Skip to main content

Flexiwork, but no flexischool?

The arrival of IT companies in India (both India and MNC) has opened to the door to a very different work culture. A lof of the IT companies let you work from time, work flexi time, sometimes across locations. Some of the more progressive ones do not even measure (or track) your attendance. Whether you come by to work or not each day is not important as long as you deliver what you are supposed to to deliver. And that sounds quite right, does it not? Why do people have to assemble at a place for working together like an industrial age factory - in which it was required because the equipment and raw material would be available only in the factory.

But today? In an age of cloud computing, BYOD, computers as powerful as anything available at ones home - do people really have to assemble and dissemble each day in order to work? Why not work and collaborate virtually? Sure, there are security concerns and the like, but other than that?

Well, the future is work is at home and the companies that have cracked this are reaping benefits. Those who are not are in some stage of denial, in my view.

Now think about schools. For all the flexibility we get at our workplaces, schools are notoriously stuck in the industrial age. Uniforms, fixed times, fixed timings, fixed curriculum, one size fits all -you think of it, they have it. And if you compare, many children spend about as much time at school, than your average adult spends time at work. And the adult numbers at work are coming down even as school hours are remaining constant or going up.

Is there a reason a child has to go to school each day of the week? If the child can finish off some of the work at home (with parents or extended family) why bother going to school each day? If the curriculum can be split between spending time at home and completing stuff that is prescribed, they why bother to send the child each day to physically attend school?

When we grew up (or perhaps a generation earlier) schooling was a lot more flexible while workplaces were more rigid. Today,there is flexiwork but no flexischool - sweet irony is it not?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more