Now another big company is going one step further and chucking out the concept of the individual desk entirely. Forbes reports that massive pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline is going deskless at its Philadelphia office, entirely eliminating anything resembling a private office or cubicle for the 1,300 employees based there. It already has one such deskless office in Bogota, Colombia. Forbes explains:

GlaxoSmithKline, the global pharmaceutical giant, thinks it has found the cure for the drab, inefficient office: fluid spaces where you do what the moment requires, alone or in groups, moving throughout the day. Each employee has a laptop with a built-in “soft phone,” a locker for personal possessions, and maybe one file drawer. That’s it. Even U.S. head Deirdre Connelly doesn’t have an office….

Why do it? “We found that only 35% of work activity took place in offices and cubes, yet we were dedicating 85% of our space to those,” says Edward Danyo, manager of workplace strategy. “It’s about creating environments so people can do their best work, and we’ve seen a 45% increase in the speed of decision making. But our biggest surprise is that within two weeks most folks say they wouldn’t go back to cellular space.” Bonus: The design saves money by saving space.

Check out the complete article for a visual explaining exactly how these innovative offices are laid out. GlaxoSmithKline is certainly not the only company trying a fairly radical re-thinking of the office. Zappos, for example, has even gone so far as to try to re-imagine the relationship between corporate campus and surrounding city, blurring the line between work and home life in their new downtown Las Vegas space.

Play office futurist – what do you foresee for the office space of the future? 

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The recent poll of 500 U.S. small business owners uncovered that large percentages of these entrepreneurs are relying on remote work to balance their need to get away with keeping their companies running smoothly. On average the respondents plan to work remotely 18 days over the summer. Fifteen percent plan to work remotely 36 days or more, while nearly half of owners plan to work remotely for at least two weeks. One in four stated their companies rely on telecommuting.

“The results demonstrate the extent to which telephone and video conferencing have become ingrained in the work habits of small business owners,” said Glenn Bray, senior director, cloud collaboration applications technology group, Cisco. “It’s clear small business owners need to stay connected to the office, even during the summer vacation season.”

What’s also clear is that small business owners, freed from the bureaucratic hassles of larger organizations, find plenty of benefit in remote working and manage to make leading at a distance work for their teams. All of which suggests that the what’s holding back remote work at big firms is more a matter of culture and inertia than logistics.

Do you agree?

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Your knee jerk answer may be a variety of communication tools and management practices to deal with distance in time and space and coordination issues, but according to David Livermore, president at the Cultural Intelligence Center, the really secret ingredient to leading cross-cultural teams well is simpler and rarer – good, old fashioned patience.

Writing for UK site Management Issues, Livermore notes that our speedy internet connections and lightning fast technology train us to be impatient. But if you want to successfully lead a culturally diverse team, he says, you’re going to need to relearn to go slow:

“Impatience” + “cross-cultural” don’t work well together. Cross-cultural relationships and projects inevitably take more time, more effort, and more patience…. Just about everything takes longer when working and relating cross-culturally. Communication, trust-building, and just getting things done requires more effort and perseverance. Whether it’s dealing with long queues when traveling, merging different technology systems, or trying to get to the bottom of a conflict, understanding and effectiveness come more slowly when different cultures are involved.

Patience needs to be factored in from the very beginning of any cross-cultural project…. In a world of instant information and feedback, it’s counterintuitive to step back and move more slowly. But slow is the new fast when you’re working across cultures.

Do you agree that when it comes to cross-cultural teams the old saying that haste makes waste applies anew? 

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On Forbes recently Josh Bersin, president and CEO of HR consultancy Bersin & Associates, laid out the feverish start-up scene in the realm of social recruiting, ticking off an impressively long list of young companies hoping to leverage our social graphs “to make the ‘job matching game’ easier for job-seekers and recruiters.” Here’s a small fraction of the companies Bersin mentions:

Path.to and Bright:  These companies try to mine your social graph and “find jobs” for you. So far they’re just getting started so the matching isn’t very good yet, but the potential is big.  Think e-harmony for the job seeker.

