Maybe not. Even big companies without a particular reputation for cutting-edge practices are slowly starting to realize that the real estate savings and employee morale benefits of remote work make it an attractive option. Take UK telecoms giant O2 for example, which closed its headquarters in Slough this week, sending all 3,000 staff home to work for an initiative designed to test the company’s ability to manage remote workers.

“We believe a cultural step-change is underway affecting staff and businesses, as work increasingly becomes something we do, rather than a place that we go,” O2 business manager Ben Dowd told UK tech news site, V3. “Today’s office-wide flexible working initiative is an opportunity for us to tangibly demonstrate the opportunity and potential available to British businesses today.”

Of course, O2 has a horse in this race as it sells a platform to support remote workers, so the firm is hardly the least likely to push the practice. Dowd acknowledges that this week’s experiment had obvious marketing benefits for the company. “By sharing experiences from across our business, from business divisions to operations, we hope to encourage more organizations to help their workforce become mobile,” he said.

But on the other hand Slough (home to Wernham Hogg Paper Company in the British version of The Office) is hardly Silicon Valley or SoHo either, so the large-scale experiment still offers some evidence that telecommuting is seeping out of trendy enclaves and into the business mainstream.

Image courtesy of Flickr user teamjb.

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If you look at trends in the future of work, then maybe not, argued Daniel Jelski, a professor of chemistry at SUNY New Paltz, on New Geography recently. Despite being a science guy himself, Jelski looks at the ways work is changing and comes to an iconoclastic conclusion. He begins by laying out the basic forces he sees shaping the career landscape in the next decades:

Let’s start with the three Laws of Future Employment. Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do.

Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.)

Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

But instead of looking at these laws and suggesting students study the math and science needed to be one of those running the machines many fear are taking our jobs, Jelski comes to a different conclusion. He acknowledges that the number of science and math grads in the U.S. has been flat over several decades, but he disagrees that this means more students should be encouraged into those fields. Pointing out that competition in these areas is increasingly global, he notes that the amount of American tech and science geeks isn’t relevant. But the global number is, and by this measure competition will be fierce, especially as many technical tasks are now done by computers:

Laws #1 & 2 predict that there will likely be fewer STEM jobs in the future – they are both easily computerized and tradable. People will always be employed in STEM disciplines, many of them highly paid, but they’ll be paid for smarts rather than education. The disciplines will be much more competitive, with older and less talented workers left on the sidelines. Tom Friedman and Alex Tabarrok, reflecting conventional wisdom, are mistaken in maintaining that increasing STEM education is a key to future economic competitiveness.

“So if computerized, tradable skills won’t create much new employment, if any, what will?” he asks. The answer is “non-tradable skills that can’t be computerized. . . . these jobs depend on human-human interaction — empathy.” Counseling, teaching and management are examples. So who is best prepared for them?

Jelski tells of a student he had in a chemistry class, an English major who was busy writing a novel about cowboys while learning about chemical reactions on the side. “Conventional wisdom says this guy is all wet,” writes Jelski, but he feels this kid’s odd combo of interests in cowboys and chemistry might actually be a career winner. Not because anyone needs many cowboys these days, obviously, but because

the skill set needed to write a novel, of which writing may be the least of it. He has to have something to write about, which means nurturing a general curiosity about the world — not just cowboys, but apparently also chemistry. He learns to be a keen observer of people: their appearance, what they wear, their character, mannerisms, and language. He develops the self-discipline and self-confidence to finish a project because it is intrinsically important, not because people say “Wow, that’s wonderful. You’re writing a novel!” Because of his novel my student becomes expert in many skills that can translate into a wonderful career.

The conclusion of the post (which is well worth a read in full) is that skills rather than education count, and writing and empathy are among the skills least likely to be mastered by computers. Counseling might beat computer science in the future of work, according to Jelski, but critics could point out that clinical psychology majors currently have the highest rate of unemployment of any college degree and that being an empathetic, sociable engineer might be the best bet of all.

Would you push your kid toward engineering or empathy for a more future-proof career?

