New column and blog in The Globe And Mail

Globemail_2 The Globe And Mail, Canada's largest national newspaper, today unveiled quite the face lift, not to mention a bit of lipo. Aside from a total redesign, the paper also slimmed down a little bit. It's very Guardian-esque, and perhaps a bit sexy. (Yes, I can find newspapers sexy.) The paper also launched a new section, Globe Life. And in that section is a new weekly workplace culture column by, well, me. It's called The Office and I will also be writing a related blog for the new website. My first column is below and online here. The blog is here. RSS feed here.

Haunted by the ring tone from hell

CRAIG SILVERMAN

When
the Blackberry service went dead last week, many people felt helpless
and disconnected. Patrick Tuite likely wished the outage had extended
to cellphones in general.

A lawyer representing John Boultbee,
who is being tried along with Conrad Black in Chicago, Mr. Tuite was at
the mercy of the court last Tuesday when a cellphone in his possession
kept ringing with the theme from The Exorcist. The judge confiscated the phone and put it in her office, where one assumes it continued ringing and speaking in tongues.

Mr. Tuite can take comfort in a 2007 survey of British cellphone
users by phone retailer Dial-a-Phone: 44 per cent of them admitted to
committing a "ring-tone faux pas."

And in a 2006 poll of U.S. workers by staffing company Randstad USA,
30 per cent listed shrill, ringing cellphones as their biggest office
pet peeve.

While movie theatres, schools and other public places make a point
of telling people to turn off their phones, the office remains the
haunt of flagrant phone ruffians.

People take calls or answer e-mail during meetings. Some cannot bear to remove their Bluetooth headpiece for even a
second; others talk at a perfectly normal level on an office phone only
to bellow on their cell as if trapped at the bottom of a well. Not surprisingly, all seem partial to ridiculous, loud ring tones.

"My ring tone is the quietest one possible," says Adeodata Czink, a
Toronto etiquette coach and president of Business of Manners. "The Exorcist was funny but not appropriate."

Ms. Czink says phones should be turned off in all meetings unless
you're expecting an urgent call, and the choice of a ring tone is just
as important as the volume. Keep it low and unobtrusive, she says. Try the vibrate setting.

Remember that a ring tone says something about you, and that something is often mouthed from behind your back.

Now that's something to be scared of.


ADVICE OF THE WEEK

 Clearing the air

“I know this may sound silly, but I get very distracted by noise,
and I often hear a lot of belching from your cubicle. If you're able to
do that more quietly, I would really appreciate it.” – A workplace
expert's suggested phrasing for approaching a co-worker who burps
constantly. If that failed, moving to another cubicle was suggested.
Crumbling Rolaids into his coffee was not. (Hartford Courant)


PRODUCTIVITY

April showers bring office slackers The
rainy, slushy April weather that hit Eastern Canada last week probably
also took a toll on workplace productivity. A survey of 6,000 workers
by CareerBuilder.com found that 21 per cent admit to being less
productive when it's raining outside and 9 per cent when it's snowing.


ART MEETS OFFICE

The creepy old guy “I think every office has some guy like Creed in it,” Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on
The Office,
told New York magazine when asked if the show's characters mimic real
life. “You know the character Creed? He's the old guy – there's always
some creepy old guy sitting in a corner, and nobody knows how long he's
worked there or what exactly he does. Everyone has worked with a Creed.”


BY THE NUMBERS

 Size matters
291 Average amount of square feet of an executive office in 1987. Today, the average executive office is 241.


98 Average square feet of a “senior professional's” office. The average call-centre employee's? Only 50.
International Facility Management Association

Craig Silverman is a Montreal-based writer and the editor of
RegretTheError.com. His first non-fiction book will be published by
Penguin Canada in the fall.

April 23, 2007 | Filed Under Columns, The Globe And Mail, The Office | Comments Off 

Mobile technology hits the oil patch

I'm a bit late updating some of the recent work I've done. Below is a technology story I wrote for TQ magazine, which is published by The Globe And Mail. It's also online at their site here.

Bonanza in the oil patch

A Calgary company hits pay dirt with a wireless ticketing system for its workers in the field
CRAIG SILVERMAN
April 11, 2007

Tucker Wireline Services Canada; Calgary
Business An oil services company that provides oil well logging and perforation services to energy companies
Employees 200
Project
Equipping its field workers with mobile technology to eliminate an
error-prone and costly paper-based system for data capture, pricing and
invoicing
Initial cost $1 million—about $7,000 to $10,000 to
equip each team with a notebook computer, network access and
electronic-signature capture pad
Ongoing costs Network access for transmitting data from the field
ROI Close to $500,000 a year in savings thanks to improved billing and invoicing, and increased productivity

Dave Jellett was talking to a field engineer at Tucker Wireline
Services Canada a few months ago when he realized just how successful
the company's new wireless field-ticketing service has been. Jellett,
Tucker's president and chief operating officer, listened as the
engineer bemoaned the recent theft of his laptop. "He was crying the
blues because he'd lost the system and was back to paper," says Jellett.