TalentBin:  Gives recruiters an intelligent tool to find people through their social graph.  Kind of the opposite of Path.to and Bright.

Jobvite: A fast-growing company which delivers referral recruiting tools, applicant tracking, and advertisement management tools for recruiters. Gooodjob is a startup building a similar offering.

Bullhorn: one of the biggest end-to-end social talent acquisition solutions (recently acquired by Vista Equity).

For the rest of the extensive list, check out the complete article. Why such a wild frenzy of activity in the space? American corporations spend $140 billion a year on recruiting, Bersin points out, and 40 million of us change jobs each year regardless of how lousy the economy might be. Add to this the huge amounts of data available through the Facebook and LinkedIn APIs and that’s rich pickings for startups who are bringing a wide array of approaches to bear on the challenge of applying social to recruiting. These include “recruitment advertising, job boards, candidate relationship management, assessment, interview automation, applicant tracking, recruitment analytics, and job-seeker services and tools,” according to Bersin.

Which approach (or approaches) are you betting will emerge victorious from the social recruiting start-up wars? 

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With its catnip title backed up with a thoughtful exploration of a difficult and emotional issue, the article has generated a predictably frantic round of response and recrimination online. But even for those who weren’t dying for another rehashing of the limitations (or lack of them) society and biology puts on women’s life choices, the piece offers food for thought, particularly for those thinking about the future of work and the role of remote collaboration.

Slaughter bemoans the “culture of ‘time macho’—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.” And argues that it’s time to decouple face time and achievement in favor of more tech-enabled flexibility not just for women but for all workers. She writes:

A study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization… Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.

One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon….

Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.”

Do you agree with Slaughter’s diagnosis that “time macho” is a problem and her prescription of tech and thoughtful flex-work policies to cure it? 

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It’s an argument to which employees apparently respond: Oh please! According to a surprising new survey from Deloitte, many executives have bought the party line on the effects of enterprise social media far more than frontline employees, who largely view social as more empty rhetoric out of the C-suite.

The Core Values and Beliefs survey from Deloitte asked 1,000 employees and about 300 executives for their views on social tools and the impact of these technologies on their organizations. In news that will surprise those who see social tools infiltrating organizations from the bottom up, driven by employee’s comfort with consumer social, the poll found much greater enthusiasm for social among execs that frontline team members.

• 45 percent of executives say social media has a positive impact on workplace culture; 27 percent of employees agree
• 41 percent of executives believe that social networking helps build and maintain workplace culture; 21 percent of employees agree
• 38 percent of executives say social media allows for increased transparency; 17 percent of employees agree
• 46 percent of executives say social media and online collaboration tools are critical to building and maintaining relationships with colleagues; 27 percent of employees agree

What do these numbers add up to? “Our research suggests executives are possibly using social media as a crutch in building workplace culture and appearing accessible to employees. While business leaders should recognize how people communicate today, particularly Millennials, they must keep in mind the limits of these technologies. The norms for cultivating culture have not changed, and require managers to build trust through face-to-face meetings, live phone calls and personal messages,” said Punit Renjen, chairman of the board, Deloitte.

Or in other words, implementing social technologies is all well and good, but employees will see through any claims that these tools are transparency, culture or cohesion boosting if the implementation is not backed up with an accessible, democratic approach by executives.

Do you think executives are often only paying lip service to the bureaucracy busting democratic ideals of enterprise social? 