Image courtesy of Flickr user UC Davis College of Engineering

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A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we should try and acquire paidContent, my fellow board members — Jon Callaghan (True Ventures), Ammar Hanafi (Alloy Ventures) and Kevin Brown (Reed Elsevier Ventures) — didn’t hesitate for a minute. The ethos of paidContent and our company are in sync. GigaOM’s core belief is that as connectivity becomes ubiquitous, it changes everything from society to business to we the people. paidContent from the very beginning has been built on the idea that connectedness is and will change media. It makes perfect sense for us to team up. Since then, Paul and his team worked tirelessly to make it happen.

OK, now you know what. Let me tell you why.

Now, why are we doing this deal, clearly the biggest of our five-and-a-half-year history? Two simple but equally powerful reasons — the first and perhaps most important reason: people. I have been an admirer of paidContent’s editorial team from the very beginning of its journey. Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer were two of my favorite writers in the early days of professional blogging. And while Rafat (who is on our board of advisers) has moved on to new things, I am glad to have Staci join us. She has been instrumental in building ContentNext from the ground up, and in addition to writing, she has been building the company’s event business. I am thrilled to announce that she will remain the editor of paidContent.

Ernie Sander who spearheads the ContentNext editorial operations is the kind of veteran everyone on our team, including me, can learn from. And for that precise reason, Ernie is going to become the executive editor of our sprawling online editorial operations. Our managing editor, Nicole Solis, is being promoted to VP of Editorial Operations. And then there is the most awesome team of journalists — Robert Andrews, Tom Krazit, Daniel Frankel, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff Roberts and Amanda Natividad. In addition there are a wonderful group of technology, business and sales people who are joining our company. I welcome them all to our growing family and can’t wait to break bread with them in weeks to come.

Location, location, location

These fine folks are actually going to help bolster our presence in New York and help increase our footprint in Europe, a region of key strategic focus for GigaOM. (We will be hosting Structure:Europe in Amsterdam, October 16-17.) With this deal, we are really pleased that one of the most forward-looking media outlets around, Guardian News & Media, will become a shareholder in our business.

As you all know, I am (and will always be) a displaced New Yorker; New York City is my spiritual home. By increasing our footprint in the capital of the world, I would get a chance to go back more often. But it’s not an emotional tug that is driving us to this decision. New York is fast becoming a major technology hub, as Ryan Kim outlined in his recent post. And we want to expand our coverage to Boston — thanks to Barb Darrow who joined us several months ago — and the Washington DC corridor as well. paidContent’s New York City offices are now GigaOM East.

Media is the new Wild West

We are quite strategic about our acquisitions — we acquire media entities only if we love the people and believe that we are at the starting phase of a trend. In 2008, we acquired jkOnTheRun as our tip of the hat to the growing demand for mobile devices and the changes it would bring into society. Later that year, we brought in The Apple Blog because we knew the best was yet to come for Apple. Both of those acquisitions have helped GigaOM cover the issues that matter most to our ultimate customers — you, the reader — in a smart, sensible fashion.

“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”— Clay Shirky

Shirky’s observation means that we are in a time of chaos where the very idea of media is being questioned. And as a Chinese proverb says, from chaos emerges opportunity. I believe the best is yet to come for media.

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information. Mathew Ingram has been writing about these disruptions on a regular basis, and now we are going to double down on what we think is a great new chapter in the media industry.

I have always believed that we’ve got to stop thinking of media as what it was and focus on more of what it could be. In the world of plenty, the only currency is attention and attention is what defines “media.” Zynga is fighting Hollywood for attention (and winning). Instagram is taking moments away from other media. They have attention. There are old companies that are dying and new ones that are being invented. We’re eager to expand our coverage of social and digital media editorially, in our research and at our events. paidContent is the best chronicler of the media industry, and by blending their coverage with ours, we hope to watch this fast-changing industry ever more closely.

Please join me in welcoming the ContentNext team!

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The price is certainly right to try OneNote if you’re an Android user: 500 notes will tell you for sure if the app meets your needs. And for many users, it likely will. I say that as a long-time user of OneNote when I used my first Microsoft Tablet PC in 2004. I found OneNote to be a powerful organization tool as I could create different notebooks for different contexts, such as work, personal, blogging ideas, and more.

