Collaboration

Coworking makes room for larger startups

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:28:37 +0000

Corporate remote employees, we recently reported, are increasingly joining the mix of freelancers and entrepreneurs at coworking spaces. But apparently that’s not the only new group making increasing use of the movement. Spaces have long been home to fledgling ventures with just a few employees, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting, that more larger startups are sticking with coworking even as they grow beyond the traditional small size associated with shared space.

Emily Maltby reports on a new style of jumbo spaces being set up to accommodate these larger startups, including the Cambridge Innovation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and RocketSpace Inc. in San Francisco:

In recent years, though, some new ventures have bucked the traditional model by creating pay-as-you-go setups for sizable start-ups.

Some of these spaces have vast, open floors that can be partitioned according to the size of a company, or enclosed offices with adjustable walls. And they often provide communal reception services, copiers and conference rooms—or even amenities like showers and massages.

Many entrepreneurs are turning to these spaces as a way to save on overhead as they expand, as well as maintain the communal feel of the business incubators where they launched their companies.

Though staying in communal space may be good for the budgets of these adolescent startups, and may be comforting to entrepreneurs used to the supportive community aspect of coworking, experts apparently warn their may also be downsides for businesses that fail to cut the apron strings and move out on their own. These include, the “difficulty of keeping secrets from rivals. And some critics worry that coworking for too long may hinder businesses from developing an individual identity,” writes Maltby.

Other startups in the space stealing your employees could also be an issue. “You have human-resources issues…. I don’t want another company to romance my guys away,” George Deeb, founder of start-up consulting firm Red Rocket Partners, told the WSJ.

Should firms with dozens of employees rather than a handful stick with communal office space?

Image courtesy of Flickr user novemberwolf.

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Remote work doesn’t have to be glamorous to be effective

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:06:41 +0000

Is remote work only for a select few? What demographic data we have on the phenomenon from the Telework Research Network has found existing telecommuters tend to be older, well paid and highly educated professionals. Meanwhile, a recent study suggested that while remote work boosted productivity on creative tasks, it generally reduced it for boring, rote activities.

These findings could suggest that remote work is best suited for senior-level folks and the highly educated – the designers, programmers and content producers that many of us generally picture when asked to imagine laptop-toting virtual workers. But outsides of cafes in places like San Francisco, there’s a whole other side of the remote work revolution going on, one that’s focused on lower skilled employees like customer service agents who are seeing their place of work move from call centers to home offices and living rooms.

Take Hertz’s “Journey to Home” program as an example. The rental car company originally housed its customer service agents in an Oklahoma City call center, but over the last few years has been transitioning to have nearly half of its agents working out of their homes. Why?

“From a disaster recovery perspective, if you put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket sits in the center of the United States where a lot of natural disasters can happen, you put yourself at risk for major interruptions to the business, so we decided that it would be good to have another center of gravity,” Joe Eckroth, Hertz’s CIO, told GigaOM.

Secondarily, he explains, “as you begin to mature a market where you’re already drawing a lot of the workforce, competition starts to rise. In Oklahoma City, a lot more call centers are coming in. Remote work allowed us to broaden the pool of people we could draw from. It’s allowed us to attract students, part-time workers, full-time people who couldn’t necessarily, because of life circumstances, travel every day to go to work.”

What started as a disaster preparedness and recruitment initiative has had plenty of side benefits, according to Eckroth. “It has exceeded our expectations for sure,” he says. “The actual performance results on the sales side and on the customer service side were in all categories as good as we were getting in a tightly managed call center and in I would say about half the metrics they were a little bit better — places like employee satisfaction. Productivity is as high and in some cases higher,” he says, and that’s not even including the sustainability gains from so many saved car trips (and the bonus to employees from not having to buy so much gas at about four dollars a gallon.)

Hertz’s experience shows that less glamorous remote initiatives can work, but Eckroth stresses that success requires careful thought and planning. “We took some of our best and brightest people and we made it their sole mission to make it work,” he says. “It wasn’t a part-time job. It wasn’t something on the side.” Hertz’s experience shows getting highly motivated, highly communicative managers is key, but so is getting the right employees, and they aren’t necessarily the same people who would thrive in a traditional call center.

