A more reflective approach to the Christmas party

'The big gains will come from a more effective use of people's time'

Are you taking the week after Christmas off? If so, you will be in good company, for in Britain and much of Continental Europe the place pretty much shuts down. Why?

Are you taking the week after Christmas off? If so, you will be in good company, for in Britain and much of Continental Europe the place pretty much shuts down. Why?

The issue is whether it is more efficient for people to take holidays at the same time or to take them at different times. The factory system, which required factories to be fully staffed to run efficiently, encouraged holidays to be taken together. It was cheaper to shut down the factory for a fortnight (the "fair fortnight" of industrial towns that persisted right through the 1950s) than to encourage people to stagger their holidays.

The shift of the balance of the economy to services changed all that. The largest single service sector industry is travel and tourism, which is not only a continuous process, but one that runs at full tilt during the holiday seasons. Most other service industries operate on a continuous basis, and the trend has been to try to use flexible staffing to increase the time when the capital is used. For example, the advent of Sunday shopping changed retailing from a six-day to a seven-day operation.

The result is that instead of wanting people to take their holidays at the same time, most companies now want their people to stagger their holidays. Thus, people without children are encouraged to take time off out of the regular holiday season.

So what about next week? The reason that everything is so quiet is that there is another force shaping the economy - the network effect - which is becoming more and more important. One of the more irritating descriptions of the nature of the present economic change is to say that we have moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, and now are moving to an information economy. It is irritating because of the over-simplification: information has always been a crucial element of both manufacturing and services. Nevertheless, information may have become relatively more important in - and this surely is the crucial change - a networked economy.

Businesses are now much more interdependent, not just because the production chain in both goods and services has become more complicated, but because human interaction has become a more important element in commercial endeavour. Organising and co-ordinating many different human skills requires an enormous amount of communication. People have to be available.

They can only be available if they are at work at the same time. Sure, some of us check the office e-mail and voicemail every day, even when we are notionally on holiday, and most of us leave a phone number in case we have to be reached.

Increasingly we bring a mobile phone too. But getting things done needs meetings and the phone is an inadequate substitute for physical contact. The result: because so many people take off the week between Christmas and New Year, it is becoming more efficient for everyone who can to write off the week, forget about trying to reach people who can't be reached, and start up again in January.

For some people, though, a quiet week is the most productive of times. And this demonstrates how workers are dividing into two groups, or maybe more accurately work is dividing into two distinct types: networking and reflecting.

People in mainline management are mostly networkers. Most of their time is spent organising, persuading people, cutting deals. Of course they have to plan and that takes reflection, but much more of the time is spent doing.

Reflectors are a more disparate group. Some are performers - people who have a specialist skill that other people want to make use of, or enjoy. This group includes pure performers such as authors and sports stars. A lot of their time is spent either working on their own, or with a small group of similarly skilled people. It also includes many professionals: lawyers, doctors and accountants, whose work is mainly done either on their own or one-to-one with a client.

Looking ahead, the big gains in productivity will come from a more effective use of people's time. It can only come from that. The factory system enabled production workers' time to be used more efficiently. The new communications technologies seem to have lifted productivity in America, (though there is not much evidence of that here yet) enabling non-production workers to use their time better.

Companies recognise that they have to identify how different types of worker can operate more efficiently, because of the new technologies. What they often fail to do is to establish systems that enable their people to pass on best practice in a structured way. So here is a suggestion, based on the principle behind the Christmas break phenomenon.

Companies should first identify whether their networking communications system is best practice. The easiest way is to compare it with that of other companies, using a pretty obvious check-list.

This would start with simple things such as e-mail practice - do people send too many? - and lead on to more fundamental issues such as meeting practice - who calls them? Why? Are there too many or too few? How, and where, could the new technologies substitute?In an increasingly networked economy, adopting best practice in communications is enormously important.

But the reflectors need to figure out ways of using the new technologies better, too. We are all learning as we go along. But figuring out how to get the best out of technologies that most of us don't fully understand is pretty hit or miss.

At the moment most of us rely on word-of-mouth- a method of communication tried and tested since human beings learnt the art of speech. But it is haphazard, and wise companies should encourage their less-networked people to share their own tricks in a more orderly way.

How so? What about a semi-social function, properly structured, with the specific aim of getting the non-networked to share their techniques of knowledge management? The office party with a purpose - better than some of the office party ideas over the last couple of weeks.