The full software paired well with my tablet because it supported ink notes, which it would then index for search by using optical character recognition. Such support isn’t available in OneNote for Android, unfortunately, but the mobile app is still quite capable. You can still have different notebooks, each of which can hold text, images, and bulleted lists. Missing however, is a OneNote widget, drawing notes and support for voice notes.

Still, current OneNote users on the PC that also have an Android handset will be happy with the new app. And they should be, because it extends the use of a tool that’s already part of their toolkit. But I don’t see Microsoft gaining many new OneNote customers out of this development. Evernote is widely considered the dominant player here; ironic because eight years ago, it was an up-and-comer against OneNote on tablet PCs.

Instead of embracing one of the fastest growing mobile platforms early on, Microsoft waited until now for Android support. In the company’s defense, it did deliver OneNote for iOS in January of last year. Evernote, and several other similar apps, brought wide-spread support for multiple mobile platforms far quicker and unless a specific app has a killer feature, I’ll opt for cross-platform support every time.

Maybe it’s just me though, since I use multiple devices on various platforms including iOS, Windows Phone (which already has OneNote) and Android. Let me know if you’re ready to move from Evernote on Android, or a similar tool of choice, over to Microsoft OneNote for Android.

As I always say, use the right tool for your tasks; clearly there’s no “right” answer here that applies to everyone. I simply wish Microsoft would have delivered OneNote for Android sooner rather than later as my notes are generally locked up on another platform at this point.

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The Atlantic Cities explained this second point of view recently, noting data that points to a renewed and rising interest in downtown cores and trends towards more urban-style suburbs where residents live closer together and rely less on cars for transportation. Citing a post by Thomas Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, that appeared on the Huffington Post, the Atlantic piece argues that as telecommuting becomes more common these trends towards denser communities will accelerate.

With the rise of the contingent workforce, people will also live and work in ways we haven’t seen for a very long time. We have developed our cities based on the old economy, with residential, commercial, and industrial areas kept separate and ‘pure’ through single-use zoning. That made sense in an economy that divided our work lives from our private lives, and that spawned large-scale noxious industries that no one wanted nearby. The next economy, though, may look more like the way in which people lived and worked prior to the industrial revolution, in which home, office, and shop co-exist in some combination of physical and digital space. This may require rethinking our zoning laws to allow for a much finer-grain mix of uses and re-purposing buildings designed for single functions that will have no tenants or buyers if they remain that way.

The Atlantic points out, knowledge work requires creative, thoughtful professionals who in turn need stimulating, densely populated spaces where they can run into and bump ideas off others of their kind. Remote work won’t eliminate this need. It’ll just shift where these interactions happen from the water cooler at the office to the street outside your house.

This idea that the changing nature of work will alter how we envision and build our communities has come up on WebWorkerDaily before. Coworking advocates, for example, have noted that, as people stay closer to their houses during the workday, they demand more from their community (and also offer it more) spurring development around their homes and coworking spaces.

Jerome Chang, an architect and owner of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, noted that Zappos, ahead of the curve as usual, is already trying to put these insights into practice, building a new corporate campus that the company hopes will encourage employees to mix their work and personal lives in the same downtown area.

Do you think the rise of remote work will spur us to rethink our communities?

Image courtesy of Flickr user shotmeshotyou.

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So it takes a bold character to suggest that what the business world needs is more virtual meetings, but that’s just what Wayne Turmel did on Management Issues recently. Of course, Turmel is a clever guy and aware that his suggestion won’t be popular, so between multiple pleas for patience from his readers, he’s at pains to point out that what he’s advocating isn’t an increase in the total number spent by virtual teams in meetings but a redistribution of meeting time from few long meetings to more, shorter ones.

Why? Turmel says that remote workers have stuck too closely to patterns formed in physical offices since moving their work online. Setting up an in-person meeting is usually a logistical challenge, as multiple schedules need to be coordinated and physical meeting spaces booked. For this reason, traditional meetings are generally infrequent but long in order to accomplish what needs doing when you can actually manage to get everyone together. But this is a flawed approach to virtual meetings, according to Turmel

When people started to do online meetings, they followed the same model, for the same reasons, but there are several fundamental differences between thoughtfully run webmeetings and a traditional meeting:

People’s attention spans are naturally shorter online. Asking someone to sit for a long time in a static environment is going to impact their ability to engage, contribute and add value. You’ll get better work and attention from people who still have some energy and will to live left.

