Tag: young professional

Winner!

I got some exciting news in the snail mail today. The Institute of Civil Engineers has awarded me and my MPhil supervisor the James Watt medal for the best paper on the topic of energy published in their journals last year.

I am very happy. There’s nothing like a pat on the back (and a medal!) to motivate me to write more.

Our paper was based on three months of research I did at the tail end of my masters year at Cambridge. I interviewed eight organisations about what stopped them from building energy efficient houses in the UK. The technology exists and you’ll save money — doesn’t energy efficiency just make sense? After all, the Scandinavians got on with it all years ago.

I ended up writing about the social, organisational and structural barriers and drivers for energy efficiency. My friend, Anna, wrote about the economic barriers. This probably won’t surprise you — the problem is complicated. In fact, everything I have ever looked at with any kind of thoughtfulness is always more complicated (in fact, more complex) than it might appear.

We did not write anything ground breaking or previously unknown so I don’t know why the judging panel chose our paper. The merit was probably in the synthesis (putting it all together), rather than the thesis. Maybe I can ask one of the judges if any are at the awards ceremony in October.

Hooray!

Locating barriers and drivers in the house building system
Figure 2 Locating barriers and drivers in the house building system

Update

My flatmate Aoife is so nice! She came back from her weekend shop with celebratory champagne, chocolate and a card.

Champagne, chocolate and card
Champagne, chocolate and card

Sustainability and rugby

At work, I’ve been working on a project to look at sustainability issues for the Welsh Rugby Union. I’m not a rugby follower but there are plenty of people around me who are. They’re envious that I get paid to tour the Millennium Stadium and study rugby matches so popular that no one can get tickets.

So, a break from the holiday photography — here are some photos from the Millennium Stadium. The full set are in the gallery.

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Walking onto the pitch.

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Lots of resource issues in this picture. Firstly, the pitch has been imported from Holland. You can’t get high performance pitch from just anywhere.

Secondly, see those gantries on wheels? Those are high energy lights that are shining onto the pitch almost every day to help the grass grow. There is too little light reaching the pitch (and in Cardiff generally) to keep the grass lush. Before these lights were used, the grass would get very patchy.

Thirdly, the video screens — obviously, they use a lot of electricity but we were thinking of how they could be used for public service announcements, like ‘Do you know the four signs of a stroke?’ With 70,000 fans packed into the stadium for each game, it’s an opportunity to raise awareness.

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Grounds maintenance crew preparing for the big Wales-Ireland Six Nations match.

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Part of our work will look at the branding risks of particular sponsors, as well as how the Rugby Union can partner up with sponsors on outreach and business programmes.

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It was a nice day.

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Kegs and kegs of beer! Liquor licensing is an issue. I’m told that rugby fans are responsible drinkers compared to the more rowdy football goers. Football matchers are more tense than rugby matches. The fans of the teams need to be segregated because if they’re allowed to mix, there is the risk of punch ups.

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Inside the team change rooms.

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Inside one of the TV broadcasting suites. We’re looking at how the media travels to and from the match, as well as equity issues related to match scheduling. It appears that media demands for prime time scheduling sometimes conflicts with business hours (and how much local businesses can profit from more activity around Cardiff), as well as public transport timetables.

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Joan, sustainability consultant.

A good day to be sick

I had been working very hard to meet a deadline. I worked on the weekend and then quite late for a few nights. Then I handed in my work and felt very happy for it.

The next day, I woke up at my usual time. While having breakfast, I realised that today was a good day to be sick. Usually, when I am feeling a bit unwell, I push through it because I have an important meeting, a deadline or there’s work to be done. But on this day, my calendar was blue sky clear.

Regretfully, I did not feel the least bit ill. If I had even a slight cold, I could have stayed away from the office and maybe even taken a therapeutic walk around Regent’s Park in the sunshine.

Careers counselling

Damjan’s sister Jana is thinking about how she can develop her career in the next couple of years. This reminded me of a a book called the Job Guide, which I used when I was 17 years old. Back in the day, I went through every single of the hundreds of job descriptions in the book, crossing out the jobs that didn’t appeal to me and highlighting the ones that might be okay.

I used it to confirm that I wouldn’t mind being an environmental engineer. Following this, I put in my application to the environmental engineering undergraduate course.

Having been reminded of this great resource, I wondered if it was still be published by the Australian Government. Indeed it is, and you can find it a handy new searchable e-version here.

