As more and more workers take up the promise of technology and get out of the office to work where and when it suits them, employees’ needs for their company’s office change radically. Cubicles fall in importance as many opt to stay away from the office when they want to grind out work in isolation, and the remaining spaces increasingly need to be designed to foster collaboration. Enter coworking, whose very existence is predicated on the idea of providing spaces to break down isolation and get workers’ creative juices flowing. What lessons does the movement have for corporate types looking to create spaces that foster collaboration?

GCUC is featuring a panel entitled “How to Design, Build and Grow your Space for Collaboration” and to get a sense of what answers it might offer for those providing corporate spaces to increasingly nomadic teams, we spoke to two panelists — architect Jerome Chang, who is also founder of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, and Harvard-trained designer Sidi Gomes, who is the founder of ParallelCities.com – for a sneak preview. Both said those interested in the future of office design should pay plenty of attention to coworking.

“The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” said Gomes. “One space that was able to host 100 permanent workers can now hold 300 mobile workers working different hours, half the time from home, or the coffee shop. Therefore, corporate offices should be learning everything they can from coworking spaces, especially how to still keep ‘community’ when the population suddenly triples in size.”

Chang agrees, calling Zappos’s new campus  for example, “a great extension of coworking ideals.” How so? Change explains that “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.” That’s an idea more companies may want to explore.

Not only are the ratio of workers to square footage and the relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities set to change, but so too is the balance of private to public spaces within offices, according to both Chang and Gomes. And coworking has something to teach companies here too, they feel.

Collaboration is all well and good, “but true creativity really comes from privacy and reflection,” according to Gomes. “Imagine Frankenstein being developed in a public lab. You need the privacy of a basement to do that.” But this creativity-protecting cocoon of privacy needs to be balanced with idea-sparking sociability. “If you were always locked up in a basement, you would never get the idea to create Frankenstein to begin with,” he continues. Coworking can provide a template for corporate offices looking to get this fine balance right.

“The cool thing about coworking spaces is that ‘privacy’ is achieved in an open floor plan setting, because you are surrounded by people you don’t know, and therefore are not expected to talk to, so you can put your head phones on and go heads down,” explains Gomes.

Could a bustling corporate campus housing three times as many folks as a standard office and with people coming and going at less regular hours offer the same advantages of meeting stimulating (relatively) new people combined with the privacy of proximity to near strangers that coworking does?

Image courtesy of Flickr user .dh.

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I didn’t have any solid data to answer that question, but one reader did: Steve King, a partner at consulting firm Emergent Research. King shared his insights on coworking with WebWorkerDaily recently and shot us an email suggesting we check out his firm’s research on the question of inequality and independent work. In a blog post explaining his company’s position on the issue, King states unequivocally that there is no causal relationship between the two trends:

As part of the 2011 State of Independence study we looked at independent worker income. We found median per capita income for U.S. independent workers to be roughly the same as the median per capita income for workers overall.

We also found a fair amount of income inequality among independent workers. In particular 3 overlapping groups of independent workers significantly out earn other independents: (1) older independents (55+), (2) independents who have been independent longer than 5 years, and (3) independents that are highly satisfied with independent work.

In other words, income inequality among independent workers somewhat mirrors overall income inequality.

Our explanation — which is based on our interviews and other qualitative work — is independent workers with the right skill sets and experience are thriving and are much more financially successful than those who don’t. This is very similar to what is happening across the workforce in general.

Because of this, we don’t see the shift to independent work as a cause of income inequality.

Instead, Emergent Research feels that independent work and inequality are rising at similar trajectories because both trends are powered by the same phenomenon. Recommending former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism for those who want a deep dive into the subject, King pulls a quote from the book to explain the underlying causes of both trends: “The crisis marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens.”

Maclean’s view that “independent jobs are bad and we should return to a world of traditional jobs is widely held,” King commented. “But it’s not going to happen. The shift towards independent work is too far along and too powerful.”