The logistics of setting up a webmeeting (once you master the software, which takes about three practices) are infinitely easier than trying to get everyone physically in the same place at the same time, book an available conference room, and all the other administrivia. It’s also much easier to get 45 minutes out of someone’s day than a couple of hours.

When people don’t have to leave their desks to attend, there’s a lot less wasted time. People can get more work done up to the moment the meeting starts, and pick up where they left off right away.

If the meeting is short and targeted, people will pay attention more.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning for remote workers gathering virtually, according to Turmel, is more meetings of shorter duration. The result will be more engaged meeting attendees, more productivity per meeting minute and a lot less doodling and covert web surfing.

“So put down the torches and pitchforks and let’s examine the notion that more frequent, but shorter and targeted online meetings, might be an option. It’s not like what we’re doing now works so well for most of us,” concludes Turmel.

Do you agree with him that more frequent, shorter virtual meetings might be an improvement on the current way of doing business?

Image courtesy of Flickr user David Recordon.

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So what usually goes wrong? At Net:Work 2011 Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers suggested  companies often make things too complicated, complaining about “Swiss army knives” that try to solve every problem and end up failing users. When I spoke with Yammer CEO David Sacks a few weeks ago, he suggested that companies often go wrong by “trying to bolt that on to some existing tool, because if the tool isn’t built from the ground up to be social, it’s not going to have the level of usability that’s required.”

Now David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, has gotten into the act, offering up common ways that well intentioned companies muck up the roll out of social tools and suggesting better ways to bring these tools to your team. “Simply throwing out social tools isn’t going to work,” he says, pointing to recent Forrester research that found widespread under-utilization of social tools. The study shows that even though companies have invested in an average of five or more tools, 64 percent realized few, if any, benefits from that investment. Only 8 percent actually use social collaboration software once a week.

So what should you do if you want your company or team’s move to social to go as poorly as some of the roll-outs documented by Forrester?

Imagine your team loves change. Some people like nothing better than to shake things up and try something new, but you can be pretty sure that’s not everyone on your team. So when you’re thinking about rolling out a tool to make your organization more social, keep in mind the howls of complaint that greet even the smallest changes to social networks in the consumer space.

“People are naturally reluctant to change,” says Lavenda. “Enterprise 2.0 author Andrew McAfee warns organizations to, ‘never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.’ When transitioning to a social model, it’s imperative to understand exactly how users work. Then, build a strategy and toolset that integrates with these practices in a way that makes sense with their current workflow, rather than asking users to make a dramatic change in their behavior.”

Rip and replace. If the wheel is turning along with just a bit of a creak or wobble, it’s not a good idea to try and entirely reinvent it. “People are often lured into thinking they need something entirely new to solve a problem. Instead of a D-Day approach that flips the switch on relatively unproven technologies like blogs, wikis and allied next-gen tools—essentially asking employees to immediately abandon existing tools like email and documents—plan for a gradual introduction that allows users to get up to speed with new functionality and capabilities at a comfortable pace,” recommends Lavenda, adding, “the idea is to improve productivity, not hinder it.”

The more the merrier. More may be better when it comes to chocolate cake or vacation days, but not when it comes to tools for the social enterprise. Rather than asking your team to log in to six different things, try to find solutions that allow them one go-to place for many needs. “An effective social strategy must start in a familiar environment and then aggregate all other pieces into the users’ base of operations. The goal is to eliminate steps, not add more. Bundling collaboration tools together in a common context and shared window drives faster, more widespread adoption and delivers the promised benefits of social enterprise integration much quicker,” says Lavenda.

Have you experienced any serious screw ups in the real of enterprise social that you’d like to warn others to avoid?

Image courtesy of Flickr user markomni.

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The software is pretty simple; you just enter a date on one of the three tabs to track days left, days past, or days until someone’s birthday. You can easily customize the title of what you’re tracking and the events can be added to your native calendar app or be set to repeat.

