Yes, it’s an extreme headline, but it’s backed up by a new study presented at a British psychology conference today. The research claims addiction to our devices causes us to experience longed for “phantom vibrations” and increases stress. Time to switch off after hours. Read more »
A round-up of advice from veteran remote workers to those who work from home turns up a rarely cited truth: Your productivity problems may have more to do with what you do than how you do it. Now you just have to admit it. Read more »
If asked to imagine the drawbacks of connecting online via social networks, most of us would probably suggest something like the time-wasting attractions of the likes of FarmVille. But a new survey suggests another surprising possible drawback of heavy social network use: lower ethical standards. Read more »
Big ideas — big societal changes — don’t simply spring up full formed. Instead, they develop. This is also true of coworking, according to Steve King of Emergent Research, who has sparked debate with his claim that the movement has entered a very different second phase. Read more »
If you’re pondering trying to get out of the office more this year but are unsure if you’re ready to jump into a membership at a coworking space, an event coming up on the calendar may be for you. Read more »
Recently, BlueSprig co-founders Jason Johnson and Hugo Dong raised $10 million for their apps business. Sounds like a typical startup story but there’s a twist. Dong lives in China. Johnson in San Francisco. How do entrepreneurs separated by a 16-hour time difference make it work? Read more »
Among cutting-edge companies the realities of virtual teams may be fairly old news, but according to several recent articles, the same isn’t true for many mainstream HR departments who are badly behind when it comes to grappling with the implications of widespread remote work. Read more »
As scientists examine the flexible future of work, more and more studies are confirming that letting employees set where and when they work promotes health and happiness, including the latest analysis of Best Buy’s ROWE experiment out of the University of Minnesota. Read more »
We often think being passionate about work involves finding the right activities to suit our strengths and interests, but what if career passion was as much about how you work as what you do? Then you might not need to change jobs to get it. Read more »
A British company surveys workers and finds not only are they more productive when working remotely, but they also feel less creative at the office. Where do they get their most innovative ideas? At the pub (assumedly with a limited quantity of libations). Read more »
Connected, location-independent, autonomous, global, piecemeal: There are plenty of adjectives that have previously been employed to describe the future of work, but the author of a book on the topic is throwing another contender into the ring — adult. Time to grow up then. Read more »
Remote collaboration tools and connectivity promise to unleash us from the office, but despite these advantages most of us still spend the majority of our days in drab spaces. Perhaps the New Year is the perfect opportunity for knowledge workers to reconsider where they work. Read more »
It’s the time of year for predictions for the year ahead, so over on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum blog, Paul Miller, who is writing a new book about “digital workplaces,” obliges with a lengthy list of predictions for the digital workplaces in 2012. Read more »
The cloud makes it possible for tiny organizations in the poor countries to access bite-size slices of tech and talent. Perhaps the developing world’s affinity for the cloud is also a threat to established firms (and an opportunity for new ones), argues one A-list blogger. Read more »
A handful of freelancer parties suggest the future of the work-related holiday get-together in a world of remote collaboration may not be so grim after all. It just may require a switch in mindset away from an exclusive focus on employers as the organizing principle. Read more »
A handful of new surveys reveal many Americans are planning to work through the holidays, increasing both their vacation starvation and the risk of burnout. The dreary economy can’t help, but are new ways of working, including remote teams and constant connectivity, partly to blame? Read more »
Gen Y members may be natural telecommuters, as FlexJobs CEO Sara Sutton Fell has claimed, but it appears their natural affinity for mobile work doesn’t come equipped with natural instincts for data security, at least if a new survey from Cisco is to be believed. Read more »
A nonprofit research center that specializes in long-term forecasting recently released a report detailing the 10 key skills that will be relevant to the workforce of the future. What are they, and are our schools doing enough to instill them? Read more »
As in-house counsel charged with procuring outside legal services, corporate lawyer Nick Cronin saw how inefficient the process of sourcing professional services could be for businesses. He decided to do something about the problem, and niche online labor platform ExpertBids was born. Read more »
Forget the romance of the high-flying executive lifestyle. When a virtual events company recently asked execs whether they’d prefer a virtual conference to a trip to several American cities, large percentages said yes, citing the horrors of modern business travel. Houston, we have a problem. Read more »
