Extension professionals tend to travel by air at least a few times each year. My experiences have been pretty positive overall, but I’m always looking for ways to make travel easier and more efficient. Dwayne Melancon at Genuine Curiosity has been sporadically posting advice on travel (see this post that includes links to his travel related postings). He recently posted this piece about an article in Bestlife by Peter Greenberg. Great advice and tips on travel by an experienced traveler. Highly recommended, as are the above posts by Dwayne – I now have a Nintendo DS Lite because of his posts!
CNN.com has an interesting news post today that discusses the differences in the use of instant messaging (IM)between current teenagers and baby boomers. No surprise that the kids use IM more and e-mail much less. The reverse is true of boomers. This dovetails much of the work done by Pew Internet Study. More reinforcement of the need to consider differences in work styles and alternative ways of reaching this generation of youth.
Last week’s Business Week covered Best Buy’s interesting venture about moving beyond flex time. The complete article is here. A 13 minute podcast interview of the author can be found here. Best Buy now allows about 60% of their corporate staff at their Minnesota Corporate Campus to schedule work as they see fit. Called ROWE (results-only work environment), the system focuses on specific metrics to determine each employee’s contribution. Time at the office is not considered as part of the evaluation. Whether the employee chooses to work at home, on the road, or at the corporate campus is up to the employee. A quote from the article: “This is like TiVo for your work.” The article does a decent job of trying to describe the difference between basic flex time and Best Buy’s approach. And why flex time is harder to implement (hint: think culture).
How well would this work in Extension settings? Our OSU Extension Center at Lima is currently allowing specialists to work from virtual settings. This could be their home, car, other offices or Starbucks. So far it seems to be working fairly well. We are completing an internal study of the process and hope to share it later in 2007. My guess is that many Extension offices already use some form of flex time, but could also use virtual settings to increase productivity and employee satisfaction.
It will be useful to look at some of the tech companies as they develop systems to address a “post-geographic” office. The tech companies seem to be on the cutting edge of developing these systems to meet employee needs and reduce turnover. Best Buy hopes to use a similar model with its retail stores next year. That will be an interesting experiment to watch.
I’ve had a very hectic past two months and have slumped a bit on the blogging front. To me it seems like only two weeks since my last post, but it’s been over two months. Oh well, more stuff to come soon!