Has King convinced you?

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WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

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What did the new data reveal? As Steve King of Emergent Research recently told WebWorkerDaily, coworking, it appears, is exiting its infancy and moving into a more business-savvy second phase with fresh faces outside the original, typical community-minded founders taking an interest in collaborative work spaces. And coworking space owners have apparently gotten the memo about their movement’s exploding popularity, telling the pollsters in large numbers that they hope to capitalize on growing interest in the movement and expand their businesses in 2012.

More than one in three owners (36 percent) surveyed said they hope to open an additional location this year. But not all owners are aiming to be moguls of coworking with a chain of spaces to their credit. A further 10 percent are simply hoping to expand their existing space in 2012. Just over a quarter (27 percent) have no plans to expand at all.

Earlier findings from this same survey indicate only a modest 40 percent of coworking spaces were profitable last year. ‘Wouldn’t owners of spaces in the red shy away from further investment?’ you might ask. The survey results suggest that’s not the case. “Of the spaces that want to open a new location, only 44 percent are presently profitable, while the majority of the expansion-planners are either making a loss or breaking even,” reports Deskmag.

For more information on how expansion plans relate to the number of months a space has been in operation and other details such as owners’ predictions for membership numbers in the coming year, check out the full write-up from Deskmag.

Are owners of often unprofitable spaces looking to expand prematurely?

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The Skitch add-on brings the ability to draw or make notes on any web content in the browser. Users will need to install the free Skitch app on their Android phone or tablet for Dolphin Browser support. Skitch is already a handy utility on desktops, but I see the value in adding the app to a mobile browser. Think of annotating images, maps or text from a web page and then sending those to a friend or family member.

Evernote was already on my must-have app list due to its support for most desktop and mobile platforms; it gives you a ready-to-use notebook in the cloud for ideas, text, images, links and even audio notes or videos. With the new Evernote add-on for Dolphin Browser, it becomes easier to capture and save such digital objects.

As more people browse the web on mobile devices, these two add-ons make sense for the Dolphin Browser team. Instead of relying on a dedicated app to capture or store ideas — Evernote has a mobile app, for example — you can now browse the web and easily save text, links or media seamlessly among such apps.

Nearly a year ago, I provided 8 reasons for Android owners to try the Dolphin Browser. With Tuesday’s news, that list just increased to 10 reasons.

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While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

• India: 56 percent
• Indonesia: 34 percent
• Mexico: 30 percent
• Argentina: 29 percent
• South Africa: 28 percent
• Turkey: 27 percent
• Canada: 8 percent
• France: 7 percent
• Italy: 7 percent
• Sweden: 6 percent
• Germany: 5 percent
• Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

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But recently ,Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s offered another possible contributing factor, one that gets a lot of consideration here on WebWorkerDaily. “Could the rise of independent work be partly to blame for the rise of inequality?” the article asks in an article entitled “The End of the Job.”

The rise of the contract worker may also be having a more wide-scale impact than previously realized. A growing gap between rich and poor in countries like Canada has been blamed, in part, on a growing number of poor quality jobs. There’s also mounting evidence to suggest that the rise of the throwaway worker has made recent recessions more painful and longer-lasting. Temp jobs? More like a temporary economy.

“It all amounts to a sea change in corporate attitudes about what constitutes a job in the first place,” concludes the article, noting the death of the job-security-for-loyalty model of previous decades. This move toward more independent and contract work is not only another contributing cause of inequality, but also of the general economic doldrums:

The concern is that all of this impermanence risks creating an economy built not on bedrock, but shifting sand….  Companies see contract employment as the answer to uncertain times, but [professor at the School of Labor Studies at McMaster University Wayne] Lewchuk says it may be a case of the medicine being worse than the disease. People who don’t earn as much money spend less, which isn’t good for the economy. “If people stop buying, then companies stop producing and lay off more workers,” he says. “You get yourself into a quicker and deeper hole. Meanwhile, on the other side of a recession, when you start bringing people back, you’re doing it at lower wages and they don’t have the kind of purchasing oomph necessary to get the economic engine started again.”

