Face time: “Unproductive time spent at the office meant to project the image that you’re a hardworking employee.”
My favorite story of a face time trick is the attorney who would come to his office each Saturday, drape his jacket over his chair, put a half-eaten sandwich on the desk… and leave to have some weekend fun. If coworkers happened to drop by the office to pick up a file, they’d figure he had just stepped out for a moment.
What a relief to leave the demands of face time behind when you ditch the office life to become a virtual worker. However, you still need to show that you’re working—and you need to keep yourself focused even though you could theoretically watch YouTube videos all day. If you’ve convinced a reluctant boss to allow you to telecommute, it’s all the more important to demonstrate productivity and dedication.
There is a web worker replacement for face time: workstreaming, the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.
Workstreaming is the next generation of the 11 pm email you send to your team to show them that you’ve been working all evening. Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.
The benefits of workstreaming include satisfying your boss (or client) that you’re making regular progress towards shared goals, notifying team members of your status in case it affects their work, and even giving yourself a sense of accomplishment and progress. Because it’s oriented to what you’re producing and doing and not just about how much time you’re spending on it, workstreaming isn’t so burdensome and misguided as face time requirements. However, workstreaming could certainly be manipulated to give the illusion you’re working when you’re not.
There are a wide variety of tools that might be used for workstreaming, and which ones suit you and your team depend both on what kind of work you do and what tools your coworkers are using. It’s not effective to use an IRC channel if you’re the only one on the team who knows what IRC stands for, but it can be great for a techie crowd. Twitter creates a virtual shared office space that can reproduce the chatter and intimacy of a physical office while allowing team members to share what they’re working on and what they’ve completed. RSS feeds from blogs, message boards, photo sites, and project management apps could all provide useful workstreams—especially if these are aggregated for a whole team. Source code control systems like Subversion can output RSS feeds too so you can make team members aware of new features and bug fixes as they’re checked in.
Of course there’s always email, which has been used as a “look, I’m working!” and “look what I’ve done!” tool for years. Ambient video awareness, on the other hand, seems just a bit too much like face time to qualify as a workstreaming tool.
How do you communicate your productivity and work status to your colleagues?
Good article, this is an important subject.
I don’t have a boss that I’ve convinced to let me telecommute, but I do have clients that like to see their work getting done.
I find that project management platform like Basecamp, and actually entering stuff into it, also gives clients the ability to see that you’re working, and keeps you organized at the same time.
Also, I usually send an email when I complete a major or exciting step, that way the important events in my workstream is delivered to the client’s inbox instead of him or her having to go and find it.
Very funny story about the attorney. I used to work as a paralegal and my boss would have me go into his office, turn on the light, and pour half a diet coke so people thought he was in.
Must be something in the air — I posted a similar thought this morning. Maybe the powers that be are trying to nudge the facades off of a workplace fakers.
[...] Ambient remote working – a.k.a. ‘workstreaming’ …through video conferencing. The Hexagon project is an interesting research project that has created a live video wall on screen that allows participants to view a number of different video feeds. Through this, co-workers can see what’s going on with their colleagues, ask quick questions etc. I came across this through Stowe Boyd’s link to Web Worker Daily, and their piece on Workstreaming. [...]
[...] This great article is a must read for all of us virtual office types here. Imagine a traditional office, where the boss sees you stopping by the coffee machine, working at the desk face down, and running to meetings. How does that translate in the virtual world of the Creative Class? The article poses a really useful solution. read it here. [...]
[...] online. Speaking of WWD, Anne’s written up the most vital tip I’ve come across of all using social software tools to simulate “face time” or “virtual shared office spac… I like to call it hanging out on-line. The point is that tools like blogs, IM, IRC (if everyone can [...]
[...] Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Workstreaming: The New Face Time «: this is an interesting concept. Right now I’m in the middle of a very large project which involves a project manager in San Diego (hi Shaun), a developer who works for me in our office, another PM in New York (hi Robert) and developers scattered around the globe from London to Vancouver. Currently, our day always begins (at least for a few of us) in Campfire, using the Mac program Pyro, where we at least plot out the day. After that, its AIM and phones and sometimes iChatAV for the rest of our communication. We do have something akin to a Workstream however, in the form of Basecamp, TRAC and maybe even my blog feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. [...]
[...] Zelenka over at Web Worker Daily has a post about the ‘new’ facetime. Do you use this technique at work to project the [...]
I use a small, jerryrigged app to hold my timesheets and email invoices. Ostensibly, it also manages my to-do list, though I tend to use a slip of paper or spiral bound notebook for that. As I do work, I try to write one or two words into the timesheet. At the end of day, I paste that info into an email as a daily report of work done that day, augmenting it with any relevant notes to clarify any issues. (You can get the app on my website link.)
Whomever is hiring you (if you’re a temp) or your manager (or project manager) won’t want more than a little info per day. They want to control your work, but only in 2-4 hour chunks. Most work is routine, anyway. So, I don’t bother with finer granularity.
[...] Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Workstreaming: The New Face Time « (tags: communication workstreaming web+worker) [...]