According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

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To find out, Forrester Research recently polled 4,985 U.S. information workers about their use of enterprise social for The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011, which was released last week. The results: 28 percent of workers use social software at least monthly.

That’s not a terribly low figure for a relatively new technology, but Forrester further profiled that 28 percent and found they belong to a very narrow subset of the workforce.

• They’re earlier adopters. “They have positive attitudes about the role of technology in their lives — more than two-thirds are technology optimists,” says the Forrester report.
• They’re well paid. More than half make $60,000 a year or more.
• They’re highly educated. “23 percent hold advanced degrees, and 49 percent are in management,” reports Forrester.
• They’re pressed for time. “Software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”
• They’re not all Gen Y. While a slightly more than a quarter (26 percent) are supposedly social-mad Gen Y, a larger percentage (35 percent) of users are from Gen X.

While there’s nothing shocking in this profile of the average enterprise social software user (in fact it sounds a lot like the average telecommuter), this stereotypical portrait of the connected, elite professional reveals that these technologies have a long way to go before they’re accepted more broadly in the workplace. This confirms earlier Forrester research showing just one in six Gen Yers use social tools.

The numbers also show that while the high-powered and over-scheduled really like their enterprise social tools, they don’t view them as essential. “Just 22 percent of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs,” according to Forrester, who says these tools “remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.”

Will enterprise social tools ever be an everyday component of work for a wide swath of the workforce?

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While a healthy 37 and 35 percent of respondents fulfilled Staples’ dreams and suggested better office technology and furniture would brighten up life at the office, an even larger percentage (41 percent) thought the best improvement that could be made was not seeing the office at all. That’s the percentage that cited allowing or encouraging telecommuting as likely to improve American offices.

The only modification that won more support was eliminating office politics at 44 percent. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that adding telecommuting and removing office politics took the top slots, as research has shown previously that one of the most undersung benefits of remote work is how it reduces perceptions of and participation in office politics. Distance, in the case of colleagues, does seem to make the heart grow fonder.

Is the best improvement to the office getting rid of the need to be there?

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Feldman is based in New York City, but his company designs and builds its products in tiny Aurora, New York, where the closest population center is Ithaca, 40 minutes away. So what are the benefits and challenges of this rural location? How does city dwelling Feldman make sure things are going smoothly up on the farm in Aurora? And does remote work hold out the possibility of bringing more jobs to other tucked away communities?

Talent

MacKenzie-Childs may have grown into a fairly large enterprise with international distribution, but Feldman is keen to keep the company agile and aggressive, and he hires with that – and the company’s remote set-up — in mind.

“We’ve grown into a pretty good-sized company but we still try to have an entrepreneurial kind of startup culture in terms of how aggressive we are and innovative and flexible. I think when you have a dispersed organization and you have a lot of people out there doing things independently, you need to hire a certain type of person,” he says. Maturity, independence and drive top the list of qualities Feldman most desires for his executives.

Feldman doesn’t use any flash techniques for getting at whether a potential new hire will fit in with the company’s independent spirit, recommending simple dialogue to get an a candidate’s work style, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t extremely careful about selecting new team members with remote work in mind.

“You are careful, because it’s not a company where people are going to be telling you what to do and when to do it all the time, and some people need that and they prefer that. We’re very careful not to hire that type of person,” he says.

Tools

Feldman calls his team “a pretty plugged-in group” and describes them as walking around each armed with a PC, iPad and smartphone. But with today’s tech, he doesn’t feel like keeping in touch across vast distances is a Herculean task.

“Not that any of this is rocket science or anything,” he says. “Most companies are doing something like this.” A Monday morning conference call with his team of five top executives and the occasional Skype video conference with agents or suppliers in distant locales are all Feldman relies on to keep his business running smoothly.

Tips

The company’s location at a former dairy farm in upstate New York is key to the brand’s identity and development, according to Feldman. “Our brand is very much about that place,” he says. “We have a group of artisans there that have come together that are absolutely critical to business and core to the brand. We’re based on a beautiful 65-acre former dairy farm with a beautiful show farmhouse. We get over 60,000 visitors a year, so the brand is very much about this place.”

