The brainstorming room encourages people to think outside the box. Here: Sofia, Martina, István and Annastiina

Anywhere

In the New World of Work you have a laptop and access to all documents you need. You can come to the office, but you are not obliged to. On Monday, for example, you are given a task and told to deliver it on Friday. Then, between Monday and Friday you are free to choose your place of work: office, home, internet café or bistro between two meetings etc. It is not important where you work, but you have to deliver the right results by the deadline. In NWOW, managers trust their employees to go out and get results

So you have the freedom to avoid spending hours in traffic in the peak hours and work from home in the morning. Or between two meetings with customers from different areas, you can work a couple of hours in the closest bistro with internet connection rather than spend all this time in traffic to and from the office. Or if your kid is ill, you can work from home instead of spending your day trying to find care solutions.

Anytime

In the NWOW flexibility is key. A presence management software enables people to see who is present (at the office, or home or maybe on the beach, but present online, that is available) who is busy, who is out of office. The same software offers the possibility to chat with colleagues that are 1 click away. The chat is good for quick questions about work and quick answers enables workers to go on with their work without walking to another office to get help.

"J'ai la réponse aux embouteillages. / Moi aussi." To convince people to switch to the new culture, the company used cartoons.

Old to New WOW

When they moved from the old premises and from the old culture, Getronics adopted digital paperless work. But they had an employee who adored paper and whose office looked like the company's archive. He could find any paper at any moment. He couldn't imagine life without paper. And now he works online. "Is he happy?" was our boss's first reaction, thinking of the bookworms in his own team. The transition was slow, was the answer. And he looks happy now.

The NWOW saves time. You don't need to physically check the meeting room to see whether it has a phone, internet connection or how many participants it can host. On the little monitor next to the door you have all these details, plus the schedule for the day, the name of the people who booked it and when it will become available. Of course, you can all these things on your laptop – at the office desk or home.

The new workspace architecture provides fewer desks than staff. However, "we are not chasing people away from the office" told us our hosts. The new office is an activity-based workspace: people come to the office to do something, not just to be there from 9 to 5. They come for example for a meeting, an intensive workshop or a great brainstorming session.

The walls of this room are not transparent so people can feel free to do what Evita did.

Annastiina only tried furniture that matched her clothes

While new ICT try to convince people to work from home, the presence of showers in the office seems to convey the opposite message.

Red frame means the meeting room is booked.

"Team" is one of the company's values, even if people work from different places - like home or café.

Dreaming is the first step towards innovation.

The Architects of the invisible do not only deal with space, but also with technology and culture of work.

This month in the EP Chamber there was also a small but noisy change.. the bell replaces traditional gavel!

From February plenary session onwards the start and conclusion of a speech, debate or vote will be announced with the sound of a bell by the the President and Vice-Presidents.. and, of course, it will be used in the most traditional way:  to keep order in the chamber!

After quite a few years of doing different EU-related jobs and passing the dreaded-by-many competition I found myself in WebComm in the very beginning of January. The first week had a still and eerie feeling to it as Brussels was almost empty and many were still on their Christmas holidays.

My first day started with a briefing by the personnel department and getting a blue backpack with plenty of different guides and papers to guide one through the first weeks. Afterwards we newbies went on to get our badges – and having one finally made being an official feel real instead of a distant dream. We even got those tinytiny calendars to put on the backside of our badges. That was it – I was ready to embark on my great adventure as a newly appointed WebCommer.

The first week passed by quickly as there was much to learn and plenty to read. I received my very own manual for writing stories – the tapas cookbook. Leafing it through was both educating and scary – I learned that writing a good synopsis is far from easy. And after synopsis, what happens then? The magic obviously: editing the story into more than twenty different languages. My colleagues are wizards with words and languages; they really bring stories to life and make them interesting for the general public.

I adore my own language Finnish. I studied it in the university (along with everything else, mind you). It is my native one and playing with its words has been a favourite hobby of mine for years. Still, writing with it is trickier than it sounds. Many of the English expressions if translated directly do not sound quite right. The 15 cases, the language structure and hunting elks and living in the woods for centuries make the language a vivid one with a special character. But new challenges thrill me – and I am more than up for this one!

After a month I am no longer the new girl in the unit. More people have arrived and now they are hitting the learning curve. I have not escaped the curve yet though – tweeting for one is an art I hope to master better soon.

When writing this, Brussels is freezing under a cold spell and with subzero temperatures. But I am still quite happy to be here as today the coldest spot in Finland had -40'C (the photo is from my parent's backyard, they had only -33'C).

Paris ©Taxiarchos228

France might be one of the better places for meeting the French, but it also works a treat for making friends from outside the Hexagone. When I left Paris in 1999 after studying there for a year, I did so with an address book spanning the breadth of the European continent. It didn't involve me cultivating a winning personality; it was just one of the unexpected benefits of enrolling in the Erasmus programme.

