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 »
The days of business card details recorded in Rolodexes are long gone with dozens of different platforms for storing contact information taking their place. Cloud-based service ContactMonkey aims to make it simple to share, grab and update contact details, no matter which one you’re using. Read more »
A new oDesk survey of users who hire workers through the online labor platform reveals most of the businesses using oDesk view hiring remote talent as a long-term strategy to boost competitiveness rather than a short-term stopgap or means to cut costs. Read more »
Want to save money by hiring talent in a cheaper labor market? Previously, your choices were outsourcing abroad or rural sourcing here at home, but now a new third way is emerging – hiring workers in the lower cost hinterlands of foreign countries. Read more »
An appeals court confirms that a Maryland-based software company with a single telecommuter in New Jersey is liable for taxes in the state, illustrating yet again that it’s past time for congress to sort out the rules on taxing telecommuters. Read more »
New communication tools have been credited with helping spur uprisings against some of the world’s nastiest regimes. In a very scaled-down way, is the ease of connecting also bad news for office autocrats? A SXSW panel delved into the question. Read more »
If miscommunication or fuzzy delegation of responsibility can hurt co-located teams, these mistakes can torpedo virtual ones. That’s why experts on managing virtual teams stress talking not just about what you’re working on, but how you’re going to work on it as well. Read more »
Findings from a new survey that confirm earlier polls showing workers are willing to sacrifice money or vacation time to work remotely may not be shocking, but other revelations about how soon employees expect their offices to go fully virtual may surprise skeptics. Read more »
Salesforce EVP John Wookey shares his views on how the changing business climate is demanding new tools, what sort of solutions suit the mobile, empowered workforce of tomorrow, and what is happening when these tools collide with traditional corporate hierarchies today. Read more »
Evidence from last week’s Global Coworking Unconference Conference and recent online commentary on the movement points to the fact that earlier predictions on GigaOM that coworking is undergoing a rapid and significant transformation were on to something. Should we mourn or rejoice? Read more »
Rising prices at the pump inevitably prompt a flurry of interest in telecommuting as a short-term solution for commuters’ pain. Should we be thinking longer term, using remote work as a way to restructure our lives to take the sting out of gas prices for good? Read more »
As more and more of working life becomes virtual, there’s one bastion of face-to-face interaction that seems least likely to go remote – the leadership off-site — but at least one high profile pundit thinks it’s time to rethink the annual executive get-together. Read more »
