New ways of working demand new workspaces, a fact that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline clearly understands. It’s building its second deskless office in Philadelphia, replacing cubes with fluid spaces, laptops and personal lockers, and saving money and speeding decision making as a result. Read more »
Vacation season is in full swing, but small business owners continue to be besieged, as ever, with a tidal wave of responsibilities. The collision of these two realities could equal frustration, but according to a new survey, there’s actually a happier result– more remote work. Read more »
High-tech tools and innovative management practices to ease coordination hassles may have their role in leading cross-cultural teams, but according to one expert on communicating with folks from different backgrounds, the real key to success is simpler and rarer. Read more »
With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer, it’s clear social has arrived. And what goes for internal communication goes for recruiting as well, writes Josh Bersin, CEO of consultancy Bersin & Associates, in an article laying out the feverishly hot social recruiting start-up scene. Read more »
An article on women and work-life balance is stirring a predictable flurry of debate on the internet, but the piece is worth reading for those interested in remote collaboration as well as gender issues for what it says about “time macho” work culture and telecommuting. Read more »
Executives may believe the hype that social enterprise tools boost transparency and cohesive company culture, but employees by and large aren’t buying it, a new survey reveals. Instead frontline folks see social as just another form of empty rhetoric out of the C-suite. Read more »
You have probably heard about the rise of the independent worker and the impact of this trend on business practices. But your team is still all traditional employees, so this shift doesn’t affect you, does it? Maybe more than you think, argues SAP’s Julien Vayssiere. Read more »
Call it the gig economy, Generation Flux or Freelance Nation, but whatever you term the rise in independent workers, the trend is reshaping management. How can you ensure that the contingent workers on your team feel as engaged and appreciated as the long-term employees? Read more »
So your company is trying to be more social, leveraging new ways of communicating to break down barriers to collaboration and information sharing. Great, but what role should HR play in mandating or refereeing that process? IBM’s VP of social software weighs in. Read more »
The online shoe retailer has big plans for its new downtown Las Vegas digs, CEO Tony Hsieh recently explained at Venture For America’s Summer Celebration, where he laid out his vision of the community-focused, creativity-inspiring future of the office. Read more »
Apparently, ProofHQ isn’t the only successful British startup with a remote team across the pond. Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, recently took to his blog to explain how he manages his widely dispersed team of 40 from his home in the UK. Read more »
As careers become more fluid, diverse and self-directed and more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects, the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark. Behold the railway station/office and coworking space/daycare. Read more »
A new survey by collaboration tools company harmon.ie reveals that working while you’re on the go is far from painless, finding that while mobile working is hugely common, remote collaboration tools are still slowing productivity, leading to errors and causing headaches. Read more »
A new study reveals that we’re much more likely to choose others of the same gender to collaborate with and suggests that management should get involved to ensure teams are co-ed and chosen based on skills rather than personal comfort level. Is this really necessary? Read more »
A UT researcher spent several years asking Austin area coworkers and space proprietors to define what the movement was all about. The wide array of different and even contradictory answers he came up with is both intriguing and bewildering. Can anyone define coworking? Read more »
Email overload is the bane of knowledge workers’ existence everywhere, as well as the impetus for numerous startups trying to perfect alternate collaboration platforms. But exactly how much inbox junk do we waste our time processing? Two new studies paint a grim picture. Read more »
In an interview, Terry Howerton, co-founder of Chicago-area incubator TechNexus, argues that rather than view big companies as innovation killers or community destroyers, it’s time for some segments of the startup and coworking communities to grow up and leverage corporate America. Read more »
Tech is allowing teams to be more flexible, hiring folks from far away, sourcing talent for project-based work online and working from home when they please. Will our physical office spaces follow suit, developing an analogous level of flexibility through the use of modular environments? Read more »
A new study explodes conventional wisdom that telecommuters feel less close to their teams than co-located employees and also reveals that more communication often leads to greater stress for remote workers. Should managers of dispersed teams consider rethinking how often they communicate with distant employees? Read more »
A new report from the Conferences Board reveals that while professions traditionally associated with remote work like writing and sales continue to have the highest rates of telecommuting, other less expected job categories are making huge gains. What are they? Read more »
The case for telecommuting is solid and gets more so with each new study. But despite this mounting pile of evidence, the number of actual telecommuters hasn’t exactly skyrocketed. Why? Economist Bryan Caplan points to a paper that blames signaling. Read more »
First-person accounts from couples that both work from home illustrate that the experience can be fraught, with one partner sometimes imposing on the other. But the arrangement works well for some. What are the secrets of these happy home working couples? Read more »
Recently the Wall Street Journal reported a trend towards larger startups sticking with coworking as they grow, but experts warned there could be downsides, including other companies poaching your talent or ideas. But not everyone it seems to see eye to eye with these experts. Read more »
Virtual working is only for professions with digital deliverables, right? Designers, coders and writers may be the first people who come to mind, but if you imagine companies that deal in the physical can’t benefit from going virtual, you haven’t talked to Fred’s Appliance. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
