Technology may be making distance irrelevant, but just because the logistical challenges of working with far away colleagues are receding, doesn’t mean the cultural ones are diminishing. How can you avoid miscommunication and unintended offence when dealing with colleagues from different backgrounds? Experts offer tips. Read More »
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Jessica Stillman
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Rather than growing out of shared office space, larger startups with dozens of employees are increasingly sticking with coworking spaces. But should they? Experts caution there could be company culture, security and human resources drawbacks if startups fail to leave the nest. Read More »
Hertz’s CIO explains how the company moved from housing all its customer service agents in a call center to having nearly half of them based at home, puncturing any ideas of successful remote workers as elite, highly educated professionals in the process. Read More »
Dave King of Salesforce explains how Chatter’s new real-time chat and screen sharing features fit into the company’s vision of the integrated future of enterprise social by bringing “islands of communication” together to create a social Pangaea with Chatter at its center. Read More »
ClearSlide aims to rescues sales from thumb drives, massive attachments and clunky web conferencing solutions, offering a streamlined way to share content. Their approach appears to be working, with the company announcing new customers and revenue growth of 400 percent in the last year today. Read More »
Pundits have been praising enterprise social for a while, but previous research has shown that despite the hype these tools had a long way to go before businesses fully embraced them. Now a new report indicates that may be changing — in Europe at least. Read More »
With the Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparations by organizers and athletes. But one other type of news item is surprisingly popular in Britain – stories equating telecommuting during the games with slacking at home. Read More »
More Must Reads
Remote work may be increasingly mainstream, but there are holdouts like Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently opined that startups and distributed teams make a lousy combination. That’s news to the founder of successful startup ProoffHQ, which has been remote from day one. Read More »
Got a remote gig that allows you to work from home but a home that isn’t exactly palatial? Design pros channel James Bond to offer clever solutions to keep your business and personal life from blurring, even if you’re living in tight quarters. Read More »
When GigaOM sat down with Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, to talk about online outsourcing, he expressed incredible optimism about the growth of his site and web-powered international hiring in general, but far less hope for niche platforms aimed at connecting workers with gigs. Read More »
Coworking, originally a movement dominated by freelancers and entrepreneurs, is increasingly attracting more and more remote corporate employees. Do their expectations line up with other members? Do they get as much out of the coworking experience? A new survey aimed to find out. Read More »
Sure, staying up until the wee hours to talk to your colleague in Israel or Asia may be a bummer, but both a business professor and practitioners say that, with the right tools, working across multiple time zones can actually be a benefit. Read More »
As a manager you may be willing to hire the best talent no matter where they’re located, but how do you go about determining if a candidate is excellent not only at their job but also at working remotely? There are questions that can help. Read More »
With the collaboration market already crowded, it’s hard to imagine an unoccupied niche for yet another tool, but startup Sparqlight thinks they’ve found one by scaling down business process management to provide a flexible, cloud-based option for knowledge workers. Read More »
Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But studies also reveal middle managers resist the idea. A recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation offers tips on converting them into flex work believers. Read More »
Marc Andreessen has famously argued that software is eating the world, reconfiguring nearly every industry. That’s good for America, according to Andreessen, but it’s also great for software collaboration tools company Atlassian, which is generating steady profits and a lot of IPO chatter. Read More »
Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And the current management mania for collaboration may be making matters worse for quiet ruminators. Is remote working the solution to the problem, or does it bring its own issues? Read More »
Recent research showed that the majority of online freelancers are women. Now, new numbers from MBO Partners reveal women aren’t just dominating independent work online, but actually make up more than half of all independent pros, and they’re highly satisfied with this way of working. Read More »
Remote working is often about practicing what you preach. Got an outdoor adventure brand? No chaining your employees to their desks then. Built your company late at night? Forget the nine to five. But what if your company is all about tracking time? Harvest explains. Read More »
Remote work advocates have plenty of scientific ammunition to convince skeptics as study after study has shown telecommuters get more done. But what’s true on average doesn’t hold for every case, new research suggests. For stultifying tasks (and, unsurprisingly, slackers), the office may be best. Read More »
The Freelancers Union has launched its #GetPaidNotPlayed campaign highlighting a “deadbeat epidemic” of non-payment that the organization says cost each independent worker $4,600 on average last year. To urge New York State to pass legislation protecting freelancers’ rights they’re putting together one massive invoice. Read More »
Under-the-radar collaboration suite Wiggio has managed to rack up a million users by courting college students looking for a low-effort tool and by insisting that the product be simple enough for a fourth grader to use. Now they’re piloting a paid premium version. Read More »