My main purpose for finding and using D-Day is my running streak, which I began on January 1, 2011. Today, for example, is my 400th consecutive day of running at least a mile. I need the daily counter that D-Day provides me for my running log. For additional fun, I keep track of my age in days. The app tells me that today I woke up for the 15,524th day. My kids swear I don’t look a day over 15,000, so the running must be helping.

Although my primary purpose for D-Day is my running streak, I’ve found it can be useful for so much more. People who stopped smoking and want to keep track of how long since that last light-up can use D-Day. Maybe you want to track how long it’s been since a quiet date with your significant other. (Trust me mobile younglings, this becomes important as date-night frequency drops off once you’ve been alive for that first 10,000 days!) Or perhaps you have a goal to lose 10 pounds in 100 days; D-Day can be your iOS countdown buddy for that or an upcoming project.

The free version of D-Day is ad-supported and there’s an in-app purchase option to go Pro for $0.99. The lite version is working just fine for me as I’ve used it daily for the last 400 days.

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Just knowing that collaboration is easy to screw up isn’t of much use though. What would be truly helpful would be a specific taxonomy of the mistakes that frequently hobble teams, including the emotional and irrational complexities that can bedevil collaboration, as well as a benchmark survey of how the best teams manage to get everyone working together well. Handily, that’s just what a new study by Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies aims to find out.

Through two small pilot studies the partners have developed a survey that digs down into what separates mere team members from true team players by asking participants to detail the differences between their ideal team and their actual experiences working in supposedly collaborative groups. Participants also signal their emotional impressions of teamwork by choosing from an array of sketched facial expressions. “These facial expressions are true in all cultures,” explains Yosh Beier, co-founder of Collaborative Coaching. The word disgust, say, may carry different resonance n India and Indiana, so using pictures takes away the danger that differences in culture or language could skew the results.

And even after examining a small sample of just over a hundred responses, Beier explains, he and his research partners are starting to see intriguing patterns emerge, including generational differences, common complaints about the current reality of teams (lack of recognition and excessive workload prominent among them) and similar notions of what moves a team from bearable to exciting.

What we find is there is a certain amount of results that people want to accomplish, so if a team doesn’t even manage to achieve its goals then that is very frustrating and dominates the experience. But it’s a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The moment teams reach a critical amount of ability to really produce results then results aren’t that important any more and other factors dominate such as connection and cohesion. People wonder: Do I see purpose? Is this meaningful for me? How much of a challenge is this?

There is also a generational theme. So far, the younger the respondents, the less happy they are with the current state of affairs on their teams.

It’s too early yet to determine if the youngest team members are the most frustrated simply because they have the highest expectations, Beier says, and an insufficient number of remote workers have so far taken the survey to conclusively determine if being virtual changes teams’ interactions or expectations. So the researchers are rolling out the survey to a number of firms, including consultancy W.L. Gore, and are also making it available online to anyone interested in participating. The only criterion for eligibility is experience working collaboratively. So if you feel like aiding an investigation of how to make teams truly gel and explore your own feelings about collaboration, 15 minutes is all you need to complete it. We’ll keep you posted on the results.

In your experience, what are the key factors that make a team really click so they can be effective collaborators?

Image courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

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Remarks, like PDF Expert, offers PDF annotation and filling tools, but it’s a much more streamlined tool than that app, with a focus on making it easy to mark up and share documents, as well as create your own notes and notebooks independent of any pre-existing PDFs that can also be marked up and shared with other Remarks users for collaborative work.

Remarks is that rare beast among PDF tools, either on or off the iPad: it features a simple, straightforward interface and everything work very quickly, with speedy response times for turning pages, adding notes, and basically anything else you’d want to do. Tools, including pens, highlighters, preset shapes and text entry, are clearly labeled with simple icons, and there’s no visual clutter or wealth of unnecessary options to distract you from what you actually need to get done.

Sharing may be one of Remarks’ best feature. Using email, you can easily share documents with other Remarks users, including annotated PDFs and notes created in the app itself. But in an upcoming update, Readdle is planning to introduce Dropbox, Box.net and other cloud storage sharing options, too, making it even more convenient for doing collaborative work.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard or stylus, Remarks is even more useful. It features effective accidental touch or wrist-detection, meaning you can write naturally with a stylus without worrying about drawing in the wrong place, and regular Mac key shortcuts like Command+C, Command+V and Command+A work with keyboard text input.

