Really sorry about your name. I had you down in my scribbles as David but then the JISC page said George and I thought they’d know best.

I’m glad you took ‘unsurprising’ and ‘not revolutionary’ in the spirit they were intended. Having worked off site for almost a year now the benefits are so clearly apparent that I am surprised when I read reports suggesting otherwise. Of course there are many challenges and the whole ‘trust’ factor is definitely one of them.

I’d also agree with your point about on-site space. I had a discussion not long ago with our admin team about what sort of hotdesks the remote workers would need. Eventually we agreed that it was relatively low priority and having an available plug socket in different offices was more important!

I really enjoyed hearing about your project and hope you get more funding to research other areas. Some of the challenges I am particularly interested in are changing people’s perspectives of remote workers, motivation and IT support for those out of the office.

Thanks again

Marieke

In some ways I am pleased that the outcomes of the LIW project are unsurprising; to have our very positive initial views of the benefits of LIW confirmed in practice is quite gratifying. Nor do I think that a revolutionary approach would get the broad buy-in from the wide range of parties that the project needed in order to succeed.

There are some interesting results, though. Firstly there is the role of middle managers – mainly departmental heads. They are stuck between trying to deliver university aims and plans and keeping the show going for the students. Some of them think they can only do this if their colleagues are being seen (physically) and heard. I don’t think it is a control desire, but it certainly seems to have to do with learning to trust LIW colleagues. Another interesting outcome was that we were wrong about the kinds of spaces that LIW staff would want when they were on campus. We thought we would have to bribe them by creating little palaces for them to use. In fact the most important issue for them was proximity to their colleagues on a subject basis; they didn’t want to be made to feel wanted by being given smart spaces to work in. They did want to be wanted by being given space where everyone else was. Ex post it is obvious; ex ante we didn’t see it.