railroad convention.  Here's an example of a layout in the competition from a few years ago.

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Feb 22 2020 - China Work or Play

How do we know people are working if we can't 'watch them'? That's the remote work question, isn't it?   I know that we can easily measure employee output these days.   We've  been doing it with great vigour for more than 20 years - and even longer if you consider Total Quality Management started in the early 1920s.  We're experts at it now. But in China, there is great worry over productivity because of the coronavirus.  I found the most hysterical quote in the front page of the business section of the Globe and Mail yesterday.  Here's an excerpt: "Some Chinese executives and managers, though, have taken a dim view of their ability to get things done with workers at home. In a country that prizes long hours at the office, companies are keeping close track of how much is getting done by employees far from the gaze of superiors who worry they can’t trust their underlings to be productive on their own. With so many working remotely, ”there’s no way for us to supervise what people are doing. We don’t know if our employees are writing code or just playing with their cats,” said Cheng Zheng, founder of DDD Online, an augmented reality company. “It’s just the opposite of the traditional Chinese work style.” The article reports that productivity levels are varying. Solitary coders are fine, but those positions requiring communications had low productivity while working remotely.   It makes me wonder how they had been working and how efficient they actually were. They couldn't have been using teleconferencing or videoconferencing to meet in groups prior to this.  Or maybe they required employees to 'check in' with managers all the time to find out how things are going - judging on time spent rather than results. And that seems to be what the article says.  The Chinese are resistant to offsite work:  the Globe reports that there have been studies that prove remote work is more productive than on site work. The crisis is showing that remote work is as productive as on site work - a surprise to the Chinese managers.   And what is this about playing with their cats.  It turns out that there are more than 67 million pet cats in China and the cat owner population are generally millennials.  So the worry is there:  these millennial employees could be playing with their pets and making videos at home right now. (Don't read the other articles about cats and dogs - makes me sadly aware of my bubblesome existence). We are enjoying some daisies today.

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Work and Play and Boomerang!

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"   Boomerang from Instagram. This is an app that "makes everyday moments fun and unexpected.  Create captivating mini videos that loop back and forth, then share them with your..."  We're working on the Fantasy of Trees and one of the Museum staff  just found this app, something that might get attention to the upcoming event - our little version is HERE. This 'all work and no play' phrase is centuries old, so there are a number of quotes that reference it. I've included the ones that are thought-provoking and come from interesting and notable people.   All work and no play makes Jack a dully boy - and Jill a wealthy widow. ~Evan Esar, 1899 - 1995, American humorist, author of 20,000 Quips & Quotes All work and no play makes jack.  With enough jack, Jack needn't be a dull boy. ~Malcom Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play:  until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub again another, while they wait for the train.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850 - 1894, British novelist, poet, essayist, musician and travel writer of Treasure Island You may try your experiment for a week and see how you like it.  I think by Saturday night you will find that all play and no work is as bad as all work and no play ~Louisa May Alcott, American novelist and poet, Little Women (1868) All work and no play may make Jim a dull boy, but no work and all play makes Jim all kinds of a jackass. ~William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper publisher, partial inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane We have two pictures today of play and then of work.

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Imperial Still - 111 St. Clair Ave West

I stopped by 111 St. Clair Avenue West earlier in the week.  It is still named Imperial, now it is Imperial Plaza.  I worked for Imperial Oil from 1985-1995 and this was its head office. The building recently opened as a condominium rather than an office tower.  This would be my third workplace that has been converted into residences. This is no ordinary building conversion, though. It was built to withstand a nuclear blast, and to serve as a hospital.  It was originally proposed as Toronto's City Hall.  The architectural model for this building was the original design for the Toronto City Hall. Nathan Phillips, Toronto's mayor in 1955, rejected the Mathers and Haldenby design for city hall and opened the commission to an international competition that was eventually won by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Imperial Oil, in search of a design for their Toronto head office, bought the design from Mathers and Haldenby.   The building sits atop a high escarpment with a commanding view to the south, and before the construction of the downtown banking towers in the late 1960s, the top floor observation deck was, at almost 800 feet (244 metres) above sea level, the highest point in Toronto; on a clear day visitors could see the rising spray from Niagara Falls across Lake Ontario.  I remember these wonderful views - we watched the construction of the Skydome which opened in 1989. You can see the mural is still there:  The ground floor lobby features a famous mural, "The Story of Oil", executed by York Wilson in 1957.  It now overlooks the Longo store.