Remarks allows flexibility in creating notes and notebooks, allowing you to rearrange pages as you add them or after the fact, but it doesn’t overwhelm with options like other iPad notebook offerings. And since it’s also a full-fledged PDF annotation tool, and one that can be used collaboratively, it’s probably one of the most versatile iPad apps for students, and a fairly inexpensive one at $4.99.

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Several years ago, when Brian Curin and his business partners were busy building up the Cold Stone Creamery franchise, “We built a big office, the Taj Mahal of offices,” he explains. But this group of surfers and outdoor enthusiasts wasn’t particularly taken with the suit and tie lifestyle, so when they moved on to their next venture, they let their lifestyle considerations guide them.

The result is Flip Flop Shops, a quick-growing franchise of more than 45 stores selling beach-ready footwear, that Curin, who serves as president, and four partners run out of home offices spread from Atlanta to Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s a true lifestyle brand,” says Curin. “Jeans, T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops: that’s what we wear everywhere and what’s nice is it’s sort of expected. So where most people couldn’t get away with dressing like bums, when we go to places everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s the Flip Flop guys. It’s OK. Let them in.’”

Talent

Curin has a simple mantra when it comes to hiring: Attitude first. When adding to their team of support staff (currently five people) or deciding who gets a franchise, experience and qualifications come behind passion. “It’s so critical for us to get the absolute right fit, and that may not be the most qualified all the time. It may just be the person who goes, ‘I used to work in the corporate world and I’d cut off my left arm if I didn’t have to deal with that,’” he says, adding “when you find those people, you just have to set the expectations.”

And a particular location isn’t among his. “Go to Mexico!” he tells his staff. “You’d probably do better if you were just living the life and doing what we need you to do.” Nor are set hours important. “If the waves are good, they’re probably going to be out of their office,” Curin concedes. What is important is that people get work done on time and forge a personal relationship with the team.

To find the right talent for this type of team, Curin is a firm believer in interviewing face to face. “People can sound one way on the phone and interview great and look good on paper, but nothing compares to face to face,” he says, but he’s also a huge fan of a healthy degree of social media snooping to screen candidates before that stage.

“People aren’t smart on Facebook. Most people put everything out there, and so in a matter of a few minutes you get a really good flavor for their vibe. You either like it or you don’t, but it makes you way more prepared when you go meet with them,” he explains. Referrals also help ensure cultural fit: “It’s rare that we get somebody that’s just cold, never met them, out of the blue.”

Tools

In collaboration tools, as in footwear, Curin doesn’t get too fancy. “Part of the whole ‘free your toes’ mentality, this lifestyle we lead, is simplicity, so Apple,” he says, giving a one word answer to the tools his team uses to keep in touch. “Apple gives us all the gadgety things we need — iPhone, iPad, iEverything — to make this whole virtual office thing work for us,” he continues, sounding like a contented fanboy. Anything else? Just FaceTime (Apple again) and “no less than 20″ calls a day to CEO Darin Kraetsch.

The company is also a fan of social media, as we’ve heard for recruiting, but also for keeping up to date with franchisees. “We set up a closed loop Facebook page for shop owners only. We’re the admins on it so we can accept or deny people. The public can’t view it, and it’s set up as a platform for all of our shop owners to talk and share best practices, complain, share inventory, whatever it is,” he says.

Tips

“We respect the fact that we’ve got a really good thing here. We don’t suit-and-tie it. We don’t report to anybody,” says Curin, but he does see one downside to his current setup, and it’s a common one for virtual workers. “The one downfall is you truly never get that total shut off downtime except maybe once, twice a year where we tell each other, ‘hey, I’m going to Hawaii,’ my phone’s done,’” he says.