This year the popular initiative, launched in 1987 to encourage students to do part of their studies in another EU country, celebrates its 25th anniversary. It was appropriately named after Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, who embraced life-long learning and was no stranger to living abroad himself.

I signed up to the programme in 1998 eager for a chance to live in the City of Light and wring some use out of my high school French. Through a friend I managed to find a poky but liveable flat in the swanky 16th arrondissement, just a convenient stroll from the Eiffel tower. I quickly made many friends, not only from among the French students, but also with the other Erasmus students who were as keen as I was to sample what Paris had to offer. Many a night finished in Bar de Bastille as it was one of the few bars that would stay open until the first metro started riding again after 6am. It also proved invaluable to me as regards to improving my French. Shortly after arriving it was clear that the French had not picked up their language from the same books as I had as everyone insisted in speaking at break-neck speeds using words not covered by le Petit Robert. However, I quickly made great progress.

And I have been far from the only one to discover the advantages of the Erasmus programme. From a modest 3,244 students in its first year, it quickly blossomed by 2006 to more than 150,000, representing nearly one per cent of the total student population in Europe. Today more than 2.2 million students from 31 different countries have already participated and this number continues to grow each year.

Erasmus not only offers the chance of an unforgettable experience as depicted in the French film l'Auberge espagnole, but also the opportunity to give a much-valued boost to your CV. Employers appreciate what an Erasmus stay says about the language and life skills of an applicant. A-levels French might show you have studied the language of Molière, an Erasmus stay proves you can use it. It also demonstrates you know how to fend for yourself outside your comfort zone.

My Erasmus year certainly helped me to broaden my horizons. At the end of it, I didn't want the experience to end and after I graduated I went on to do another degree abroad and work in three different countries. It's probably no coincidence that I now work at the Parliament with colleagues from 27 different countries as the stimulating variety of cultures and languages reminds me of the good times I enjoyed as an Erasmus student.

I need to confess something. I can't count, I can't do even simple math. I don't like numbers and going through different statistics always gave me a headache. I'm sure people like me inspired Facebook when they're prepared the new Insight section for pages. It's quite easy to read and analyze. And instead of numbers you see nice and colorful graphs. So I decided to give it a try! 

1. We're bigger than our 297,345 fans. Because through them we can potentially reach their friends. And that's quite a number – 59,262,197 people.
2. Our fans talk! If we're good in what we do our fans will like and share our posts – and they friends will also see it. In the last week 42,346 people did it. So our weekly total reach was 27,256, 407 people. These are all unique people who somehow saw our content. That's twice more than Belgium population.
3. People like polls. In the Insights section we clearly see that our polls have the most viral effect. We liked this this new feature as it adds diversity to the page. And we see that they're always successful with up to 10,000 people participating. And I suspected they are viral. Now we have a proof, we can see how many people created the story from our polls.
4. Visual part of our posts is as important as the content. It's banal, all TV journalists know about it. When I worked for TV news program we always saw viewership rising when we showed cute animals or babies, and dropping when we showed another set of men is dark suits. But here, in the EP, sometimes people don't believe when I tell them that. Insights confirmed – a nice photo leads to more engaged users. The post on Durban climate conference got more than 2,000 clicks. The photo of cute polar bears is responsible for a lot of them.
5. People do care about important issues. With new Insights we see what post were the most successful and what subjects are interesting to people. No surprise here – economy and the crisis. Plus – social issues, Internet, enlargement and foreign affairs. Recently one of the most successful post was about Croatian referendum (3636 engaged users).
6. People like music (or at least like to share songs on their walls). The videos are also high on the virality list. So adding Tina Turner or Bob Marley to serious posts helps to spread the message.
7. We already knew that only 5% of our fans live in Belgium. But now we have more geographical data. We see where people who actually share our posts live. The most active fans live in Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany and Spain. But there's quite a big group outside the EU – i.e. in the U.S.
8. How they found us? That what is easy to track as well. We can find what was the source of a new like. In the last week when we had an ads campaign with EuroparlTV so the big amount of likes came through ads. But quite a lot also through posts on a people's walls or ticker.
9. Timeline is not everywhere yet but it's already affecting our page. We got few hundreds of new likes because some people added our page to their Likes on their Timeline.
10. Where they come from. Now it's also easier to see what was the biggest source of our traffic and also external referrers. We see that a lot of fans come through our chat application, the Sakharov tab and the Parliament's website.

What I still miss is a tool in Insights that would help track the sentiments. To see if the interactions were positive or negative.

EuroparlTV reportage comes here.

The rules and procedures are available on the new European Citizens' Initiative website – where you can also register and launch your initiative.