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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Why? Barrie explained that as hard as it is for perpetually plugged-in Europeans and Americans to imagine, only about 30 percent of the world’s seven billion inhabitants are online, leaving billions of potential Freelancer.com customers out there yet to get online. In Asia, for instance, internet penetration is still at a modest 21 percent, leaving some 825 million people yet to get connected.

Getting those folks onto the internet will be great for them (we’ve already seen scattered cases of “million dollar freelancers” who have built seven-figure incomes off platforms like Freelancer.com in the developing world) but it will be pretty awesome for Barrie’s business as well, he believes. The flood of newly wired workers will provide a huge and growing customer base of hungry and driven potential freelancers for his site, which already has about 3.5 million users around the world. Barrie’s company charges them and job posters a hefty but variable commission to connect on the site.

Dismissing fears that the trends his site is banking on will mean fewer jobs in the West, Barrie is even optimistic that this explosion in online outsourcing will be good for those of us in developed countries –provided we develop an entrepreneurial mindset and start putting the huge pool of cheap talent across the world to work realizing our ideas and supporting our businesses for, essentially, peanuts. While this inexpensive labor pool may be good news for someone hoping to get a business off the ground on a shoestring, the ability to get stuff done at low cost may be cold comfort for those who are less entrepreneurial by education or character and would like to remain employed. But Barrie seems less than moved by these worries.

Is there anything Barrie isn’t bullish on? In short, online labor platforms that look to compete by serving a specialized sector or targeted geographic location. The likes of Zaarly and ExpertBids “are all going to fail,” according to Barrie because of their inability to scale sufficiently to make enough to be attractive business opportunities. Want to take in a million dollars? Then ten million in business needs to go through the site – the equivalent of something like $100 million in U.S. labor costs if you’re dealing in lower wages overseas – and Barrie just doesn’t see the market being there for niche sites. Those that aim for geographic specificity in the style of TaskRabbit will struggle to reproduce their success in one city in another a bit down the highway, making expanding the business a gigantic money sink, in Barrie’s opinion.

Do you think Barrie’s optimism is well founded?

Image courtesy of Freelancer.com.

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Do their expectations line up with those of freelancers and entrepreneurs? Do they get as much out of the coworking experience? The Second Global Coworking Survey aimed to answer these questions, with the results published recently in DeskMag.

The findings confirm that the number of employees working out of coworking spaces is steadily increasingly, currently making up about a third of coworking membership in the U.S. And it turns out these corporate coworkers come to their spaces with different problems and experience group working differently. Though all groups agree about some fundamentals – freelancers, entrepreneurs and employees are all satisfied with coworking at the same high rates, the survey found.

“Social networks are expanded, isolation is reduced and productivity increased – if not quite as markedly as the other two groups,” writes Carsten Foertsch of employee members in DeskMag. Everyone is satisfied and more plugged in, but the three groups focus on slightly different benefits of this sociability with entrepreneurs understandably more excited about the potential for interdisciplinary work, while freelancers, again unsurprisingly, see the highest gains in productivity.

What’s most the most important benefit for employees? This answer might comes as more of a shock. Despite usually having years of experience sharing offices with colleagues behind them, employees actually enjoy the social benefits of coworking more than other types of members. “Somewhat surprisingly, employees most often appreciate being a member of a community,” Foertsch reports. This is so even though they’re the least participatory members, making the least use of coworking space events.

Is there anything corporate types don’t like about coworking? The noise, apparently. “Volume… is an issue – with almost one in three bothered by the noise levels of the new workplace,” according to Foertsch, though unlike other types of coworkers, employees are content with spaces only opening during regular business hours.

All in all the results indicate that coworking is beneficial to corporate remote workers (though implying less than flattering things about the social vibe at most offices in the process) and offer no reason these three groups can’t play well together going forward. Even if corporate types aren’t the most actively engaged coworkers and are looking for slightly quieter facilities, it seems they’re fundamentally after the same things as independents and entrepreneurs.