And while Curin admits that shutting out work stuff at home is a challenge, he’s firmer about shutting out home stuff when he’s working. “Make sure your space is set up the right way, so basically, when you go in there, it’s: ‘I am at work.’ You’ve got to make sure those ground rules are set with your significant other or your roommate, whoever it is.” And this space shouldn’t just be any old desk, chair, computer setup but a place that truly reflects your lifestyle. “To do it successfully, you can still be in your pajamas, but make sure your space fits the vibe of whatever business that you’re in.” Need an example? Check out Curin’s home office to the left.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

“To most effectively build a thriving enterprise social network, the existing groundswell community, forward-thinking leaders, and use case influencers must be directly involved and feel a personal connection to the success of the network,” said Murray. He noted that although all three of these user groups are important, they each play different roles.

Marketing, sales, information technology, and formal communities of practice are all tangible units at the heart of an organization. Yammer’s implementation experts have found that great things happen when these segments identify use cases for the product. Groundswell adoption and executive attention are both valuable for awareness, but the heart is best able to combat the “what’s in it for me” questions that push back against any new collaboration tool. The heart has identifiable work to get done that can often benefit in a visible way by having faster or broader access to knowledge across the organization.

Value From Sharing Across Similar Stores & Regions

Supervalu  (a nationwide grocery and pharmacy company, which owns Albertsons, Lucky, and Jewel-Osco) provides an especially good example of how Yammer can help facilitate collaboration. When Supervalu’s CEO Craig Herkert started in 2009, he aimed to transform the company through “radical transparency” and give the stores a hyperlocal focus to better meet their customers’ needs.

With a history that goes back to 1870, Supervalu was a conservative company where social media use was rare. There had been informal use of Yammer at Supervalu for years, but things didn’t take off until the business units began developing ways to support the hyperlocal efforts in the stores.

In one particularly effective project, store directors photographed product displays, posted the pictures on Yammer, and linked the images to local demographics and outcomes. Directors in similar situations (e.g., a college town during spring break) were able to use that information to decide which displays were likely to generate the most sales.

Herkert’s executive vision gave collaboration and transparency greater credibility and budget, but it was the business goal at the heart of the company that gave the collaboration efforts the energy to spread.

As Herkert says in this video, “Yammer has made my life easier, but what it has really done is made my life as a CEO better. Better because I’m able to listen and converse with all of our associates. Real time. All the time.”

7-Eleven convenience stores provide another example. Similar to Supervalu, Yammer was adopted by a groundswell community, and the executives were on-board, but it was in the heart where the value grew.

The company is built on a very distributed model with stores spread around the globe. David Sacks, Yammer’s CEO, said 7-Eleven aimed to use Yammer to “unify its distributed workforce, drive consistency across franchise locations, and foster better communication among employees and leadership.”

7-Eleven’s information technology group was the first to use Yammer, but now the dominant use case is of directors tracking regional trends and sharing that information. They also appreciate how easy it is to quickly share examples of employees supporting their guest services culture. For instance, a story about an employee who helped a customer change a tire in a 7-Eleven parking lot might not be something that would be emailed to all, but it’s perfect for a short post.

Sharing with a Purpose

Sharing is a crucial part of collaboration, and tools such as Yammer provide us with low friction ways to share our knowledge, activities, and results. Yammer’s experience with their clients suggests that while broad, groundswell support and executive attention are important for creating a viable network, business success comes from sharing at the heart of the organization’s work.

How are these three levels (groundswell, heart, executive) of importance in your own collaborations?

Images courtesy of Yammer

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

“While coworking spaces might come pretty close to the ideal working space, at times they can also be spaces where some of the worst characteristics of a capitalist economy are being reproduced — just like in an ordinary workspace,” she writes. Independent work may solve many problems, but it doesn’t get rid of asymmetric relationships between those handing out work and those completing it, she states. What does she mean by this?

If there is a big difference between the partners in a work relationship, sometimes the stronger party gets all the advantages and benefits, while the weaker party has to bear the full risk and disadvantages.

Usually the strong partner is someone who is established and well connected. Often these people or companies are very good at communicating and selling, they act mainly as project managers, while contracting out the actual development or design work to other people. The subcontractors in turn are often newcomers who don’t have a big network, who are rather inexperienced and not as good at selling themselves and their work. Usually these people are happy that someone subcontracts them work and they don’t have to spend time on acquisition, communicating and networking. The relationship between the main contractor and the subcontractor can be win-win situation, but rather often it is not.