“Anybody can try to work from home, but it takes a certain set of disciplines. It takes a different mentality for somebody to stay motivated, to be undistracted and succeed at home. If you just took the average guy in the call center and sent them home, there would probably be a fairly high failure rate,” Eckroth says, noting that in fact some of the Oklahoma City call center’s star employees tried remote work and subsequently requested to return “to the box,” as Eckroth refers to it.

To make sure Hertz hires folks with the right combination of a self-starter mentality and basic tech savvy, the company has set up a detailed profile of the kind of person it’s seeking, putting candidates through thorough testing to make sure they have the skills to succeed. “I don’t think we knew how different the hiring profile might be,” Eckroth admits. “We didn’t modify our initial hiring process enough to accommodate that, and so that’s something we learned pretty quickly over the course of the first year or so. We changed our competency model.”

Besides figuring out exactly what you’re looking for in at-home agents and testing stringently to make sure candidates have these qualities, is there any other recommendations Eckroth has for other firms contemplating taking agents out of the box and sending them home? “Benchmark,” Eckroth suggests, noting that more and more firms are taking a remote approach and have wisdom to share. “Go out and talk to some people who have done it and get their lessons learned.”

Also, ensure no one feels like an afterthought. “This is a part of the organization. Treat it as such. Agents at home are every bit as important as the guys sitting in the box. I do a periodic video for all agents in our customer care, but once in a while I will uniquely do it just for the at-home agents with a specific message to them. Call them out and recognize them for some of the unique things they do. They should always know that they’re a part of a thought-out strategy. Pull in some of the really good people. They can come in for a few days or a week and work on special projects. It makes them feel that much more part of the team and not like they’re just a contractor out there. If that mentality builds, you’ll begin to create a second-class citizenship and that can be a disaster.”

Should more companies consider letting their less highly skilled employees skip the drive in to the office and just stay home?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mrkathika.

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Chatter builds its social supercontinent with new real-time features

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:01:10 +0000

Salesforce, executive John Wookey told GigaOM earlier this year, is betting on social, envisioning a future where not just communication tools get a social rethink, but nearly every area of business.

“Over the next five years this will start sweeping through companies. In the same ways that Rypple has taken this model of social networking as a fundamental design point and applied it to performance management systems, I think you’re going to see it apply to a lot of systems, whether it’s recruiting, compensation or learning systems. I think it will eventually hit things like your financial budgeting and planning systems, your project systems, anything where the work is inherently social,” he said.

That’s a lot of social. But hopefully, in Saleforce’s vision of how things unfold, not a lot of different social tools. We spoke with to Dave King, director of product marketing for Chatter, about new real-time chat and screen sharing features for enterprise social network Chatter that the company is announcing today, and he explained that the overarching aim of the new additions to the product is to integrate “islands of communication” so that employees need not switch through multiple tools but can access this growing array of social processes through Chatter. Salesforce wants, in effect, to link these islands together and create a Pangaea of social with Chatter at its center.

Looking very much like a Gchat within Chatter, the new messaging tool lets workers message others, either singly or in groups of up to ten, within the organization (i.e. other Chatter users at the company) without having to switch windows or open another application. Your buddy list is automatically generated from all those you’re already connected to on Chatter. The in-browser screen sharing application is designed to replace the likes of WebEx for internal discussions. Both tools are freely available to all existing customers as of today, as well as those using the free version of the product.

This additional functionality is good news for current users, but it’s also interesting in what it indicates about where Salesforce sees social tools going. “Every business process has a combination of unstructured or social processes and structured processes,” King explains. “Let’s take recruiting. When I’m recruiting maybe I email a PDF of the resume around and I’m IMing people who interviewed the candidate to get their feedback, but all of those things are in different places.”

Chatter wants to be your portal into all those actions and to the increasing array of business areas that Wookey predicted are getting a social overhaul. “We think it all needs to be united. So let’s say your files are in SharePoint and maybe you have an HR system in a different place, Chatter, with our Chatter Connect API, can be the unifying social layer that really brings all those things together,” King says, who added that Salesforce is also hoping to enable collaboration with those external to Chatter through the platform in the future.

Rather than tools proliferating as more processes go social, Salesforce wants all of those additional functions to integrate with Chatter. That’s good for the company, of course, as their products become more tightly woven into ever more aspects of your business, but the message out of Salesforce is it’s also a matter of increased efficiency for the user.

