Beyond the Workplace
Since my 30th May update on Beyond the Workplace (#BtWC) the last twelve days have been a bit like the twelve days of Christmas each one bringing exciting and ever increasing developments! I thought about trying to put everything that has happened into verse but that would take until Christmas with my limited skills. Overall, lots has been going on and given appetite from those in the social media world for updates its been a bit challenging to know when to share stuff. It’s a great example of how our lives are now truly digital and of the moment.
The most striking thing for me is that the last twelve days have uncovered an amazing amount of interest in Beyond the Workplace and truly justifies in my mind that now is the time to have a ‘Big Conversation’ that captures insights and enables us to change a few things. For me this whole point of this is to come out with a menu of tangible actions that people can chose to use or not.
Since my last post on this the following is a quick summary of a remarkable number of activities;
- Participants of the original BIFM/CIPD 28th May roundtable were invited to a follow up, those that could make it, brainstormed a simple Statement of Belief for BtWC.
- We reached out to the UK’s Government Property Unit of the Cabinet Office and had a positive discussion.
- We’ve started to reach out to other potential travellers – organisations such as RICS and CoreNet Global.
- There was a really positive engagement on the part of workplace strategists at their 2014 Summit.
- The IFMA Foundation is positively engaged.
- We’ve uncovered a lot of international fellow travellers via social media.
- With help from Simon Heath we’ve developed a topology for the Big Conversation and the concept of Communities of Practice.
- We’ve identified with help of David d’Souza a smart way of having part of the Big Conversation via something called Street Wisdom.
- We’ve started thinking about a methodology for how we can do real time research amongst the Communities of Practice.
The first deliverable for Beyond the Workplace is a succinct statement of what this is all about so after a fair amount of word engineering and with input from BIFM and CIPD here goes;-
Beyond the Workplace aims to explore the future in the context of work, workforce and workplace.
The ‘Big Conversation’ the centrepiece is designed to capture insight that is both thought provoking and can have practical implications on how everyone involved in enabling work can collaborate to prepare for the future. The result will be a series of outputs throughout 2014 which will set the stage for future conversations as together we build better understanding of the evolution of the working environment. We appreciate that everyone in the workforce, at whatever level, should have an input into this initiative. Therefore, in the spirit of true open and honest collaboration, we will not limit ourselves within the boundaries of a particular profession nor fall back on introspection but seek to open up both the conversation and our discoveries to the whole workplace community.
We aim to be the global vanguard for all those who are passionately concerned with driving a collaboration of ideas and solutions to increase organisational performance in an increasingly complex world of work. Together we have instigated the truly multi-dimensional ‘Beyond the Workplace CONVERSATION’ #BtWC which seeks to highlight current practice around professional collaboration, examining what works, what doesn’t and understanding the catalysts for, and barriers to success in achieving these improvements. We aim to demystify some of the concepts and issues surrounding work now and in the future.
This work will facilitate and gather the thoughts, experiences, perspectives and suggested solutions in a genuinely open and far reaching exercise centred on the future of work, workforce and workplace. It will provide a central platform, using both social and traditional media, that will be open to all interested communities, regardless of affiliation, on key areas, encouraging them to discuss, challenge and debate. The platform will be used to share existing and new content, gather insight from leading thinkers, share experiences and learnings and to understand the next steps that are needed to take the actions required to enable us to remain relevant and to add value. It will ultimately aim to showcase the good work that already exists, demonstrate what ‘good’ looks like; outline best practice and provide the practical tools and guidance that can ensure that the outcomes become common practice.