The description of ‘environmental engineer‘ hasn’t changed from what I remember. It begins:

Environmental engineers are concerned with assessing and managing the effects of human and other activity on the natural and built environment. They apply their engineering knowledge and skills to such things as environmental impact assessment, natural resources management and pollution control…

Although this is the job I started out doing, I can’t say this is what I’m doing anymore. I spent some time looking through the Job Guide 2009, trying to find a description that matched my present job. There was no ‘sustainability engineer’ or ‘sustainability consultant’ or ‘consultant’. Is my job too new, too niche?

But finally, I found it in a unexpected place. My work matches closely to that described for an ‘urban and regional planner‘. In fact, the match is rather uncanny, considering I never studied urban planning.

Urban and regional planners develop policies and plans for the use of land and resources. They advise on the economic, environmental, social and cultural needs of particular localities or regions.

They also work on large-scale projects such as new suburbs, towns, industrial areas, commercial and retail developments, urban renewal projects and transportation links…

Planners work closely with professionals in other fields (e.g. surveying, architecture, engineering, environment and conservation, property development, community services and transport planning). There is a high level of public contact as planners spend a lot of time in meetings and discussions. Time is also spent on field visits, writing reports and performing research. Planners are also required to prepare documentation of decisions for independent review and are often called upon to appear as expert witnesses before appeal hearings.

That’s pretty much it exactly. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering my department at work  is called ‘Planning Plus’.

You are the weakest link, goodbye

Cardboard boxes

To me, the cliché image for recession and redundancies is the person in a suit leaving the office with a cardboard box of belongings. Often, this person is being escorted by a security guard.

I said to my workmates, ‘You know to start worrying when a pallet of empty cardboard boxes shows up at the office.’

‘Especially if one of them has your name on it!’ Jessen added.

Escorted off the premises

Jessen continued. ‘Speaking of being escorted off the premises, a friend of a friend working in finance was approached by rival company. He was being head hunted because he had lots of great clients and contacts. Well, my friend’s friend accepted the offer and a month before he was to start at the new place, he told his boss that he was changing to the other company. Within minutes, the security guards had arrived and others were confiscating his laptop and files. And the headhunted guy was like, “Hey guys, that’s not going to help you. I’ve been copying files for weeks. Why do you think I was working from home all the time?” ‘

The signs

Jessen has another friend (let’s call her Gemma) who worked in banking. One day, Gemma heard the phone in the next workstation ringing. Her colleague picked up the phone, listened, put it down, then went into a nearby meeting room. Minutes later, he came back to his desk and started packing.

Then the phone rang for the colleague who sat in front of Gemma. The colleague picked up the phone, listened, put it down, went into the meeting room, came back and started packing.

By the time Gemma’s phone started ringing, she was already halfway through her own packing.

Pop idol style

One of our secretaries, Tanya, described what happened during the last wave of redundancies. They got all the secretaries together for an ‘away day’. Away days are usually for team bonding. This time, though, they separated the secretaries into two groups. To Tanya’s group, they basically said, ‘You won’t be seeing the people in the other group anymore.’

Redundancy Day

A friend told me what happened last year at one of our competitor consultancies. The staff were all told that a particular Monday coming up would be ‘Redundancy Day’. Arriving at work, each person found a white envelope on their desk. The letter in the envelope told them that they were either safe or dismissed. Those dismissed had to leave the same day. Of course, even those who were safe could not do any work that day while their team mates and friends were packing their desks.

False pretences

Another story I heard involved everyone being invited to a keynote presentation. When they were all gathered for the presentation, the person on stage sheepishly began, ‘Actually, this isn’t a presentation. We’re making redundancies and you’re here so that we can notify people all at once.’

Roll call

Last week at a manufacturing company, everyone was called to a meeting. Management then started reading out the names of 170 people who were being made redundant. Those who had lost their jobs had to leave in half an hour — no time to say goodbye to friends. In a manufacturing environment, you don’t want to risk having angry people sabotaging equipment. Understandable, but how very sad.

It could be worse

Devastating as redundancy is, it could be worse. One of our client contacts in the Middle East has been put in jail, accused of corruption by his own bosses. He’s been locked up for six weeks now. I’ve never met him but those who have worked with him say that he’s an honest bloke who is the unfortunate scapegoat for his company’s current dire financial situation.