Of course, the need for companies to grow leaner, including by utilizing more independent workers, is driven by larger economic forces like globalization and better, cheaper technology, so it’s difficult to argue that independent work itself is the root cause of the problem. Pretty clearly it’s an effect rather than a driver of change. But Maclean’s contention that independent work may be a piece of a destructive cycle that’s both increasing inequality and holding back growth seems worth considering.

How much is the rise of independent work contributing to increased inequality? To economic stagnation?

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Whether on smartphone or tablet, business leaders now demand access to corporate email and documents 24/7. When they get such access, they begin to see the potential that comes with it: increased productivity and flexibility, improved efficiency and perhaps even a reduction in the amount of office space required as people are able to work remotely. When this occurs, senior execs start asking why there isn’t a company-wide mobile strategy in place — which is exactly where the troubles can begin for beleaguered IT teams.

Tablets equal headaches

We have all heard the phrase “consumerization of IT.” But despite its overfamiliarity, it is a genuine phenomenon. If enterprises don’t issue their workforce with smartphones or tablets, employees become increasingly intent on using their own devices. This trend, affectionately known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), is a real headache for IT teams. Recent research from Dell KACE showed that of 750 IT professionals surveyed, almost nine in ten said that their staff were using their own devices for anything ranging from email right through to CRM and ERP.

More devices means more operating systems, which in turn means added complexity for IT departments. Concerns about network security breaches, IP theft and loss of data mean that a strategy for addressing BYOD is imperative.

The best approach

Essentially what is happening is a shift from IT assets inside the firewall to IT ​assets outside the firewall. While this does present challenges, it is by no means an insurmountable problem.

Your enterprises should begin by choosing at least three smartphone platforms to support. It is, of course, impossible to support every platform, but an audit of the most popular devices in an organization will reveal the most appropriate. Then your organization must decide what type of approach it wants to take: Do you still want to provide and retain control of all devices, software and apps? Or is there merit in a hands-off strategy? Perhaps your IT departments should recommend devices and apps but ultimately let employees source their own, with any required controls applied in the cloud?

Business has changed, IT must follow

The way in which so many of us work has changed dramatically over the last decade. There is no longer a requirement for today’s web workforce to be stuck in one location or connected to one enterprise server. Web workers are mobile and flexible — reflective of the way businesses operate in 2012.

So the traditional roles and responsibilities of an IT department are changing, just as the way that businesses operate is changing. An IT team worth its salt needs to be aware of this. The consumerization of IT and BYOD are not passing fads, and the sooner organizations embrace this, the sooner they can reap the many benefits that such an approach brings. People are going to use devices that make their working lives easier whether an IT Director likes it or not, so surely acceptance is the way forward for any right-minded organization?

By relinquishing just a little control, IT departments can unlock their organizations from the constraints that come with the old approach to device management and usher them into a new era of productivity, flexibility and collaboration.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

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So how does the fact that “no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” these days affect the coworking movement, which is predicated on the notion that getting together in social spaces improves work? Are coworking spaces the enemy of the “more nuanced approach to creativity,” Cain advocates for, an approach that encourages “casual, cafe-style interactions” but allows people “to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone”? Or can spaces accommodate both needs? We asked a number of coworking space owners for their thoughts.

Don Ball, the co-founder of CoCo coworking in St. Paul, Minn., was unruffled by Cain’s piece, seeing it as directed more toward “ham-fisted” corporate collaboration efforts than the environment at coworking spaces like his. Like several members of the coworking movement who emailed in, Ball felt coworking was actually well positioned to allow the balance of solitude and sociability Cain is championing:

Some of the writer’s assertions actually jibe with our experience at CoCo. Our most popular membership option is what we call a part-time membership, in which members work in our space one day per week to get their social group time. And then stay at home (or who knows where else) to get their heads-down time. So, it’s a sanity insurance policy, if you will.