The result of this unequal balance of power, Pohler claims, can be impossible deadlines, insane hours, failure to pay for revisions to a project and extremely long lag times before payment for subcontractors. And coworking spaces, she feels, may be inadvertently making the problem worse. “It is easy to find young, skilled and motivated people as subcontractors, and it is easy to build relationships on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same and equal,” she writes.

Pohler may diagnose the problem in her article, but when it comes to solutions, she simply advocates for greater discussion of the issue and more openness in the community.

Is that an adequate solution, or do you think independent workers need to do more to protect themselves?

Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Hancock.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Report: Web Worker Survey 2010

IBM’s purchase of Worklight will allow it to offer customers a simple way to create apps that can run on all manner of devices on multiple platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Worklight, which has previously partnered with IBM, also offers an integrated development environment along with middleware, management and analytics. By using Worklight, IT staffs can also create secure connections between mobile devices and their enterprise IT systems.

The acquisition is set to close in the first quarter. The terms of the deal were not announced. Worklight will be moved into IBM’s Software Group.

The pick-up helps enhance IBM’s mobile portfolio and makes it more appealing to companies looking to leverage tablets and smartphones. In a recent IBM survey of 3,000 CIOs, three out of four respondents said mobility solutions was one of their top spending priorities.

In that same vein, IBM also unveiled a new software system called IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices. The software will help IT teams manage their exploding fleet of mobile devices, which are growing thanks to bring-your-own-device policies. IDC said that nearly half of all mobile devices in the workplace came from employees. With Endpoint Manager, companies will be able to remotely set policies, wipe data from devices, look for security holes and configure passcodes, encryption and virtual private network settings.  This will work on iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows devices as well as computers and servers.

The move to beef up IBM’s mobile credentials makes sense in a market that is moving increasingly in that direction. SAP bought Sybase in 2010 for $5.8 billion in part for Sybase’s mobile middleware and device management platform. Research in Motion recently unveiled a new device management and security tool called BlackBerry Mobile Fusion that allows companies to secure iOS and Android devices through BlackBerry Enterprise Servers. And Good Technology has been building up its business managing and securing enterprise devices and this past fall also introduced a new platform called Good Dynamics that allow companies, ISVs and developers to create and manage secure mobile apps using Good’s infrastructure.

“Our clients are under increased pressure to meet the growing demands of a workforce and customer base that now treat mobility as mission critical to their business,” said Marie Wieck, general manager, IBM application and infrastructure middleware.

Just as consumers have gone mobile and app crazy, it’s influencing companies, which are having to adapt. There’s still a good opportunity for competitors like IBM to help make sense of it all for companies and provide them with secure tools as they mobilize.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The rise of tablets in the enterprise
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Elance has grown pretty dramatically over the past few years, as more and more jobs move online and work becomes more virtual. To provide more value to its users, the company wants to do more than just connect employers and contractors. That’s why it has a virtual workroom that enables collaborative work and communications tools between them.

In their virtual workrooms, contractors can send messages, submit invoices, respond to to-do lists and other features. And now, Elance has added a new video chat feature to enable more “face-to-face” contact between collaborators, without users having to enter a whole different application to connect.

According to Elance VP of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Ved Sinha, the addition of video chat to the virtual workroom will reduce the friction that comes when employers and contractors work together. While many had previously interfaced through other applications, building the chat window directly into a contractor’s dashboard enables instant communication with the click of a button.

To do this, Elance uses Tokbox’s OpenTok video chat client, which enables businesses to embed video chat into their websites. While there are plenty of video chat offerings available on the market today, Sinha told me by phone that OpenTok was the only solution that allowed Elance to build video chat directly and seamlessly into the virtual workroom.

That was a big advantage for Elance, which wanted to ensure its users didn’t have to open a different client or application to get in touch with one another. And for its clients, the feature should enable better coordination and more productivity.

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• Report: The Enterprise Videoconference Landscape, 2010 – 2015
• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q1 2010
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

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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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The role of organizations, individuals and managers in the new workplace
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business