The brand may have grown up in a small town over three decades, but current remote working tech has allowed it to expand its reach and for the company to expand it’s workforce. “We’ve grown our workforce by 50 percent since the beginning of 2010, so we’ve added a lot of jobs,” says Feldman, who believes that a more flexible, connected style of work may bring more opportunities to rural communities. “People don’t need to report to a skyscraper in the middle of New York every day for a lot of jobs now because of technology,” he says.

The result for MacKenzie-Childs is a fertile, tech-enabled loop – country sensibility enlivens a company and the company in turn enlivens the country with an influx of income and job opportunities.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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It’s an idea we’ve covered before, noting the trend of “rural sourcing,” which offers the dual benefits of lower wages to companies and economic development to out-of-the-way places (also, plenty of workers simply prefer the lifestyle – and lower property prices – of more rural area). But it’s not just corporate remote employees that are bringing big city work into small towns; co-working spaces are hoping to achieve the same thing for freelancers, startups and small businesses.

At least that’s what local Kentucky-focused site KYForward recently suggested. Reporting for the site, Mark W. Kidd outlines the efforts of economic development non-profit Virginia Economic Bridge to bring coworking to central Appalachia with the opening of a space in Radford this fall. According to Kidd, the organization sees several reasons coworking might be a good fit for rural communities:

Coworking is flexible enough to accommodate for-profit, non-profit, or agency ownership, making the model adaptable to local economic and funding realities. Underutilized commercial space is common in many rural communities, and coworking’s flexible, do-it-yourself ethos is particularly suited to adaptations of existing space. This approach also offers resilience, because earned income through membership fees should cover the operational costs of a coworking space, regardless of whether the group seeks added grant or investment funding to procure special equipment or other shared resources….

Coworking bypasses logistical barriers like access to secure, broadband-ready space, features that can be especially vexing for innovators in small communities…. Existing organizations with community facilities – like craft centers, libraries, community colleges, and churches – could be excellent partners for establishing a coworking space.

Besides these advantages, there’s also the money remote workers utilizing the coworking space put back into the local community. Out in California, NextSpace used an economic development model to sell the idea of a coworking to the local authorities, noting that while it might be hard to attract a big employer to airport-less Santa Cruz, there was little stopping individual remote workers from basing themselves there.

“We realized after chasing a lot of companies that instead of attracting one 200-person business, we should attract 200 one-person businesses. The economic impact is bigger, and some of those businesses will grow,” the mayor explained.

A similar argument should apply to Kentucky, though the experiences of other coworking spaces in less urban areas suggest that overcoming lack of awareness about the movement will likely be a significant problem. Luckily, crafty coworking spaces are already coming up with creative ideas to raise awareness.

Is coworking a good way to bring city-sized paychecks to more remote communities?

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But despite a lot of talk in support of new ways of working to help knowledge workers keep their sanity and their families intact, there’s plenty of evidence that some managers are merely paying lip service to the idea.

Recently, HR consultancy WorldatWork decided to take a closer look at managers’ true attitudes towards flexible working, polling 2,312 employees in six countries (Brazil, China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) in late 2010. The results out now show a chasm between rhetoric and reality when it comes to flexible working:

While, 80 percent of respondents claimed to support family-friendly workplaces and arrangements such as remote work, more often than not their behavior didn’t match their beliefs:

• More than half the surveyed managers think the ideal employee is one that is available to meet business needs regardless of business hours
• 40 percent believe the most productive employees are those without a lot of personal commitments
• Nearly one in three think that employees who use flexible work arrangements will not advance very far in their organization

“The good news is that 80 percent of employers around the globe avow support for family-friendly workplaces,” said Kathie Lingle, executive director of WorldatWork’s Alliance for Work-Life Progress. “The bad news is they are simultaneously penalizing those who actively strive to integrate work with their lives.”

The WSJ’s The Juggle blog points out that the WorldatWork findings are consistent with other earlier surveys, including one done by Bain & Co last year that found while flex work programs were widely available, they were very little used.

This gap between what management says and what it does can can result in employees who “go underground, resorting to ‘stealth maneuvers’ for managing their personal responsibilities,” according to Lingle. On the flip side, actually implementing flexible working is tied to lower turnover, among other benefits.

