Mugwort buys the furniture - Fytte 6... [printer-friendly]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/25/screwpole_emails-episode6/

Mugwort buys the furniture - Fytte 6...

Published Monday 25th June 2007 10:38 GMT

Mugwort has been getting less and less favoured by the iteration. However, there is hope following an isolated period of success for the young demon. Several key members of his victim’s development team have left and, due to inadequate training, this means that Mugwort’s intended victim, our young project manager, has struggled to keep the existing project on track. Li'l Devil in barrel.

The project manager has been tasked with relocating his stakeholders, sorry - worthless underlings - to a new office environment. An ideal opportunity for Screwpole to convince his nephew to press home the advantage…

To: Mugwort
From: Uncle Screwpole
Subject: Sun Tzu’s The Art of Feng Shui

Ahh Mugwort,

The office move – what an excellent opportunity. And I believe you’re in charge of mentoring our unsuspecting victim. The disastrous implementation of his training regime has caused many of his peons to leave for greener pastures, and left the project manager in a weakened and confused state. When advising him, remember these goals: limit productivity, increase staff turnover, and stifle recruitment. A poor work environment can achieve all three!

Cutting costs is the single most effective way to undermine an efficient, productive and fair office environment. Your manager, in his obsession with all things new and modern, will likely have lofty ideas for his new office. Your opening gambit, then, is to point out the ‘10% rule’: if he saves £1, this is equivalent to a £10 sale. He will be unaware that this can be a false economy – even small savings, if not judged correctly, can have hugely detrimental effects on staff morale and productivity.

Once you’ve started pound signs spinning in your manager’s eyes, it’s time to get down to the dirty business of actually designing your new office. There’s currently a belief that the pathetic, fleshy bodies of humans require much care and attention. This is ridiculous – just look at our superb sweat shops. Endless rows of people stitching designer handbags for 18 hours a day, six days a week. Do they complain? No, because if they do, they get sacked. Humans will put up with a great deal of punishment if they think there is no choice.

There are three primary factors to consider when arranging an office: physical needs, communication needs, and social needs.

The IT equivalent of the sweat shop is our call centre model of office design, successfully implemented several years ago. Study this and you will find that a number of our call centre demons manage to allocate just 85 square feet of office space per employee. I’m sure you can better this.

For your development team, the significant features of their ‘personal’ areas are, in order of importance: chair, computer, and desk. The office chair is paramount to employee comfort and health – it’s what they will spend most of their time in. The more strong-willed office managers recognise this and have at least one trained posture expert on the team, who is dedicated to sourcing the best chairs for individual needs.

This is all poppycock, of course. The team should sit on upturned wicker baskets if your manager tells them to. Get the worst chairs you possibly can [Perhaps ones that induce painful muscle spasms – a hearty laugh at your violently contorting employees is a good way to start the day].

The PCs you choose will ultimately dictate the speed at which your developers can work and therefore their productivity and stress levels. Understand the edit-compile-debug process and make sure you procure desktops that run slower than people’s short-term memory, thus causing them to forget what they’re doing.

Desks are an area where office managers can legitimately save money – they only need to support the myriad useless knick-knacks that humans like to collect. So here is an area where you can waste vast amounts of cash. Acquire dozens of rare minimalist tables from an eccentric Japanese designer. Make them as small as possible – we want to battery farm these pitiful saps.

Be aware that a successful office environment is one where it’s easy for everyone to communicate with the rest of the team. In such an environment, it’s also important for your manager to be close to his developers so he can gauge the progress of his current project. With this in mind, you should give your manager a palatial new corner office far away from his team. Not only will this cause him to make intermittent and ever briefer visits to his team and lose insight into projects, it’ll also fuel resentment amongst the developers as they must sit elbow-to-elbow - while the manager resides in his spacious home-from-home.

You must also think about whiteboards, Mugwort. The best offices have lots of them, everywhere. They are used to visualise meetings, reminders, outstanding tasks, and social gatherings. Completely eliminate them, tell your manager they are messy and it’s far safer to have all this information in a spreadsheet locked away in his laptop. Even better, your laptop. Although, I did read a report recently about an office where the workers coped with the lack of proper whiteboards by writing on the windows, to the outside of which they’d fixed large sheets of white paper so they acted like whiteboards. Almost devilish in its ingenuity.

Limit meeting space under the guise of a ‘cost-saving exercise’. Limited meeting areas will never be enough and meetings will inevitably take place around desks, disrupting everyone else around them.

This follows on nicely to my final subject, nephew: the social needs of your team. The tea and coffee area, according to bile-inducing human idealists, should be as large as possible - as it's the area where a ‘knowledge community’ can be maintained and where staff tend to exchange information. Nonsense! A tiny kitchenette will more than suffice.

We want to encourage a sedentary lifestyle for the development team. Free gym membership is out of the question. Instead, introduce another ‘perk’: give out free unhealthy snacks, like crisps and sugary fizzy drinks. But be warned, one demon delegated this job and his manager came back with fresh fruit, which led to a perceptible increase in morale and performance [As I recall, the demon had to inject the bananas with liquidised doughnuts to stop the project from succeeding].

Lastly, the games room. Seen as the pinnacle of dotcom excess [happy times, Mugwort! Like a Black Wednesday that seemed to never end…] many people are now sceptical of games rooms and see them as needless perks. In fact, they can be quite beneficial for staff, helping to limit stress levels, enabling workers to bond both during and outside work hours, making staff more productive by taking up the ‘slack’ of unproductive work time, and providing a source of regular physical exercise.

I imagine it’d bring tears of joy to the eyes of your manager to see his team bonding over a friendly game of table football, or guffawing loudly at their ping-pong ineptitudes. Utterly sickening, I’m sure you’ll agree. Simply remind him of the costs; and perhaps show him photographs of bedraggled web entrepreneurs at the turn of the century, standing outside boarded-up offices as their pinball tables are repossessed.

You would do well to research this period in history, Mugwort. Use it to inspire you and hopefully we won’t have to deal with your failure ever again…

And try to check your inbox more regularly – I’ll be sending you important advice on situational management very soon.

Uncle Screwpole.

Phil Rice is CTO of software vendor Erudine, the creator of the Erudine Behaviour Engine (http://www.erudine.com) Phil Rice.

With acknowledgement to CS Lewis' "Screwtape Letters" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters).

Mugwort buys the furniture - Fytte 6...

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