David Moffitt, the founder of Coworking Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., was equally unruffled, agreeing that coworking allows an ideal situation for workers to regulate their own need for human contact (or lack thereof):

From observing our members in the context of coworking, the thing that strikes me is that people here are able to self-regulate their level of intro/extrovert or community involvement.  Some members will pull others into discussion and spend half an hour on tangents ranging from database architecture to preferred coffee or beer brewing methods, while others are perfectly content to make their desks their own bubble or personal island.

But he does stress that it is incumbent on coworking spaces to help members get away by providing private spaces. Cain may feel that the current fad for open-plan offices and collaboration may be bad news for introverts, but Liz Elam of Link Coworking in Austin, Texas, feels that while quiet-craving personalities may be common, those that desire to work in complete isolation aren’t.

“Steve King and I discussed yesterday ‘Hermitpreneurs’ — people who like working from home because it allows them to avoid other people. We guesstimate this is less than 5 percent of the population,” she says. “Most people are not Hermitpreneurs.” Like Ball and Moffitt, Elam thinks coworking provides a good balance for the remaining 95 percent of the population. “Many of my Link Members are introverts but they work from a Coworking space because it allows them to be amongst people and they can interact when they want/need to,” she says.

Like Ball, Moffitt underlines the point that while corporate mania for collaboration obligates introverts to attend more meetings and listen to more office chatter than they would naturally want to, coworking allows complete control over your level of interaction.

At least as long as you have a good pair of headphones. “I think noise cancelling headsets are wonderful,” says Elam. “Why do you need walls to isolate? You can choose to isolate in the workplace.”

Do you think coworking is a symptom of our mania for collaboration or a solution to it?

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The headline takeaway is that employees are shifting from being passive observers of social networks while at work to active participants, dramatically increasing their use of these networks (in fact, total social networking traffic more than tripled). But despite BusinessWeek claiming social-mad employees are hogging bandwidth, don’t be too alarmed about the increase in usage. All that posting and game playing only accounts for a total of about one percent of Internet bandwidth, and Palo Alto Networks is stressing that while some people are certainly slacking off, an increasing amount of social networking use is also for legitimate work purposes. File sharing is way up as well but also only accounts for about one percent of total network bandwidth.

“At first glance, the shifts in usage patterns may imply that there is a significant drain on productivity and a strain on the networking infrastructure, possibly jeopardizing other, more business critical, bandwidth sensitive applications. Clearly social networking applications are being used for both business and personal purposes, but the overall impact to the bandwidth infrastructure is small,” says the report. A more serious risk than wasting time or bandwidth may be threats to data security. The report suggests networks are harder to secure than many IT pros imagine.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Franco Bouly.

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That’s the contention of Jim Ware, the founder and executive director of The Future of Work, in a fascinating recent article for Workspace Design magazine. In the piece, Ware says workplace professionals need to shake up their conception of their role to keep up with the times.

I believe it starts with rethinking—from the ground up—the role of a workplace professional. I’ve recently been tracking several debates about the definition of “facilities management” as discussed across a number of LinkedIn groups…. most of the contributors seem to have a very limited view of their jobs. They focus on keeping their buildings open and clean, on controlling costs, on ensuring business continuity, and sometimes on improving sustainability.

In contrast, I believe your job as workplace professional is to support work, wherever and whenever it takes place. And for me “support” means focusing on the work itself, and how it’s being done, almost more than the workplace.

As one senior executive commented to me several years ago, “The most expensive cost of any workplace is the salary of the people who use it.” Thus, the most important measure of workplace effectiveness is workforce productivity, not simple cost control.

This shift in focus, “puts workplace professionals squarely into flexible work programs,” Ware concludes. In order to be effective at providing work spaces that fit with more flexible conceptions of work, Ware says architects, designers and facilities managers shouldn’t shy away from playing futurist: “creating pictures (visions) of alternate possible futures, and then being sure your organization is prepared for any or all of them.”