Poor man. Let’s all count our blessings.

Consultation

When we came back from the Christmas holidays, we received an email from management regretfully announcing that they were kicking off a consultation period that would lead to up to 400 people being made redundant around the UK.

In the UK, there is a rather odd law that any time 20-99 people are to be fired, there is a 30 day ‘consultation period’ during which the company must ‘consult’ with employee representatives. When 100 or more people are to be fired, the consultation period is 90 days. Our 90 days ends on March 16. The tension (and black humour) is building up, as people wait for dismissal notices.

Because the consultation period is so long, it is sensible for the company to set an overly high limit to the number of redundancies they will make. They don’t want to start another round of consultation, should they find that they’ve set the limit too low. There is a balancing act between setting the limit high enough to give the company room to move, but not so high that it panics and demoralises everyone.

Many people have remarked to me that the 90 days for consultation is too long to be left hanging. Hearts pound quicker when an email arrives without a subject line. People view suspiciously meetings between upper management people, and upper management and HR. Some people I know had planned to go on holiday in April, May or June but are reluctant to book tickets and accommodation in case they find out on March 16 that they need all their savings to get through unemployment.

Yet, 90 days is better than 8 hours. I took part in our company’s the first sustainable construction materials conference. Invitations for the conference were sent to offices in the UK, mainland Europe, Australia and the US. For two days, specialists in America and the UK were to present to a a worldwide teleconference. However, two days before the conference, all the American presentations were cancelled without explanation. My Outlook invitations suddenly had big red crosses on them.

The conference went on without the Americas and it was there that I heard what had happened. In the US, people showed up to work and found dismissal emails in their inbox. They had to leave the office by the end of the day.

Losing 15% of staff was so devastating and the need to cut costs were such that US management withdrew participation from the conference. I don’t know if the presenters themselves had been axed. In Australia, too, about 10% of staff have been ‘released’.

There are many ways to handle redundancies badly and here is one of them. I will write about some stories that were shared in the aftermath of this news from the US. Some of them were so horrible that they were funny.

I will say that our company is more cuddly than most, being employee owned and sustainability focused. Many people have commented that the way the American redundancies were handled was uncharacteristically cruel.

10am, 1pm, 4pm, no excuses

Being constantly ‘on call’ at work by email, phone, at my desk and the newly installed enterprise-wide ‘chat’ program (aargh!) means that my ‘to do’ list grows faster than I can tick things off. The only way to clean the slate is to catch up out of hours, during which no one can add anything to the list. That is, unless they’re in our Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco or New York offices. However, many of these colleagues have recently been fired so this is less a problem these days (more about this in a future post).

Not only am I chasing an ever-growing ‘snake’ of tasks and meetings, because most tasks or meetings are small, much of my day is spent recovering from the last interruption and steeling myself for the next ‘to do’. So while the quantity of time for my projects is reducing, the quality of time is also plunging.

I am pretty good at multi-tasking (or rapid switching, which is probably a more accurate term). But recently, I reached my limit. I had two days in a row where I struggled to work out what to put on my time sheet. I was busy all day but was I productive? Could I justify charging this time to a client? Could the budgets on my projects handle days like this?

A very timely article appeared on Lifehacker: Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality over Quantity. These are the rules.

QUALITY vs quantity, UX process.
Check email ONLY:

  • 10AM
  • 1PM
  • 4PM

Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.

FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki

MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking

OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~

I bookmarked this on Delicious on February 28 and tried to implement it when I went to work on Monday.

I wasn’t successful straight away. First, I got rid of the pop-up that told me I had new email. Even this small step was helpful, despite me still checking my mail twice an hour. Then there was an unfortunate (but necessary?) evening where I worked until 8:30 PM. But as the week went on, I checked my email less and less often.

By Friday, I no longer had Microsoft Outlook open at all. I followed the 10 AM, 1 PM and 4 PM rule (interestingly, every time I checked my mail, I spent at least half an hour responding to the accumulated messages — but I was thankful for the uninterrupted three hours of productive work that had just passed). I finished one task on Friday. And at 5:30 PM, I dropped it all and went to the pub.

It was a rather extraordinary day. I was so thrilled by it that I’ve been telling everyone about the rules. My colleagues are envious. They immediately recognise the wisdom of the rules but are doubtful they can apply them.

Maybe if I can show them these rules are achievable (at least on some days) at our workplace, more people will adopt them.