Coworking space members, do all three groups agree on what they want from your coworking space?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kheel Center, Cornell University.

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And anyone who has ever worked with a colleague half-a-world away knows of the occasional necessity of late night calls to bridge time differences, but besides knowing how to brew yourself a strong cup of coffee and operate your alarm clock, is there anything you can do to make working across many time zones less painful and more productive?

Erran Carmel, a management professor at the American University Kogod School of Business, has actually written a whole book on the issue entitled I’m Working While They’re Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions. He also recently authored a guest post on blog Workshifting boiling down his advice for those he calls “timeshifters.” These folks are “globalized workers who are comfortable timeshifting and traveling across time zones,” according to Carmel who has a few suggestions for those looking to join their ranks, including:

Breaking the email chain. The email chain begins when, in asynchronous communication, the sender initiates a message, and the receiver on the other side of the globe asks for clarification. The original sender attempts to explain, but the receiver, still confused, sends another request for clarification. Meanwhile, an entire week has passed. Zoners stop this chain early by picking up the phone to clarify the message and move the task along.

Carmel also points those confused about syncing up their schedules with distant coworkers to a handful of useful apps. Timeanddate.com, for example, offers everything from clocks giving you the current time just about anywhere to a time zone map and a list of world holidays – it’s cluttered but useful. World Time Buddy creates a dashboard that shows the time in multiple locations to help you plan meetings, while Every Time Zone does basically the same thing with a prettier but slightly harder to read slider mechanism.

Another new, simple app along these lines is SameTimeAs, a dead simple solution dreamed up by Will Rodenbusch, one half of a globe trotting couple of location independents. As you might guess from the name, the gizmo simply tells you what time it is in location X when it is a given time in location Y.

Amidst all this talk of the hassles of timeshifting though, it’s important to note that many professionals who work across time zones report benefits as well as drawbacks. Jason Johnson, who co-founded BlueSprig with a technical team in China, has said that the massive time zone difference provides a great mix of collaborative overlap and uninterrupted periods of concentration.

“I wake up about 6:00am. It’s around 10:00pm in China and generally they’re still working. I have a couple of hours overlap with them and then they go offline for eight hours. But then they come back online just about the time that my two-and-a-half-year old goes to bed and we can review things together. The really neat thing is, I will go to bed, say, 10 or 11:00pm. I will have shot over some requests or some feedback and they then have seven hours to work on those deliverables, so that when I get up at 6:00am I have an inbox full of messages,” he told GigaOM earlier this year.

“The beauty of this is we operate 24 hours a day, and we have periods of being online at the same time to collaborate but we also have the benefit of these blocks of time where they can do what they do best without any interruption. During my workday I’m not getting all these emails. I can focus. Likewise, when they’re cranking away, I’m asleep and not bugging them. It works really well,” he said, putting a positive spin on timeshifting.

Have you found ways to make timeshifting work for you or is it pretty much a nightmare in your experience?

Image courtesy of Flickr user leoplus.

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It’s not IBM or Cisco, but in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. According to Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for collaboration apps (with whom I spoke on Tuesday), you can see the evidence of Google’s maturity in recent product launches such as Google Drive and BigQuery. They’re not half-baked computer science projects in the guise of applications, but fully baked products that have undergone lots of internal scrutiny.

Where does it live and what should it cost?

Today, Google isn’t just thinking about the technology when it releases products, but also about things such as pricing and ensuring applications stick around. It’s also naturally limiting the products it rolls out, Rochelle said, always asking, even of cool technology, “Where does it live?” Someone has to sponsor it, and it has to have a purpose.

That’s probably a good starting point considering the heat Google has taken over the past year for some significant product changes. CEO Larry Page’s “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy, for example, might help boost the company’s bottom line, but users of some experimental services that got the axe weren’t too happy. And then there was Google Wave.