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Maybe more than you think, argued Julien Vayssiere, chief development architect at SAP, on SAP’s Community Network recently. In the thought-provoking post, Vayssiere notes that despite the endless chatter about “free agent nation,” he actually doesn’t see that many independent pros around him. Instead of being surrounded by contractors, freelancers and the like – those we usually think of as independent workers – Vayssiere observes that employees themselves are adopting the mindset of the independent worker:

Why don’t I see more free agents around me? Is it just because governments are slow at creating “laws that reflect the new workplace reality“? Is it because of my vantage point, being employed by a large IT firm? Is it that, in many places of the world, being an employee is still more advantageous in terms of taxes, financial safety and access to social benefits? Is it that Free Agency may, in the end, not be the key to freedom, self-fulfillment and wealth?

My opinion is that those of us who still appear as employees on the outside have started becoming free agents on the inside. We now plan careers, education, projects as if we were free agents, or could become free agents soon, even though we work within the context of “traditional” employment.

Let’s look at the way we work today. We make sure our LinkedIn profile is up to date. We groom our network of connections on a variety of social networks. We maintain a certain amount of social media activity as a projection of our work persona. In short, we build our personal brand and personal portfolio. Or, in the words of [The Individual Age Economics author Andrei] Cherny again, “today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business“. Whether we like this trend or not, whether we see this as a threat or an opportunity, I think it captures the way many knowledge workers have come to think about themselves and their situation in the workforce.

He closes with a series of questions, asking readers to weigh in on whether their experience aligns with his. “Is becoming a Free Agent something you desire or something you fear? Are you already a free agent?” he asks. These are good questions to ponder, and one could also ask if this shift towards a free agent mindset among traditional employees is a precursor to a full transformation to largely gig-based employment or a stable development unto itself that has ushered in a career reality that’s likely to be here to stay for awhile.

What do you think?

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That’s shaping not only the career trajectories of individual knowledge workers, but also the practice of HR and management as teams incorporate more and more contingent workers employed on a project-basis. If you’re running a team made up of a mix of traditional employees and independent contractors, how can you ensure that the independent pros under your supervision feel as engaged and appreciated as long-term employees?

It’s a question author Alexandra Levit tackled recently on the American Express OPEN Forum blog, offering several tips to ensure your freelancers and independent pros feel like family. Her ideas include:

Recognize their value. Contract workers want to make a contribution quickly–they know their livelihood depends on it. So read their status reports and results summaries and illustrate the big picture so they can see how their work is fueling a greater mission.

Treat them like employees. When a contingent worker needs training to complete a new type of responsibility or keep current in her field, facilitate it. Give regular performance evaluations and gather survey feedback just as you would for any full-time employee. If you’re happy with his work, reward him by providing access to other people and opportunities within the organization. Don’t make your contract workers feel like a vendor who should be lucky to be working with your company and can replaced at any minute.

Engage in team building. Remote workers are more effective when they have solid relationships with their co-workers. If it’s feasible, introduce your virtual contract workers to each other and to their full-time team members in person, as this will build rapport and engender greater trust and cooperation. You should also invite remote contingent workers to visit your office, or pop into their locations from time to time. This shows that you actually care enough about the relationship to behave like a manager.

Don’t create a subculture. In their text Essentials of Organizational Behavior, Timothy Judge and Stephen Robbins suggest that subcultures often develop in organizations to reflect common problems, situations or experiences. What you don’t want is for a negative contingent worker culture to develop in the absence of guidance from management. If your contingent workforce is to be effective, your company’s leadership must go out of its way to ensure that members feel welcome and are effectively integrated into the larger organizational culture.

For more info on these tips, as well as statistics on the rise of independent workers, check out the complete post.

What tips would you add to Levit’s list?

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That’s what David Kiron of the MIT Management Review recently asked Jeff Schick, the vice president of social software at IBM, in the course of a lengthy interview. The long conversation about IBM’s efforts to build a more social business and put all its social technology to use internally, dug into not only what specific tech tools IBM employs, but also questions of the culture of sharing that successful implementation of these tools demands.

“It’s not all about the technology. I think culture plays a huge dimension in how successful organizations are in transforming themselves into a social business,” said Schick. “This stuff is so easy to use that it’s not about what button to click to post a blog, but how do you create a vibrant community?” The interview goes on to touch on how IBM uses social “ambassadors” and gamification to encourage participation in its social communities, as well as offering heavy users the chance to win donations to charities of their choice by creating content.