Not as I good as I think I am

One of my projects at work is to produce a film introducing the concept of sustainability to all the engineers, scientists, designers, project managers and support staff in my company. As usual, it’s a rush job — why do people leave things to the last minute?

I think we’ve done a pretty good job in putting together a script for the film. Four different bosses have laid down the law on what the film should say. Crafting something that will satisfy  four executive directors… It’s tricky but we managed.

I sent the final draft script to the film unit . The film unit is part of our company’s corporate communications department. Their job is to turn the script and our ideas into a coherent all-singing all-dancing message.

*Bing!*

The sound announces the arrival of an email in my inbox. It’s from Ben, the head of film.

‘As promised,’ Ben says, ‘here is the edited script. ‘We trimmed it down to fit ten minutes and changed the order of some of the ideas. Could you have a look? If it’s okay, we’ll start to put the film together.’

The attached Word document is covered in the red of track changes.

As I read through Ben’s version of the script, my heart sinks.

‘Did you see the script?’ Amanda says as she walks past my desk. Amanda is the project manager for the film.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

I have trouble with my next sentences. Amanda waits.

‘There’s nothing wrong with Ben’s changes,’ I say at last. ‘In fact, they’re really great. He didn’t change any ideas… he just made it all simpler, less formal. But not casual, either.’

Amanda nodded. ‘I thought so too. You and I, we both try to avoid jargon, but we forget how much we write in ‘report speak’.’

‘Look at this!’ I lamented. ‘I had written, “The company’s regions and sectors have each developed their own sustainability strategies to implement the objectives of the sustainability policy”. And what did Ben write? “The different parts of the company have strategies to tackle the goals of our sustainability policy…” Why didn’t I just say that? It’s so obvious now. ‘

I yowl in anguish. ‘I thought I was good at writing! But I do ‘report speak’! I don’t want to ‘report speak’!’

Amanda laughed, ‘Don’t worry, Joan. It’s his job. Corporate comms are professional communicators. You know, Ben couldn’t calculate a carbon footprint like you can.’

Lettuce capture and storage

Recently at work, we put in a bid to do a life cycle assessment of a head of lettuce. This is a serious issue. Lettuce wastage rates are very high. We’ve all experienced having to throw out lettuce because we couldn’t use it all up in time, or because the fridge had frozen it. Now, multiply that wastage to retail and agricultural scale, adding in the risks of fluctuating consumer demand, cold snaps, and malfunctions in storage, transport and retail refrigeration.

During our research, we discovered that there is a ‘voice of the salad industry’ — the British Leafy Salad Association. Who would have thought? You would not be surprised, probably, that while working on this bid I would spontaneously start giggling at my desk.

As I constantly extolled to my team mates, all the wastage problems could be solved by installing ‘lettuce capture and storage’ systems alongside farms and major grocery stores.

Excess lettuce would be stored in the less perishable ‘rabbit’ form. Later, rabbit would be harvested and the useful lettuce nutrients would be returned to the global food cycle.

Becoming chartered

Becoming a chartered professional has always been tricky for environmental engineers, even engineering project managers. Being an engineer means solving problems. Usually, engineers design physical solutions (bridges, circuit boards, water pipes) for society’s problems. On the other hand, for the last few years, I’ve been working on management systems, policies and strategies. In the traditional sense, I’m not an engineer, yet I think of myself as designing non-physical solutions to the same problems.

We’ve tried to make this argument to Engineers Australia, who won’t allow us to become chartered engineers without us demonstrating that we have design skills. Unfortunately, they’re sticking to the relatively traditional definition of design so I’ve found myself unable to be a chartered engineer in Australia.

I don’t object to the way Engineers Australia have chose to define the job of an ‘engineer’ because I work alongside ecologists, physicists, social policy analysts, media specialists, microbiologists, environmental scientists, geographers — and we all do similar work. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I’m not doing engineering work.

To progress through an engineering company, more often than not, one needs to be chartered. That’s why for the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a take-home exam to become an associate member of the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Management (after that, there are a few more steps before I can be a chartered environmental professional). Doing the exam has meant little time for cooking, blogging, seeing friends and Damjan, and regular exercise.

Sitting in front of a computer doing heavy thinking all weekend is never much fun. But if one has to do an exam, then the IEMA exam is not a bad one. I learned a bit and got to write about a pet topic or two.