This latest idea has been a gripe of mine for a while. Why don’t all businesses encourage, insentivise and ensure efficiency through making sure all staff can TOUCH TYPE!!!

It is surely the most obvious thing you can make any desk based (or at least staff regularly using keyboards) member of staff do to get them working faster. If you could type 20%? 30%? 50% faster? How would that save you money. Surely if someone is touch typing rather than plod typing (my abusive term for slow typists!!) they would be so much more efficient. Say they type 20% of their day. 20% of 20% is 4%. If even 25% of your staff were typing then you could make your company 1% more efficient.

1% may not sound like a lot but that is off the top end and will repeat each year and hopefully will increase as people get better.

Another factor is that people who can touch type are much more likely to learn other time saving skills on the computer. I will probably go on about keyboard shortcut in another post (rant!!).

Manchester Police have announced massive cuts today. If all their officers could process documents 25% faster this would be negated in one small way (if they only had to fill out reports once rather than up to 6+ times it would help more but that is another matter).

I am tempted to get people in Essex doing this with lessons by inviting people to bring their laptops to a room where I sit in front and literally put paper over their hands and tell them to type. After all that is the way I learnt.

I also raised this with 2 Headteachers in secondary schools over the summer. I had a false opinion that every kid could touch type now as they have grown up with computers, wrong. If they could type twice as fast, how much more homework could they do and therefore learn?

It took me 5 minutes to write this blog post with edits. How long would it take someone bad at typing?

I have just read the interesting analysis on Tech Crunch about Europe’s lack of successful tech start-ups : http://bit.ly/doHNXg

I blogged, some time back here, questioning why and this has made me think some more. It is interesting his point that although we talk of them being US based most are in Silicon Valley. This is obviously no great insight but his point that the eco-system in place is self perpetuating more start-ups.

People are there to do these businesses, skills are everywhere and the population “get’s it”. It seems that to make it work in the UK we really do need to get UK developers and other tech experts properly skilled and surrounding service motivated. I have read and thought about how to do this many times and although I would have hated it as a graduate the idea of a Certification of Software Development (and related disciplines) must be one step in that direction. With accountancy and other financial disciplines this is common place. It may be no coincidence that the UK qualifications in accountancy are highly thought of and we have a very strong financial sector? Maybe we need to get together and set this up. It would give access to leading edge resources for the budding entrepreneur. At the moment it is tough to know if you are really hiring a hacker or an expert.

Finance was also mentioned, this is something I have often wondered about. Dragon’s Den is highly viewed in the UK but the people on there are expected to already have some cash income from the business and be able to demonstrate clear plans. This attitude can’t help. Often tech companies are not started because of the lack of initial investment. Maybe this is not feasible but I just never thought going to any funds would ever yield any investment. If people still feel like this then people wont go now and will take the safer route (full time paid employment).

Market Size is another factor raised. This could be a problem for the UK but in truth the web is a global industry and we have 60 odd million in the UK so really it should be enough to at least start.

Support Systems are probably better in Silicon Valley. There must be more specific people about but I have never found it that hard to get support that I need. In truth I think this is a smaller problem.

Attitude to risk is a big one. I think this could be helped by encouraging more investment as previously discussed but it is also about seeing a few role models giving it a crack. Possibly we need our established service based tech companies (medium sized web development houses etc) to let staff go part time to explore ideas. I would think that would help mitigate some of the risk. Also now cloud hosting is much cheaper and you can do so much with open source software, start up costs are lower if you can pay your own living costs.

We probably need one company to catch fire and take off and it will take others with it. I reckon we need to get networking more than we already are and all take the plunge!

Several things that often comes up in the media is the Rich / Poor divide, Unemployment, Disability Benefit and the lack of new job creation.

A 4 day week has been implemented in many factories struggling to stave off redundancies in the latest climate. I have been wondering if it should actually be more widely adopted. It is in many ways a more socialist type policy rather than a capitalist policy but it could solve many of the ills of society and help individual companies. Implementing it could be very tough though.

If we were to create 25% more jobs in a stroke, to cover people doing 4 days rather than 5 and not just working longer hours on days worked (assuming it worked like that, clearly it wouldn’t at first), we could solve unemployment very easily. The problem is clearly that the right people in the right locations wouldn’t be available but with a gradual change people could adapt and be trained.

This method would see people earning 20% less which would obviously be a massive downside! However if people earned less across the board many other things would be cheaper. Less child care would be needed, possibly house prices would adjust, elderly care might be easier for carers to do more of. Also taxes should drop as less people would be on welfare and so on.

The rich/poor divide argument is tougher to address than many other issues. However if we had more jobs available to more people than in theory in could be a shot in the arm for people to get on and achieve things. Along side the disability benefit argument people are able to do certain parts of a job could do those in their 4 days and the people who are not could cover those parts. This might be a stretch in reality but something I could see working if people are prepared to collaborate. This is similar to job sharing.

As far as wider job creation goes, I have started many projects whilst being part time in my main employment. People who have a spark of an idea but are frightened to put the plan in place could use their extra day to get something off the ground.

To implement the plan would be very tough but if people bought into it then the gradual migration to it could work. On a base level away from money, quality of life may well increase. The French have the working time directive but I don’t believe this should be legislated as flexibility is key.

Just an idea, and one I am sure would be impractical for many reasons!