Do you see an integrated platform model dominating the future of social, or are we more likely to see a profusion of “social islands” dominate the scene for a good while yet?

Image courtesy of Salesforce.

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Sidecar turns the simple phone call into a media sharefest

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:47:08 +0000

Yet another app has joined the growing ranks of over-the-top mobile VoIP services, but Sidecar is offering up a twist on the usual VoIP format. The San Francisco-based startup is using the voice call merely as the starting point to a richer media session, over which it is layering video, photo, location and contact information sharing features.

Services like video and location sharing certainly aren’t new, but they’re often trapped within their own dedicated apps. Sidecar’s premise is that those kind of sharing features are most useful when consumers are already engaged in a phone call, so it should only be a simple matter of hitting a button within your phone’s dialer to launch a video session or send the call’s recipient your street coordinates, said co-founder CEO Rob Williams, a RealNetworks and Openwave veteran.

“All of the cool stuff has happened on the data side of the phone,” Williams said. “I shouldn’t have to jump out of my voice call to share that stuff.”

The Android version of Sidecar app has been available in Google Play for the last several weeks as a beta app, but on Tuesday it launched the commercial versions of its iPhone and Android apps, both available as free downloads from their respective markets.

The Sidecar client integrates with the phone address book, and identifies individual users by their phone numbers, so if other sidecar users are among you contacts, the app recognizes them. Once a call a Sidecar session is established, the participants can just have a normal voice conversation, but the client presents them with a several collaboration choices.

The app can turn on the phone’s front or rear cameras to create a “see what I see” video session, and it allows a user to snap photos and share them. With another button tap, Sidecar can launch an interactive map showing the relative locations of the two speakers, either one of which can then designate a specific coordinates for a meetup. Users can share their own contact info or the contact info of any user in their respective address books. The app even has a chat service, called Whisper Text, which allows customers to send private text messages during the call.

Given that Sidecar is a peer-to-peer service, Williams is very conscious of the fact that the company needs to achieve a critical mass of users to make the app useful. To get maximize that network effect, Sidecar is trying to make its app the first place customers look to when placing any call. All Sidecar-to-Sidecar calls anywhere in the world are free (for now). Customers can initiate any call within the Sidecar client even if the recipient isn’t a Sidecar user, though none of the sharing features will be available.

If the caller is on a Wi-Fi network, Sidecar will turn launch an HD voice session — which the recipient receives as a regular voice call — for no charge to any U.S. or Canadian number. After the call ends, the recipient gets a text message, inviting him or her to download the app. If the caller is on the mobile network, Sidecar places a normal circuit-switched call through the carrier’s voice network.

Sidecar originally launched as SocialEyes in 2011, a Web-based video chat service, but the company soon shifted its focus to the smartphone. Along with Williams, the company was launched by RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, and is funded by Ignition Partners and the Webb Investment Network as well as Glaser himself.

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ClearSlide offers painless pitching for sales pros, achieves impressive growth

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:41:54 +0000

Even in a pre-internet world of cubicles, carbon copies and universally co-located teams, sales folks were the original remote employees, often living a road warrior lifestyle that saw them roving from the office to meet with clients and pitch products. The introduction of web-based tools changed some aspects of a life in sales – CRMs evolved, for example — but “sales reps used a hodgepodge of different solutions,” to communicate with clients, according to Jim Benton, COO and co-founder of ClearSlide.

Created three years ago along with fellow Evite alum Al Lieb, ClearSlide aims to update sales for the wired present, rescuing reps from thumb drives, massive attachments and clunky web conferencing solutions, offering a simple, cloud-based solution for sales pros to share content either over email, during a live pitch or at an in-person presentation. Teams upload all their decks, videos and other content to ClearSlide (the product doesn’t include authoring), which generates a branded link that a prospect can click to view the material in a quick, clean environment, no downloading required. Reps can also lead prospects through the material, interacting with rich media such as calculators or live web pages within it and pulling up additional materials to answer prospects’ objections.