Users of App Engine, Google’s cloud computing application platform, were downright furious when the service lost its “alpha” label last September after about three years. Along with the status came new pricing model that threatened to raise the monthly bills for their apps — many of which weren’t generating much money in the first place — through the roof. For developers, it was re-architect your application for efficiency, pay a much larger bill or rebuild your application — built especially to run on App Engine — and take it elsewhere.

Rochelle acknowledged that some of Google’s past actions have resulted in “a valid concern when things are first introduced” that they won’t stick around.

“Do no evil” … and be prudent

However, with Drive, Rochelle said, the seven or so years it was in development actually resulted in a product that users can rest assured isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to suddenly double in price. The technology is right and the team didn’t take lightly the task of developing a sustainable pricing model. Google is getting better at this kind of stuff, he said. “It matters to people.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that a market built up around Drive while it stayed tucked away inside the Googleplex instead of being rushed out the door. Box.net and Dropbox, “gave credibility to every layer of the concept,” Rochelle said.

Much of what makes Drive such a robust product off the bat also applies to BigQuery, Google’s recently released big data tool querying huge data sets via a spreadsheet interface. Although many users might never need to move beyond the free 100GB the service allows them to store and analyze, users paying for BigQuery can analyze up to 70TB of data.

BigQuery is targeting “big, hairy, audacious problems that you otherwise couldn’t solve,” said Rochelle, who spent years on Wall Street and knows the types of demands serious users can put on spreadsheets. And because it’s targeting users like those on Wall Street, or in pharmaceutical firms or genomics labs, BigQuery came with a service level agreement from day one.

You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette

Google’s minimalist booth at Interop.

Actually, it’s Google’s quest to move beyond consumers and attract enterprise users that might be most responsible for its newfound maturity. Although Apps and everything else non-advertising is just a sliver of Google’s overall business, Rochelle said it’s a “significantly big business compared to its peers [in the collaboration and productivity software space].” In some ways, he said, “It’s shocking that we’re at that point.”

But competing against the likes of Microsoft and other large vendors comes at a cost. For one thing, there’s the constant litigation, customer poaching and public potshots all in an attempt to gain every possible edge over competitors. On the product side, although large customers will actually pay for products that work, they’re dead serious about those products working as advertised. For Google, that means no more (or at least a lot less) messing around.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Michael Drager.

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During that time, the participating finalists will learn how to pitch properly and learn the basics of good interpersonal skills at Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road headquarters. Once that’s all done, they’ll hop up onstage on June 20 to present their ideas to our audience of about 900 investors, executives, media and fellow entrepreneurs and more than 20,000 online video viewers. Check out last year’s finalists here, and read about DotCloud, the eventual winner.

If you are a startup in stealth mode, with a product, or just think you are all that and bag of chips, and you want in on the stage time and Sequoia session, then get busy and apply today! The deadline to apply for the Launchpad is May 16, although we’d love to see your application sooner. We’ll disclose the finalists on May 29 and you will present on June 20 at the Mission Bay Conference center in San Francisco.

At the show you’ll have the chance to meet some of our awesome speakers such as Werner Vogels of Amazon, Steve Herrod of VMware, and executives from Microsoft, Rackspace, and more. Plus, we’ll have cookies. And who doesn’t like cookies? Entrepreneurs, you still have a week, so check out the application and get busy.

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Personal recommendations are great and, as with any job, past performance is a nice indication of a potential employees’ abilities, but the interview, as ever, is key. You’ll need to ask the usual questions to get at the candidate’s suitability for the work but you’ll also need to probe how the candidate will handle the remote team set-up. Handily, there are questions that can help.

The easiest way to gauge if a potential employee will thrive on a distributed team is to find out if they’ve worked this way before and how they handled being remote. Wayne Turmel, who writes the Connected Manager column for Management Issues suggests wording your question on this topic, this way:

What has been your experience working as part of a remote team? Shut up at that point and let them answer. Keep the question open. They may tell you about technology challenges, they may tell you about working relationships, let them start where they are most comfortable then you can drill down.