With the world changing so rapidly and unpredictably, it’s unlikely workplace pros will be able to correctly guess the exact shape of their organizations’ future needs But that’s not the point, according to Ware. Instead of hoping to outdo the neighborhood psychic in accuracy, facilities managers should use scenario planning, envisioning a range of possible futures. What good does this do? The practice enables:

Managers to open their minds to the inherent uncertainties in the future, and to consider a number of ‘what-if’ possibilities without needing to choose or commit exclusively to one most-likely outcome. Scenario analysis enables managers, business planners, and executive teams to develop multiple options for action that can be compared and assessed in advance of the need to implement them.

The bottom line, according to Ware, is that facilities managers shouldn’t just worry about keeping the lights on and the real estate bill down, but should be proactively planning for the future of work. “Enlist your peers in HR, IT, and Finance, and together build the stories of how you believe your employees could be working in three to five years. Then, develop plans for a workplace laboratory where you (and those employees) can experiment with new layouts, new technologies, and new ways of working,” he concludes.

Do you agree with Ware about the changing role of facilities managers?

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Onboarding any employee into a company can be tricky, and as we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, getting new virtual employees up to speed is even trickier. In fact, the process has so many potential pitfalls that some experts on remote work recommend you skip it entirely, opting instead to train your remote workers face-to-face.

Speaking to MoneyWatch’s Laura Vanderkam recently, Mom Corps CEO Allison O’Kelly suggested managers bring new hires that will be working at a distance into the office for the first week or two:

Train in person. If you’re hiring someone into a virtual position, awesome. You can find a great person without having to pay moving expenses! But “training is the most difficult part,” says O’Kelly. You have to explain exactly what it is the person needs to do, as well as your culture. “We have had some people who we have tried to train virtually and it really is difficult,” O’Kelly says. The solution? Spend time together. O’Kelly is in Pennsylvania, and recently hired a CFO in Atlanta who spent two different weeks with her. Spread out over several weeks, those two weeks have been “invaluable,” she says.

Donna Wells, CEO of online company Mindflash, concurred with this position last year on Mashable, suggesting managers should:

Plan to have new remote teammates spend their first days or weeks at HQ. As good as collaboration tools are, they are not effective in building the personal relationships and communication shortcuts that come very quickly face-to-face. For the employee, it’s a chance to feel a strong sense of belonging and to establish a positive bond with the boss and whole team. For managers, it’s an opportunity to convey the company culture, to set expectations and start building the trust you’ll need later on to hit mutual goals.

Even here on WebWorkerDaily where we’re usually focused on figuring out how to do nearly everything better at a distance, my colleague Darrell Etherington has conceded that when done virtually, “training is tricky. Orientation for new remote workers, especially if they’re new to the job or company and not just making the shift from being an in-office employee, can be very difficult.” Though there are plenty of tech tools to ease the stresses of training remote workers and keep them closely connected to the office during those crucial first weeks if a trip in to get to know the team is impossible.

In your experience is trying to train at a distance a hopeless undertaking or can it be done well?

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On Monday, PC Magazine wrote up one way to log in to your Gmail account on a PC by using a smartphone. It’s a clever and simple method. On the PC, you simply browse to https://accounts.google.com/sesame, where you will see a QR code.

Use a bar-code-scanning app on your Android or iPhone (which is already configured with your Google account credentials) to snap a pic of the code, which is a URL. Browse to the URL on your phone and tap the “Start with Gmail” button or “Start with iGoogle” button, whichever you prefer. Doing so causes the phone to shoot a verification to the PC, which immediately opens up Gmail.

[UPDATE: This method appears to be experimental. The day after this article was published, Google shut down the login service. Clicking the link now shows the following message from Google: "Hi there - thanks for your interest in our phone-based login experiment. While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms. Stay tuned for something even better!"]

