4. Be Human
Whenever IT equips a user with a laptop or a BlackBerry, it comes with an implicit message: You can work from anywhere. In most cases that message gets extrapolated to mean: You are expected to work from anywhere, be it home or your hotel while you are travelling. In fact, the barrier between the professional and the personal has all but disappeared for many workers. A study of more than 200,000 workers conducted by the employee research firm ISR found that between 2002 and 2005 the number of workers who said that their jobs seriously interfere with their private lives rose from 24 percent to 34 percent. So why shouldn't employees be able to bring some elements of their personal life into the workplace? That's a question CIOs need to start asking.
"We realize the reality of the workplace and we want to make it employee friendly," says Brent Holladay, chief deputy of information resources for the Lake County (Florida) Clerk of Courts. "In government we can't use pay as the only incentive." Letting workers use personal technology is one way to be flexible. Holladay has decided, for example, to let people listen to music on their computers, provided that they show their managers they can still get their work done.
Employees are discouraged from bringing iPods into the workplace and from listening to music in the office at Millipore. That said, "We realize from time to time people will have music files on their laptops while travelling or whatnot", says Wilcox. And he lets them, because he doesn't want work to encroach on people's lives any more than it does. But when Millipore backs up its files every night, sometimes the company ends up backing up someone's MP3s. "We try to exclude that stuff whenever we can," he says. "But it happens, and it is bandwidth hog." However, he thinks that's a small price to pay for happier employees.
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