Workplace community

Social media is helping to unite a global community of those interested in work and place

By Paul Carder

Edition 2 – February 2013 Page 29

Tags: social media • networking • community

The concept of Occupiers Journal (which later became our limited company) all started online through LinkedIn, supplemented by ‘real’ conversations at conferences. You can read about it on our homepage and in the Financial Times article “So near and yet so far”. Our Global Research Director, Dr. Jim Ware, said in the article:

“I don’t think we could have started the business in this way five or 10 years ago … more and more people are working like this, collaborating with people who are halfway across the world. There are two things we can be pretty sure of about the future of business. One is that offices will be more distributed with people working in many different locations. The other is that, paradoxically, people will be collaborating more than ever before.”

And that is precisely what is happening across the global “Workplace Community”. There are examples in this issue. On page 4 we cover Workplace Week in the UK, which will run again this year, 4th to 8th November. On page 6 we cover the IFMA Foundation’s excellent Workplace Strategy Summit, hosted by Frank Becker and colleagues at Cornell University, in upstate NY, USA.

LinkedIn

There is one LinkedIn Group, The Workplace Community, which is global (by its very nature) and non-partisan. All parties are welcome, from the large organisations such as CoreNet Global and IFMA, to the many smaller ‘communities of practice’ which form from time to time. It is simply a place to post discussions from your part of the workplace world, make connections with like-minded people and, probably most of all, to keep up with the latest thinking.

Do please share your plans, for your Workplace Community – I posted this discussion on the LinkedIn Group recently, with the words:

“Please share YOUR plans for YOUR “Workplace Community” in 2013…let’s hear from all please…”

And from some, we did. Others may follow. But, I will give you a flavour of some of the discussions from these various groups, below, and in future issues of W&P.

These are in the order they appeared, and my thanks to the individuals concerned for posting:

Mark Catchlove is Director of the Insight Group (@HMInsightGroup) for Herman Miller’s EMEA region. He is therefore a one-man ‘workplace community’! Mark’s Insight Group is a “collective, working on commissioning and sharing workplace research in an interactive and interesting way”. And you can follow the events that Mark is engaged with at this link.

Dr. Rachel Permuth-Levine is Director of Workplace Research at Sodexo (@ToLiveSodexo), in Washington D.C., and champion of their work on “exemplary workplace experience”. Rachel is another one-person ‘workplace community’! She also runs a LinkedIn Group called Workplace Experience and leads many other initiatives.

Rex Miller, a consultant from Texas, USA, leads Case4Space. This is “a cohort of committed thought leaders from organisations like Haworth, Balfour Beatty, Google, GSA, AIA and AutoDesk with diverse expertise…focused on one key question: ‘In light of research that measures workplace engagement at less than 30%, why do so few companies …have a workplace strategy that addresses this gap?’

June Langhoff is the editor of NetWORK, part of New Ways of Working, which started in the USA but is broadening its horizons. June says: “NewWOW holds four virtual roundtables and two symposia a year. The next symposium (March, 2013) will investigate Organizational Culture and New Ways of Working”. The website also has a calendar of events around the world that focus on workplace.

There are too many others to mention. Like Bob Fox and the excellent online Workspace Design magazine. Just follow the Workplace Community LinkedIn Group and you will not miss out! W&P

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