Seattle-based games company Valve claims to make more per employee than even Google and does it without employing a single boss. How does the company manage to do so well with no hierarchy? The employee handbook lays it all out. Should others follow suit? Read More »
A handful of furniture and design stores are doubling up as coworking spaces, encouraging nomadic workers to drop in with their laptops. Is this a natural evolution and the beginnings of a healthy partnership, or hardly a home fit for community-focused coworkers? Read More »
The collaboration space is already crowded, but one expert feels there is still a gap in the market for a “WordPress for enterprise,” a flexible collaboration platform that allows businesses to tailor their collaboration suite as easily as WordPress allows them to tailor their sites. Read More »
An exec at jobs marketplace Zaarly pens an uncompromising post admitting he’s been converted to remote work skepticism and arguing that for demanding, idea-hungry startups at least co-located teams are definitely the way to go. Is he on to something? Read More »
A new survey released by remote access company TeamViewer today shows that while both genders predict more online meetings in the future, women see more benefits to the practice than men do and are also more demanding of their meeting hosts. Why is this? Read More »
The CEO of GroupTalent, a marketplace for top-tier tech talent, combed through company data and uncovered a rising number of ‘stealth freelancers’ who have full-time jobs but sell their skills on the side. Could this partially explain the mystery of the missing self-employed? Read More »
A quarterly report from Elance indicates that with the lengthy economic crisis in Europe showing no signs of coming to a happy conclusion, workers in troubled countries are increasingly turning to remote work as an alternative to finding jobs in their stressed home economies. Read More »
With the traditional college experience being assaulted as out of touch with real-world careers, a handful of coworking spaces are launching themselves into the gap, partnering with universities to reconnect classroom learning with a community of doers. Read More »
In honor of tax day, a look through the annual explosion of articles offering tax tips for independent workers, weeding out the obvious and repetitive and highlighting the genuinely helpful, including the SEP IRA and a round about approach to sorting out health insurance. Read More »
If you imagine that online freelancing is mainly the preserve of male techies, it’s time to revise your understanding. A new survey of the sector by consultancy Zinnov reveals women make up 55 percent of the online labor pool, along with other insights. Read More »
With the number of remote and freelance workers on the rise and the coworking movement maturing, some coworking spaces are getting pickier about their membership, actively curating their communities by seriously vetting would-be members and turning plenty of people away. Read More »
How is the future of work changing whole organizations? A social business expert and the folks at Yammer weigh in on how we should re-jig our mental models of companies, conceiving of them more like cities with bosses playing the role of urban planner. Read More »
Coworking is moving out from its community-focused roots as larger organizations explore ways they can apply the principles of the movement. And Twitter has gotten the memo. When the company opened a satellite office in Detroit, they set up shop in a coworking space. Read More »
Allowing team members to define their own roles sounds like a sensible way to empower employees and engage them with their work, but in a counter-intuitive post HBR pundit Tammy Erickson cites research showing well defined responsibilities are key to great collaboration. Read More »
Microsoft Canada’s latest Flexible Working report shows that despite a steady drumbeat of studies validating the idea that telecommuting improves productivity, Canadian managers are still much more skeptical of the practice than their employees, holding back uptake of remote work. Read More »
The results are out on UK telecoms giant O2′s one-day telecommuting experiment and it’s good news for fans of remote work. Sending nearly 3,000 workers home improved productivity, saved money and CO2, and resulted in more sleep and family time for employees. Read More »
Finding ways to put social tools to work in business has been high on the agenda for many organizations, but new research reveals not all firms are equally interested in the idea. The very small and very large are far more interest than mid-sized companies. Read More »
New research from independent work consultancy MBO Partners out today reveals that while people across the generations are interested in breaking out of the corporate grind and going solo, Baby Boomers are the most satisfied working independently. Read More »
A newly announced partnership between mobile working app LiquidSpace and three Bay Area cities is another example of local communities leveraging the idea of coworking to keep commuters closer to home, boosting economic development in the area and cutting carbon emissions. Read More »
Weak isn’t a desirable characteristic for bodyguards or cocktails, but when it comes to social ties, weak is good, according to a recent study by Emergent Research. It explains why weak social ties are valuable and how coworking can help professionals cultivate them. Read More »
While a host of studies have found that telecommuters are more productive and happier with their work, new research paints a less rosy picture of managing virtually, finding that bosses who don’t share a space with their reports perform slightly worsel than co-located supervisors. Read More »
Along with some impressive new growth numbers, online labor platform Elance offers GigaOM an exclusive sneak preview of its predictions for the future of work online. Get ready for widespread remote work, commonplace use of the human cloud and global guilds for independent workers. Read More »
Why make a team distributed? For some companies it’s about hiring the best talent, while other founders look at it as a lifestyle decision, but at GitHub, letting the team work from anywhere and at any time is all about producing excellent products. Read More »
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