Does flex work rhetoric match reality at your employer?

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But some financial industry experts say the current market volatility doesn’t necessarily mean the IPO window is closed for prospective newcomers such as Zynga. Here are a few main takeaways from conversations I’ve had with senior bankers about the current financial environment:

• Look around; It could be worse. Although the market for publicly traded U.S. tech stocks may be battered, many still believe that the sector is likely to fare better than most others in the long-term. That’s why a lot of money managers — the big investors in today’s stock market — will continue to invest in technology, and have an appetite for more tech IPOs. “If you’re an asset manager, you have to put the money to work somewhere. You can’t put it in the mattress,” Paul Deninger, a senior managing director of investment bank Evercore Partners said. “Whether the market is good or bad, many investors are going to be looking at stocks relative to their other opportunities. And on a relative basis, the growth potential of these [technology company] IPOs is still extraordinary.”

• Delays may not indicate fear. “This environment is really only a couple of weeks old, and the IPO process takes a while,” Morgan Keegan managing director Peter Falvey said. “Even in more normal times, it is very, very difficult to price IPOs.” And while some companies may be waiting on the sidelines a bit longer before going public, it may not be because of a lack of appetite for their stock: They could just be waiting for another lull in the financial news cycle. “Companies going public also want to make it a marketing event,” Falvey pointed out. “Right now, people are only talking about the general volatility in the markets.”

• For new tech stocks, it’s a correction, not a crash. Though the recent downward impact to newly public Internet companies has been especially severe, that doesn’t have to mean that all web companies will suffer a similar fate in the future. Newly public companies such as LinkedIn debuted at such sky-high stock prices that they may have been destined to come down at some point or another. “The hit that LinkedIn took could just be an example of the market taking the air out of the stock,” Deninger said. That means that future IPOs don’t have to be delayed — but that they must be priced more carefully to avoid a similar fate. “In the tech sector there’s been some criticism over the pricing of some of these companies,” Falvey said. “It’s exacerbating what is already a difficult problem.”

At the same time, it can’t be stressed enough that it’s still too early to know exactly how this will all play out for the Internet industry and the economy at large. But for people who work in technology and new media, it may be good to hear that the industry’s recent wave of good fortune may not be crashing down just yet.

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1. Microsoft Office 2004

Let’s face it, Microsoft Office isn’t cheap, and Office 2008 wasn’t that great. Some features in 2004 weren’t in 2008 (though many were reintroduced in 2011), and when 2008 included the new .docx format, 2004 users didn’t want to move to a new format that could cause problems. Because of these issues, it’s not unusual to find users two versions behind. Alternatives: Office 2011, iWork, Google Docs.

2. Appleworks

Appleworks, why can’t we quit you? I’ve been a fan of Appleworks since the Apple II days. You worked equally well on Mac and PC, and included a database that’s easier to use and understand that those used by either Filemaker or Access. In fact, Apple was still selling Appleworks until 2007. Fortunately, iWork will open most files in Appleworks format and Apple has a full transition guide about moving Appleworks files over to iWork. Database users will either need to export the file to spreadsheet format or move up to Filemaker. Alternatives: iWork, Filemaker, Bento.

3. Freehand

Die-hard Freehand users refuse to use Illustrator. Freehand MX was the last version released before the purchase and discontinuation of the product by Adobe. Freehand holdouts might balk at the cost of Illustrator, or at having to relearn using new software, but it’s time to move on, or Lion won’t be able to open your files. Alternatives: Illustrator (this guide will help).

4. Eudora

Eudora was an outstanding cross-platform email program and a longtime Mac standard. It easily imported into Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or Microsoft’s Entourage, but some of us, myself included, were lazy and didn’t import old emails. Instead, if I needed an ancient email, I just opened Eudora. Now’s the time to import those emails before you run into problems with Lion. And if Eudora is still your primary email program, it’s definitely time to move onto something else. Alternatives: Penelope/Eudora Open Source, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook.

