On employee spaces

Just discovered an excellent blog by Anuradha.

She asks:

A lot of our interventions in HR essentially impinge on “employee spaces” –
be they temporal, physical, social, or cerebral. The key thing here is – do we
allow them to “access / manage” this space or “control” it?

And her answer:

So, is greater control over space necessarily a better thing?

I think that’s a wrong question. What would instead help is an understanding of how our interventions interact in each of these spaces and produce consequences that may be desirable or undesirable. Profit center responsibility or increase in job size, may give greater control over cerebral space, but may impinge about the employee’s physical or temporal space. Similarly, telecommuting may give the employee control over his physical and temporal spaces, but what about his social space? Sharing of ideas, working with people, leading a team? And continuing this line of thought – not all employees want control over all these spaces at all points of time. Well, obviously not – you would say. So then – what spaces do our employees want to control at what points of time in their careers? And how we provide for that? These are the questions that we need to answer.