But it also touches on the interesting and under-discussed question of whether HR should get involved in mandating or refereeing participation in an organization’s social tools, comparing different approaches used in different countries. Schick says:

As I travel around the planet, the role of human resources and what you can ask an employee to do or not do is subtly different. For instance, I spent time recently in Germany, and more than a healthy amount of discussion with clients was about, “Gee, there’s a workmen’s council in your organization, made up of different workers from different areas of the company. And as you make policy on employees and what they can do or cannot do, or tools that they can use and cannot use, the workmen’s council plays an instrumental role in whether or not they’ll permit that.” A group like that works hand in hand with human resources on changes that would take place in the organization.

An example is that we’re rolling out social software at Bosch in Germany; and working with HR and workmen’s council. So we ask, what should be our policy in asking an employee to fill out their profile? Can the company mandate it? Or is that not permissible? Have you established a set of business conduct guidelines that talk about the ethical aspects of being an employee, the way you need to behave, the way you would conduct yourself in terms of business, including blogging and responding to questions in Facebook?

So human resources does take an active role in describing and creating policy around leveraging social, both inside an organization as well as outside the organization. And this has become such a popular discussion with us that we actually publish our Social Computing Guidelines right on IBM.com, so people can understand the policy that we hold our employees accountable to.

Laying out what’s acceptable and what’s off limites when it comes to social technologies seems like a fairly inevitable responsibility of risk averse, legalistic HR.

But is social something HR can mandate or, like forced “fun” activities, is the whole cultural point of these tools lost when you require people to participate?

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That’s what coworking is betting on, as the movement sells itself as providing ideal environments for serendipity, relationship building and nurturing the creative spark. But it’s not just spaces for entrepreneurs and independent pros that are adopting these ideals. “The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” Harvard-trained designer and ParallelCities.com founder Sidi Gomes told GigaOM in the run up to this year’s Global Coworking Unconference (GCUC).

Zappos for one is already embodying this change. The company’s new downtown Las Vegas base is “a great extension of coworking ideals,” another GCUC participant, architect Jerome Chang, told GigaOM. “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself,” he explained.

But don’t take Chang’s word for it. Recently, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh laid out his own thinking about his company’s $350 million investment in Las Vegas at Venture for America‘s Summer Celebration, giving a presentation explaining just what the company is up to in the city. The plan includes $50 million for local small businesses, $50 million for technology startups, $50 million for education and $200 million in real estate. Business Insider has posted the entire 60-slide presentation.

Or for the short and sweet round-up of Hsieh’s thinking look to Las Vegas Weekly, whose reporter J. Patrick Coolican met with Hsieh recently and was converted from his previous skepticism about Zappos’ plans. “Is he building a Burning Man encampment Downtown?!” Coolican wondered, but after speaking to the Zappos boss, he understands there are pragmatic business reasons for the company’s hefty investment in Las Vegas as well as philosophical ones. Coolican writes:

Zappos considered building a new suburban mega-campus, like Apple or Google. These campuses have creature comforts to induce workers to never leave, and/but they can be very isolating.

Hsieh had a radically different idea: Downtown, because he believes, he knows, that workers in cities are more productive. He thinks Zappos will be more profitable Downtown.

Here he leans on the work of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, who notes that per-capita productivity increases by 4 percent as population density rises by 50 percent.

It’s not entirely clear why this is true, but Glaeser calls cities “machines for learning.” Humans have succeeded because of our ability to collaborate, and cities are the best geographical mechanism for doing so. Hsieh refers to “serendipity,” the chance encounters between technologist, thinker, social entrepreneur, artist and venture capitalist to create the new.

More human interaction means more serendipity and happiness, which therefore means higher productivity and profits.

Does this equation seem sensible to you? 

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