“When we looked at the market, all the investment in the space has been in CRM. There’s really nothing for sales to help them communicate with customers. We saw a big need there,” Lieb told GigaOM. His company’s approach to filling that gap appears to be working, with ClearSlide announcing a handful of new customers today, including CareerBuilder, Gannett., ShareThis and Wayfair, as well as revenue growth of 400 percent in the last year. Expedia, Yahoo, Amazon are already customers and ClearSlide received $11 million in series A funding led by Greylock Partners in September of last year.

Of course, ClearSlide isn’t the only company helping folks share presentations. WebEx, GoToMeeting and SlideRocket offer some of the same capabilities, but ClearSlide is more specifically focused on sales, combining tools for email and in-person presenting, as well as the virtual pitch. “Most of the solutions in the space are designed around web conferencing, WebEx for example,” explains Lieb. “One of the things we think is unique about ClearSlide is we have a broad horizontal package that ties it all together. It’s really email we’re competing with.” Plus, ClearSlide offers analytics.

Send a link to prospects and ClearSlide will tell you not only when they open it but how long they spend on each slide, as well as aggregating data on a specific deck to show managers what’s getting looked at and what’s being ignored. “We’re giving sales reps back-end data that’s really actionable, so we’re helping them better service their prospects by understanding how they have engaged with the content. Sales guys are able to follow up smarter,” says Benton.

It’s a big reason online home goods retailer Wayfair chose ClearSlide, according to Andrew Garcia, local media manager for the company. He runs a small team within Wayfair that sells media to brick and mortar stores that has been using ClearSlide for a couple of years, and he says the ability to know exactly what his prospects are spending time on has been valuable. “We think where ClearSlide wins for us is really as a sales intelligence tool,” he says. “We end up selling smarter. For my sales guys, it’s important to them to know the right time to follow up with their prospects. In the case of ClearSlide, we actually know when prospects have been looking at our email decks. In the old world, you’d have someone maybe badgering you day after day– ‘Did you look at my deck?’ – but now we just know, which is great.”

“And we’re selling more efficiently because we just know what topics to address,” he adds. “We see the prospect looking at a particular slide and say, OK, the prospect is interested in a particular testimonial so we have to be sure to bring that up when we talk to them.” A review of the last six months of sales revealed at least half involved ClearSlide at some time during the process, he notes.

The analytics may win over the cool heads of sales managers, but the product wins the hearts of sales pros in the trenches and their distant prospects with its elegant content sharing, according to Benton. “There’s a little bit more of a warmth to this because you don’t have a lot of technology in the way. It’s just the visuals and the conversation,” he says. The result? No matter the distance, “you feel like you’re just sitting next to somebody.”

ClearSlide users out there, what’s been your personal experience with the platform – have you found any drawbacks?

Image courtesy of ClearSlide.

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European companies embracing enterprise social, reaping rewards, report shows

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:49:38 +0000

Pundits have been chattering about enterprise social media for a while, but previous research showed that despite the hype these technologies had a long way to go before they were fully embraced by business. Now a new report indicates that adoption of social tools and the realization of their much discussed benefits may be firmly underway, in Europe at least.

The report by branding agency Millward Brown, and sponsored by Google, is based on a poll of 2,700 professionals in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and comes to conclusions that will get enterprise social advocates excited. “The results… clearly show that not only are social tools being used widely within business today, but that those who are using them are already reaping the benefits,” declares the report’s forward written by Sebastien Marotte, VP of Google Enterprise, EMEA.

First off, it should be noted that the report includes both consumer social products like LinkedIn and Facebook used for business purposes and social tools geared specifically for organizations under the banner ‘enterprise social’. So what are the details?

Some of the most encouraging findings about enterprise social concern exactly who is using the tools. The report found that high-growth companies (defined as those with more than 10 percent growth in 2011) are making the greatest use of social tools, with 81 percent of these dynamic companies that employ enterprise social reporting these tools have significantly impacted growth and 80 percent telling pollster they saw benefits to teams’ collaboration and knowledge sharing. “Frequent users of in-house social tools are more than twice as likely to be working in high growth companies,” says the report, though professionals in Germany and Sweden seem to be less likely to utilize enterprise social.

“The better the performance of a company, the more likely they are to be using social-media tools,” Allan Hyde, senior account director at Millward Brown, told the Wall Street Journal, though the paper notes the report does not attempt to demonstrate the bottom line impact of these social tools but instead offers subjective opinions about them. Hyde concedes that, “it may well be that the sort of companies that adopt social media tools are the sort of companies that are successful anyway. We are not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea.”