I tested the function on my Galaxy Nexus and it worked perfectly. But I was already using a smartphone to verify my Google login with two-step verification. Google actually offers an application called Authenticator for Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices. Instead of calling or texting a verification code to your smartphone, Authenticator creates six-digit verification codes on the fly, without any connectivity required. Each code lasts only 30 seconds, much like a rolling code. Entering the code when prompted during log-in to a Google account provides access.

Although I have been using the Authenticator app for some time, I like the QR code method better. There are no verification codes to manually type; it is a simpler process that still combines “what you know with what you have.” And if you add in passcode security on the phone itself, there is another layer of security with either approach to help out in case you lose your handset.

If you are not familiar with Google’s two-step verification feature, here are the details from the rollout last February, as well as this video to explain how it works.

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Recently, WebWorkerDaily phoned up Gene Zaino, a Net:Work 2011 speaker and CEO of MBO Partners which offers a package of back office services to independent workers they dub a “passport to independent work” — they’ll sort out your taxes, benefits, insurance and the like if you hand over a small percentage of billings — for a wide-ranging conversation about his predictions for independent work in the year ahead. (Check out his full predictions in infographic form here.) In his role at MBO, Zaino deals closely with a number of corporate HR and procurement departments, and his view of how quickly companies are coming to terms with the changing landscape of work varied significantly from the opinions of those who paint corporations as slow to adapt. For one, he defended HR against its critics, at least when it comes to taking advantage of independent talent:

HR organizations are very focused on the full-time employee segment of their business because that’s what they do, and they typically don’t deal with non-employees. Non-employees are paid through accounts payable or through procurement, so they tend to not be part of their system.

Now the more forward-thinking companies have decided to partner HR and procurement to figure out how to [handle independent workers], because HR gets upset when you hire an independent contractor who’s sitting next to or working alongside one of the full-time employees and they start talking. There’s a culture issue there, and I think the smarter companies have assembled teams or new positions, which have representation from HR, from procurement and from legal, and they put together a strategy and make [independent work] one other component of how they get work done.

And outside the boundaries of HR, Zaino insists, in the last few years, companies are really starting to grasp the benefits of hiring independent workers, as well as how to maximize their value while minimizing the compliance risks of nimble hiring.

I’ve seen tremendous change. Today most Fortune 500 companies have an actual position – sometimes it resides in HR, sometimes it resides in their procurement department, sometimes it’s a new department. It always has someone from legal involved because it’s generally a compliance issue. But they generally have someone that manages their non-employee labor and in more and more companies there’s much more publicity, much more education, much more awareness.

Most recently in 2011, for the first time, I’ve even seen public companies in their annual reports start talking about how many independent workers they have as compared to employees. Caterpillar is one where they actually boasted because they consider that a strategic advantage to be able to be nimble in terms of their cost structure. So there has absolutely been a dramatic increase in education on the corporate side that has taken about ten years to happen, but it’s prominent today.

As Zaino points out, ruthless economic realities are pushing companies to be equally ruthless about cutting costs and maintaining flexibility, but he also explains that a vigorous compliance drive by tax officials partly explains why companies are getting more savvy about managing their independent workers.

“There’s a huge enforcement effort to reclassify people as employees that companies are paying as contractors,” he says. “Today there are 14 new bills pending that will increase penalties for companies that try to engage independent workers who would otherwise be classified as employees, and the test for being an employee versus an independent contractor is extremely gray. It’s about behavior. It’s about control. It’s really easy for the state tax, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Labor to come in and say: ‘You look and walk and talk like an employee, so we’re going to call you an employee and we’re going to give a big fine to the place where you’re working because that’s the easier way for us to go collect a lot of money.’”

Motivated by both the carrot of a more agile workforce and the stick of stiff government fines, it seems even the slowest moving organizational behemoths are learning to manage the exploding number of independent workers. (Zaino predicted independent workers will be a majority of workforce by 2020 at Net:Work.)

In your experience, are big companies dragging their heels or quickly coming to terms with the realities of the changing workforce?

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