Without his laptop, the engineer would have to go back to the
way things were done before the company began rolling out its new
remote workstations about a year ago. Roughly 75 of Tucker's 200
Canadian employees work in oil fields across Alberta, providing
services to such companies as EnCana and Suncor. Tucker lowers sensors
into newly drilled wells to take readings from the rock that help
decide how the oil company should proceed. "It's like doing an MRI for
the rock," says Jellett.

Tucker also provides "perforation" services—drilling holes
into the steel casing placed inside a well to enable it to start
producing oil. Tucker's field teams are constantly on the move,
gathering new data from different wells and performing whatever work
the oil companies need. At each stop, the team fills out a so-called
field ticket that includes all the key information about the job, along
with the cost of the services performed.

In the old paper-based system, each team had to fill out
several pages of forms and produce an invoice using a large pricing
book they had to lug from site to site. "They usually filled out the
paperwork on the fly, and it certainly added a couple of hours to every
job," says Jellett. That's big money: Each lost crew hour costs Tucker
$500.

Allowing
workers like Jack Domet to complete their paperwork in the field saves
Tucker Wireline roughly two hours per job or about $1,000.
The paperwork was then delivered by hand or sent via bus to
one of Tucker's field offices, in Medicine Hat, Leduc or Grand Prairie.
From there, it would make its way by car or bus to the Calgary
headquarters. "One of the big problems we had was the two to three
weeks' time it took to get the information into the office," says
Jellett. "That also meant delays in terms of invoicing customers and
getting paid, and getting the data associated with our operations into
the office."

Another hassle: engineers would often make mistakes while
filling out forms in the field. "Any time you're doing paper records,
the error rate associated with it is very high," says Jellett. "We
would have everything from pricing errors right though to
data-recording errors."

Tucker knew that field tickets wasted time, degraded the
quality of data and delayed the time between doing a job and getting
paid for it. So three years ago, the company partnered with Spira Data
Corp., a Calgary-based oil-field technology company, to turn its paper
forms into software. As for transmitting data directly from the field,
that fell to Telus. (The telco now sells the new system, dubbed
wireless field ticketing, to other oil services companies.)

Tucker's system works like this: Each three-person field team
(the company has 25 of them) gets a basic laptop loaded with the
ticketing software and a network card so it can connect to Telus's
high-speed wireless network (in remote areas where cell coverage is
unavailable, they can connect via satellite).

When they arrive at a well and assess what they need to do,
the team fills out an electronic field ticket; the software
automatically calculates how much the job will cost, thus reducing math
errors, and generates an invoice that's signed by the customer on site,
using a signature capture pad that plugs into the laptop. Then the team
sends all the data and invoices over the cell network back to the head
office, where it's processed.

Tucker spent about $1 million to get the system up and
running (all its field teams were wireless by August, 2006), and
Jellett says the company will save close to half a million dollars a
year, two-thirds thanks to the faster billing process, the rest from
increased employee productivity. "We felt we would pay for the whole
development of the system within the first two years of usage," says
Jellett, noting the company is on track to meet that goal.

There are other, less tangible savings. Jellett says his field teams are now able to better analyze the data.

"It allows them to focus on issues other than data entry," he
says. "Now they're actually looking at the data and trends of activity,
and analyzing and making decisions based upon the data."

Telus's projections for the system show an average reduction
of four weeks' invoicing time for clients, "a significant advantage
when you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars earned each
day," says

Telus's Allison Vale. "The default business case on the ROI
calculator for the wireless field ticketing solution comes up with a
return of $1.8 million over five years" in cost savings and faster
invoicing.

"Everything is captured within that notebook instead of in a
huge briefcase," says Jellett. "The field teams find it easier to use,
and the buy-in has been terrific. We had to do some work on the
education side with a few customers because they're stuck in the old
way of doing things.

But it's a better system for them as well because it makes
for less paper and material for them to handle." Still, he admits some
customers prefer having the old few weeks' delay before seeing an
invoice from Tucker.

"I'd be lying to you if I said that wasn't the case," Jellett says, laughing.

April 23, 2007 | Filed Under Feature articles, Magazine articles, The Globe And Mail | Comments Off