Not only were those at high performing companies more likely to use social tools, but the highest performing individuals were also more likely to adopt enterprise social. Senior managers, somewhat surprisingly, were also more likely to be using social tools than more junior employees. The report finds:

86 percent of frequent users have recently been promoted, compared to 61 percent of non- users.
Frequent users are happier in their jobs with 38 percent claiming to be highly satisfied compared to 18 percent of non-users.
Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of senior managers are using social tools at least once a week, compared to 49 percent of those in more junior roles.
Senior managers who report using social tools, claim they are already improving productivity (76 percent), knowledge sharing among dispersed teams (79 percent) and the ability to quickly find information (72 percent).
76 percent of senior managers believe businesses that embrace social tools will grow faster than those who ‘ignore’ the technology, and 53 percent believe that businesses will not survive unless they embrace social.

If you’re interested in the full report, you can download it for free here.

Do you think a similar survey in the U.S. would yield similar results?

Image courtesy of Flickr user andrewasmith.

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Olympics causing remote work controversy in Britain

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:03:51 +0000

With the London Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparation by organizers, the host city, the athletes and security forces. But this year there’s one other great wave of pre-Olympics news items breaking across Britain’s media—surprisingly controversial telecommuting stories.

Just this week interest turned to Britain’s civil servants who are being urged to work remotely to avoid adding to the expected congestion on the city’s already packed roads and trains. The announcement, which might seem ho-hum in some tech-savvy circles, raised a few eyebrows in Britain with the Daily Mail declaring government workers get “a gold medal for skiving!” (the British English equivalent of slacking off) for being allowed to telecommute for seven weeks this summer. The article notes that “business leaders” are complaining about the probable reduction in useful government work that the policy will bring.

“Business groups criticized plan that has led to fears of a massive reduction in government work as the country tries to pull itself out of recession,” says the paper. “They said it sent out the dangerous message that Britain would close down for almost two months,” it continues, quoting Pierre Williams, from the Federation of Small Businesses, as saying: “A lot of private sector workers will feel rather surprised that the public sector have decided to work from home during the Olympic games.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister was forced to deny that staff would be “skiving” at home, reassuring the public that no less work would get done. Meanwhile, other stories are offering businesses looking to offer staff options, tips on how to make flexible working successful.

With study after study confirming that remote work actually boosts productivity for most people and most tasks, the most surprising fact about the boom in remote work this summer in London may be the fact that’s it’s controversial at all, revealing to converted virtual work fans the deep well of skepticism that still exists in substantial pockets of the business community.

In four years when the Olympics are held again, will remote work have become so mainstream that a bit of an uptick during the games will be far less remarked upon?

Image courtesy of Flickr user surreynews.

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Author Paul Miller on The Digital Workplace and the evolution of the office

Chris Albrecht — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:30:19 +0000

In his new book, The Digital Workplace, author Paul Miller doesn’t hail the death of the traditional office, vanquished by a rise in Web workers. Rather, he sees a more symbiotic relationship between the physical and digital work spaces.

The traditional office has reached an evolutionary plateau, according to Miller, but the digital tools we use to communicate both inside and outside of the cubicle will continue to improve to create more visceral experiences for the workforce. At the same time, Miller believes that the physical office remains important to provide social glue for the organization and head off total isolation of its employees.

Miller sat down with us for a brief video interview to talk about some of the key concepts in his book as well as the evolution of the digital workspace.

Watch this video for free on Collaboration

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ProofHQ CEO: Remote work is bad for startups? Oh, please!

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:54:39 +0000

Remote work may be going increasingly mainstream with more and more companies letting staff work flexibly, but as with any major shift in how we work, there are bound to be holdouts. And the start-up scene is home to its fair share. Early-stage companies, particularly in the tech sector, have a long-standing mythology of (usually young and personally unencumbered) teams sleeping under their desks to get products to launch, with many wearing the hothouse atmosphere and extreme hours as a badge of honor. Remote working still raises eyebrows among some.

Zaarly exec Shane Mac, for example, recently published a piece in VentureBeat, which we highlighted here on GigaOM, arguing that a remote set-up stinks for startups who need their staff in close proximity to form a company culture and generate the maximum number of ideas by sparking their thinking off each other. Mac makes a compelling case for the usefulness of physically close teams, but not everyone in startups is buying it.

