| Abe Darwish:
This is our biggest problem, which I call the silo factor. Managing vertically versus horizontally. It's a huge problem. To look at any situation, it requires a collective effort to line up the resources to do it right. To have a holistic solution. It requires a human resource, the GIS team, the management team, etc. to do the exploratory. When you mush up these resources, you tend to have a very effective solution, one dimensional.
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| Joe Ouye:
Workplace is not a good in itself. In other words, that's not our goal. It has to relate to some other reason, to some other purpose. To support a business to grow. So when that happens, when you are trying to compensate business goal, those divisions tend to fall away a lot easier. Lucent, for example, trying to support a faster time to market for their R&D groups. Of course you still have those silos, but somehow since you are there for a business purpose, those barriers come down a lot easier than saying that 'we just want to create a better workplace'. There's no drivers for that.
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| Bob Kraiss:
The whole silo concept that we bounce against all the time. I look at my job as trying to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker. But, real estate, facilities, IS, and HR are all trying to do the same thing. How well do, real estate typically do really well. IS and HR, I went to the alt. Office conference and did not see one HR representative. Doesn't alternate office have a whole lot to do with human behavior and shouldn't the HR people try to be here. Part of what we need to do is to engage those other silos within our companies to work together towards a common goal.
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| Marina Van Overbeek:
Because alternative ways of officing or those other ways of working, becomes a recruiting tool, flexibility tool. HR groups tend to get away from alternative officing because they refer to it as a take away. Understanding it as not a take away, but as an option, that it's a perk will bring those groups together.
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| Bob Kraiss:
One of the skills of remote management, how do you manage people if you don't see them often.
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| Marina Van Overbeek:
Its critical that Hr is able to address that, otherwise, the companies productivity won't be enhanced.
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| Parkash Ahuja:
That's the typical CIR motive at IDRC, how do these functions come together and work together. We need to stand for our infrastructure resources, figure out where synergies are, and we need to make sure that they all have the same strategies. They eventually make the productivity go up or down.
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| Bob Kraiss:
Someone has to take the lead, why not us.
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| Marina Van Overbeek:
It is us. It means enough to us initially. |
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