Goal setting is traditionally one of the most top-down aspects of business, with executives setting the agenda and employees often unclear on how their daily work fits into that vision. Now Rypple is teaming up with Spotify to reimagine goal setting with Social Goals 2.0. Read more »
A new survey from Intuit QuickBase shows an increasing number of tech-savvy employees are building their own solutions without going through official IT channels – some even despite official IT opposition. Is this good news or bad for IT? For workers? Read more »
It’s the holiday season but the impulse to celebrate gets a bit more complicated if you have colleagues spread from New Delhi, India to New Haven, Conn. How can you hope to bring everyone together to celebrate the season and build a bit of camaraderie? Read more »
Coworking might be the pivot around which the transformation of work revolves, but the movement is young and facing profitability challenges. Its money struggles may be explainable, but they’re still undesirable, so how can more spaces move into the black? There’s no shortage of ideas. Read more »
Mobility usually means both more hours and more flexibility for workers, but does it also equal more stress? About a third of connected workers say absolutely yes, while another third say absolutely not. What are the differences between these two groups? Read more »
The economy might not be booming but online labor platforms sure are. Last month, oDesk announced impressive growth and today rival Elance is doing the same. Elance says this is great news for US professionals who can export their services abroad. Is it really? Read more »
There is no shortage of collaboration and productivity tools to help you get more done, but just because so many cool new tools are available doesn’t mean the old standbys are completely obsolete. Is there still a place for pen and paper in our lives? Read more »
At Net:Work 2010, eight startups pitched their products for the Future Ideas Launchpad. Now that Net:Work 2011is less than a week away, how have last year’s highlighted companies fared in the past 12 months? For Rypple, 2011 has been a pretty good year Read more »
Next week at Net:Work in San Francisco, tech geeks and forward-thinking business folks will gather to discuss the untethered, agile future of work. But apparently it’s not just these private actors that are cheerleading these changes; several governments are getting behind the idea too. Read more »
When DeskMag polled 1,500 international members of the coworking movement, it found only 40 percent of coworking spaces are profitable. How bad is this figure? When you take the movement’s young age into account, not as bad as it first appears, claims the magazine. Read more »
For stressed-out working parents, telecommuting seems like an intuitive solution to improving the juggle and reducing their time squeeze. But according to surprising research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology, telecommuting may actually make matters worse for some busy parents. Read more »
A few weeks ago we brought you the preliminary results of a Stanford University study into the benefits of telecommuting, suggesting that reluctant bosses might be persuaded on remote work after looking at the findings. Now, one of the authors presents the results via video. Read more »
Corporate America earns praise for being efficient, creating economies of scale and bringing the wide world’s goods and services right to the doorstep of consumers. Among the things traditional big business isn’t so good at – authenticity. Working independently is a whole other story. Read more »
A year ago at Net: Work 2010 the audience crowned social task management product Cohuman with the people’s choice award. The company was also a Future Ideas Launchpad finalist. So what’s happened to the company since it made a big splash at last year’s conference? Read more »
Think of independent workers, and you’ll probably imagine a lone professional staring at his laptop all day, supporting himself in his slippers. But there are some freelancers who build their solo gigs into thriving, and lucrative, businesses, employing others. Here’s how they manage it. Read more »
Sky high gas bills, road rage, unpleasant body odors on packed subways: The many downsides of commuting already constitute a solid argument in favor of remote work. But a recent study offers another reason to trade in your train pass: Your commute is killing you. Read more »
Telework may have obvious benefits, but the number of remote workers isn’t exactly soaring. In fact, according to some recent studies, the growth in telecommuting is actually slowing. Many explanations are possible, but maybe the simplest is best: The terrible economy has everyone scared. Read more »
The consumerization of IT is a hot topic as employees increasingly bring beloved gadgets from home to work. But just because it’s much discussed doesn’t mean that most offices are ahead of the curve on this trend, at least according to new research from Unisys. Read more »
Bosses may be worried that their mobile employees are wasting vast amounts of time updating their wall or emailing friends, but a new report from iPass reveals we lose relatively little time on technology distractions. But our gadgets are harming us in other ways. Read more »
What if a product could sort through all the messy chatter and lunch invitations that fill a company’s inboxes to pinpoint exactly who has expertise in what, and then automatically created a searchable directory of profiles? That’s what start-up Whodini is aiming for. Read more »