ProofHQ, a British company that sells tools to help review design work, for example, has been remote from day one. “The company has literally never had an office with employees in it,” founder and CEO Mat Atkinson told GigaOM, explaining that having had an earlier experience starting a company with VC backing, he opted to bootstrap ProofHQ and avoid venture money, necessitating he skip the office as a budget-saving measure. Plus, he found a development team in distant Poland and wanted to be able to serve customers globally right from the outset. The result is a team spread from the west coast of America to the Middle Eastern country of Qatar.

So did he experience the squeeze on ideas and the less binding company culture that Mac predicts? “From our experience it just simply wasn’t the case,” says Atkinson, who uses constant Skype chats, regular video calls and daily scrums for each area of the business to keep his team collaborating and innovating. He also insists on regular face-to-face meet-ups for the team.

“I do understand when people say face to face matters and I agree with that. We make an effort to do things face to face both virtually by video conferencing, as well getting together in person, but I disagree when people say it’s the only way to make it happen,” he says, though he concedes that working at a distance is tougher on managers. “Remote working works really well for the team, but if you’re managing people, you have to put more effort into it. I would say it takes probably 20 percent more effort.”

Besides admitting that a distributed setup is tougher on managers, Atkinson also acknowledges that those looking for venture money might have a reason to shy away from a remote set-up. “If you’re looking to go down the venture capital route then your VCs will probably want you to be co-located and co-located close to them,” he says. “I know that’s breaking down more and more but I think VCs are still skeptical of companies that work remotely.”

But it’s not just VCs who Atkinson sees changing their minds about remote work. According to him, skeptics like Shane Mac are slowly going to the way of the dinosaurs. “There has been a real transition in the perception that people have of working remotely. In the early days it was seen as kind of odd — it’s never going to work. Now customers that we talk to about it are very interested. I have quite a lot of other early-stage technology companies wanting to talk about how we’ve managed the business, and it’s just not seen as weird. When we recruit now, people see it as a positive rather than a negative or a neutral, so I think there’s a massive change in people’s perceptions at all levels.”

Within five years, Atkinson feels, remote work will be as unremarkable as cubicles and laptops seem now – even for startups — and its posts like this, discussing the issue as contentious, rather than the practice itself, that will seem odd.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy of Flickr user dierken.

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Design tips for home offices in small spaces

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:03:58 +0000

Constant connection and the blurring of the lines between rest and work that it sometimes causes is one of the clearest downsides to the otherwise pretty awesome phenomenon of remote and flexible working. Tech tools that block distractions can help keep the spheres separate and give your brain a chance to recharge, as can shifting company culture to encourage rejuvenating off-time. But can space design also play a role?

If you have a huge pad then keeping your spaces for work and for chilling physically separate is a non-issue – just locate them in different parts of your home and simply close the door on your home office when you’re done for the day. But what if you’re an urban dweller or otherwise living in tight quarters for budgetary, environmental or lifestyle reasons? How can you keep your work life from invading spaces that should be used for chilling?

Design site Apartment Therapy tackled this issue recently, citing a clever strategy an Australian design firm used to solve this issue in a Melbourne apartment. Nexus Designs created what the blog dubs, “a top secret slide-open home office,” using a moveable door that’s artfully camouflaged to appear like just another wall when closed (pictured — check out Apartment Therapy for a full slide show of images). The result is a secret space both James Bond and design aficionados would be proud of. The flexible space solves the issue of being “forced to work in the place where you normally relax and kick back to watch zombie flicks,” as well as doubling as a guest bedroom.

Of course, professionally designed secret walls don’t come cheap, so Apartment Therapy notes that the general principals that make this solution successful can be applied to come up with cheaper alternatives. The blog boils it down to three essential considerations:

Keep it subtle
Create fine lines between spaces
Never underestimate the power of lighting

The post suggests curtains might replace fancy sliding doors for those on more modest budgets and goes on to double underline the lighting issue, stressing that you should “be judicious with lighting. Make sure when the walls are down that both rooms can flow into each other, but when separated, they can function independently as well.”

How have you used design to keep work and relaxation separate?

Images courtesy of Earl Carter for Nexus Designs.

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