5. Quicken 2007

Although Intel Macs have been out since 2006, Quicken still hasn’t updated the program. And Quicken 2007 is still being sold, because Intuit’s new product, Quicken Essentials, is a scaled-down version of its 2007 predecessor. Essentials lacks features such as bill pay and sophisticated stock tracking. Intuit generally keeps their Mac products somewhat behind the PC versions. Intuit’s suggestions for what to do with the end of Rosetta are laughable. Fortunately, a wide variety of alternatives exist for these users, but be sure to research these carefully, and import your data into a new program before you make the move to Lion. Alternatives: iBank, Moneydance.

What still-in-use programs will you have to say goodbye to when you make the leap to Lion?

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The new features allow for the creation of “companies,” based on email domain names, which give users the ability to share presentations and meeting recordings with individuals and groups with the company for evaluation and training purposes. Meeting recordings include both notes taken during the meeting and audio; these recording are synchronized with the presentation during playback. Video recordings are planned for a future version.

The app also now provides administrators with more sophisticated tools to review, analyze and manage how presentations are used. There is also a completely new system to search and filter content by customer or employee, with more filters are being developed in response to the feedback of beta users. These new features will allow organizations to evaluate in detail how effective presentations — and even specific slides — are. They can also be used to set up A/B testing to compare presentations.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but invitations are available to WebWorkerDaily readers here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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While those in traditional fields may pursue study and qualifications in order to advance their careers and earning potential, and see PD as both a reward and a motivator, for those in working in technology and innovation, the pathways for — and value of — professional development aren’t so clear-cut.

And for team leaders seeking to attract and motivate truly innovative staff, the role of PD in employee motivation and satisfaction can be very fuzzy.

In a recent interview, I asked a mobile developer how he keeps his skills at the top of his field. He laughed and said, “Coming to work is a good start!” In this industry, at least, the progress is being made — and knowledge is most quickly gained — in startups and innovative businesses, not in universities.

That explains why younger players entering the industry today face such fierce competition. There are plenty of people already working in innovative technology roles on the strength of experience and talent, rather than qualifications. As the technology sector gains maturity, employers now have the luxury of valuing people with proven experience (with or without formal qualifications) over fresh graduates. And few employers will bother speaking to a candidate who hasn’t learned or created anything new since they finished formal study.

The freshly released Startup Genome Project report corroborates the value of non-school learning. The research found “Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth” than those that don’t. No mention is made of the value of formal qualifications as a basis for startup success.

Your potential team members don’t want to see professional development listed as an employment benefit in their contracts; they choose jobs on the basis of how much the roles themselves will let them learn. The risky thrill of experimenting to create world-first products and take them successfully to market is a core appeal for those who work in innovative technology.

For this reason, proven expertise is usually more respected than qualifications by peers and colleagues. In innovative development, team members expect their peers to be able to walk the talk — for the good of the team, the project itself, and the individual’s own on-the-job PD. That motivates team members to seek productive, challenging, high-profile projects with great teams that they can learn from, rather than formal qualifications. Similarly, successful team leaders know that the bottom line depends entirely on whether team members can deliver, so rewards and respect naturally flow from successful experimentation, not traditional education.

Not surprisingly, the terms on which these types of team members are engaged aren’t those that appeal to those opting to work in more staid, traditional fields. The innovators thrive on possibility, the thrill of pushing boundaries, and the chance to have an impact. Offer to foot the bill for an MBA, and you’ll likely get a lot of blank stares. Employers may expect staff to walk the talk, but team members, too, judge employer credibility in terms of on-the-job projects, tasks, and teams. They want:

• roles that effectively amount to paid experimentation, perhaps through the opportunity to participate in rapid prototyping projects where team members can focus on mastering a new skill or its application in a certain environment
• to attend industry events that combine seminars with networking events — providing access to the “thought leadership” and “mentoring” mentioned in the Startup Genome report
• the ability to contact and engage with other specialists outside the organization, on the organization’s time and, potentially, money.

Rather than being an after-hours, formal, institutionalized proposition, successful PD in innovative teams is holistic and always-on. Instead of tracking the team member’s achievement on the basis of grades, leaders are more likely to assess the ROI on what may be a guesstimated investment in PD by looking at individuals’ influences on company revenues and profits. And team leaders who understand these motivations can consistently attract and manage good innovators.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user madame_min.

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