Finding out a little bit about their work setup (Do they work at a coworking space? A home office? What’s it like?) is also valuable. “Describe your remote office and virtual workday?” CIO Insight suggests asking in a recent slideshow on interviewing for remote posts. But even more important, according to Turmel, is understanding their approach to technology and communication. He advises asking:

What technology have you used in the past as part of working remotely? This is a good question for several reasons. You’ll get a sense of their comfort level (listen carefully to tone of voice. Does their tongue drip with venom when discussion firewalls and connection speeds?)

You may also learn about other tools they’ve used that can be of value to your existing team. New hires are often thought of as blank slates, but people bring valuable experience to your group.

Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO and Founder of FlexJobs concurs, suggesting in an article covering the whole process of remote hiring, that interviewers ask: “What methods of communication do you prefer?” She also recommends asking candidates how they prioritize tasks and stay focused. CIO Insights also suggests asking directly about a potential hire’s ability to prioritize but also offers more specific questions to get at this sort of information, including:

• What did you do when a manager was absent and you had to make a decision? To get at an employee’s ability to be independent in a virtual work environment.
• How do you manage working for more than one supervisor? To get at their ability to juggle assignments for multiple parties.
• How do you stay current? To get a sense of whether they’re proactive and keep up to date with your industry.

What other questions have you found to be effective when interviewing for a virtual team?

Image courtesy of Flickr user bpsusf.

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Enter Squadmail, which has one of those ideas that seems quite obvious in retrospect: shared, cross-client email folders for collaboration. Or, as the company is fond of putting it, Dropbox for email.

The Berlin startup is bringing the service into public beta on Tuesday, following a successful private testing period. This is a service that can prove useful in both personal and business contexts, and the company says it’s been surprised at the level of early corporate takeup.

Just two months after sending out the first invite to a corporate user and with $0 marketing spending, we recently acquired the 500th company (with many more on the beta wait list right now),” Squadmail co-founder Philipp Mayer told me.

The idea is simple: Squadmail creates and syncs folders that are shared between IMAP mail servers, making the choice of client irrelevant. Each folder gets its own email address, and users can also drag emails from their personal folders into the shared folder, removing the need for CCs and forwards.

And the uses are also easily apparent. Businesses with heterogeneously-equipped staff? Friends trying to organise a shared flat rental? People who want easily-dumpable pseudo-accounts for newsletter signups? Check, check and check.

Readily international

According to Mayer, the private testing period has already drawn in active users in more than 70 countries. Squadmail is obviously a readily international service, but the bulk of the takeup has come from the U.S., and that’s already the core market for the small German firm.

“Right now, Germans make up less than 10 percent of our user base with a steadily declining share and U.S. users are rapidly approaching 50 percent,” he said. “When we first launched an early alpha in January we focused almost all our marketing efforts on Germans, thinking our chances were better with local users. But it turned out to be incredibly hard to gain momentum in Germany with beta conversion rates 50 percent below average and low activity rates for German users.”

As you can tell, Mayer is unusually confident about sharing stats on his product’s usage. Fair enough: there’s a lot to chew on there, particularly when it comes to that keen corporate takeup (half of which comprises small IT companies, with the remainder a mix of Fortune 500s, universities and NGOs).

Corporate users, who are not charged yet but will soon be targeted with additional paid-for features, are around 50 percent more active than users with private accounts, he says. It also seems that two-thirds of business users’ folders are shared with email contacts, with on average three people sharing each folder.

And the remaining third? Just one user — there, it appears the customers are using the folders for ‘Bacn’ mail.

There are a couple of downsides, such as the fact that the folder’s email address must currently end in ‘@box.squadmail.com’ (although the team says it will allow customers to use their own domains soon). The biggest limitation that immediately strikes me is that you can’t send emails from that shared folder/email address to someone outside the sharing group, but that will only be a barrier for some.

For the rest of us, Squadmail may be pushing it with its “Enjoy email again” tagline, but it’s certainly a tool that makes email that bit more relevant in this collaborative age.

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“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

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Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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