To capture the sheer quantity of joy telecommuting brings, Staples Advantage asked 140 telecommuters what they would give up to continue working from home, and it turns out they were willing to make some significant sacrifices:

• 54 percent were willing to sacrifice their favorite TV show.
• 48 percent would give up an hour of sleep.
• 40 percent would stop eating a favorite food.
• And 40 percent would even be willing to take a pay cut.

How much was telecommuting worth to those who were willing to give up a portion of their salary? 74 percent said they’d take a 2-5 percent pay cut, while 20 percent say they would part with 10 percent of their pay.

To dig deeper and find out why telecommuters valued the ability to work flexibly so highly, Staples also asked a series of questions about the benefits of telecommuting. The responses revealed exactly how beneficial many workers find telecommuting to be:

• Respondents said their stress levels have dropped 25 percent on average since working from home.
• 76 percent of telecommuters said that without a commute to worry about they are willing to put in extra time on work.
• The same percentage said they are more loyal to their company since telecommuting.
• More than 80 percent said they now maintain a better work-life balance.
• 73 percent of those polled claim to eat healthier when working from home.

What would you be willing to give up to keep the right to work flexibly?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user bingbing

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It turns out there is research not only on the comparative happiness levels of office-based versus remote workers, but also on the reasons for the difference between the two. Last year a paper published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research aimed to tease out exactly why those who telecommute at least half the time are more satisfied with their jobs. Some of the explanations are no surprise, including:

Spending less than 50 percent of the week in the collocated office affords more flexibility and aids in the balance of work and personal roles, which teleworkers find satisfying.

Telework is associated with less frequent information exchange, which relates to lower stress from meetings and interruptions.

Other findings might come as a shock to those who fear that working from home or the local coffee shop is sure to harm interpersonal relationships with colleagues. The researchers revealed that we actually like our co-workers more when we see them less. Forget loneliness and isolation, the effect of putting a little distance between team members seems to be at least a partial inoculation against the annoyances of office politics:

Teleworkers are less likely to perceive that general political behavior is pervasive in the organization, and in turn are less likely to perceive that people conform to political behavior in order to get ahead. Being less exposed to, or perceiving less of, this type of going along to get ahead behavior is linked to higher job satisfaction.

We conclude that decreased face-time in the office affords a distinct advantage by limiting teleworkers’ exposure to political behavior, or at least allowing them to feel removed enough to downplay its prevalence… Less frequent interaction with others may be desirable.

Hell is other people, according to the famous misanthropic quote from Sartre. Perhaps this applies at the office as well.

Do you think web work is a good way to eliminate some of the stress and distraction of office politics? 

Image courtesy Flickr user benjaminasmith

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If you’re not the type to go in for bunker building, there are alternatives, according to a new book by London Business School professor Lynda Gratton out this week in the U.S. The Shift tackles the broad forces impacting the way we work, including globalization, demography, technology and energy, and offers advice on how to keep your career going in a time of great change.

Gratton took to her blog recently to give American readers a sneak peak (the book is already out in the U.K.) offering ten ways to future proof your career. The lengthy post is worth a read in full, but some of her suggestions are particularly resonant for web workers (or cubicle warriors plotting their escape to the web worker lifestyle), including:

Learn to be virtual. We are entering a period of hyper technological advancements — avatars, holographs and telepresence are all just around the corner. If you are a young ‘digital native’ you are already connected to this – but if you are over 30 the chances are you are already behind on your understanding. Work will become more global and that means that increasingly you will be working with people in a virtual way — it’s crucial that you learn to embrace these developments and don’t let yourself become obsolete through lack of technical savvy.

Be prepared to strike out on your own. There will always be work with big companies — but increasingly the real fun will come from setting up your own company. We are entering the age of the ‘micro-entrepreneur’ whenever decreasing costs of technology will significantly reduce the barriers to getting off the ground, and when talented people across the world will be connected and keen to work with each other.

Build the Big Ideas Crowd. The future is about innovation, and sometime your best, most innovative ideas will come as you talk and work with people who are completely different from you — perhaps they have a different mindset, or come from a different country — or are younger. It is this wide network, the ‘big ideas crowd’ that will be a crucial source of inspiration. Make sure that you don’t limit yourself to working only with those who are just like you.

Become a producer rather than a simple consumer. The old deal at work:  ‘I work, to earn money, to buy stuff, that makes me happy’ is rapidly becoming obsolete. Engaging in meaningful work where you can rapidly learn will become a priority (although fair pay will always be important). So think hard about sharing and great experiences rather than simply building your working life around consuming.

A future of work that stresses location independence, an array of advanced tech tools to keep connected, engagement in meaningful work and creative collaboration? Sounds like it’s right up WebWorkerDaily’s alley.

Do you think Gratton’s prescriptions for the future are solid?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user krupp

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Most of these helpful folks are well-connected to a large network of people, but they don’t build this network by being selfish and difficult to work with. The people I know who fit this mold are usually generous and “pay it forward” in return for the help they’ve received from other people. Paying it forward is something I’ve tried to achieve in my professional life, and here are a few ways that I do it:

• Career mentoring. While formal mentoring programs work well for other people, they always seem a little forced to me. However, I’m often happy to sit down with people just starting their career or moving into a new one to provide suggestions and ideas for ways to improve. If nothing else, I can share what’s worked for me over the years and hope that they find something useful in it.
• Sounding board. I like to spend time talking to people who are working on interesting, innovative projects. In most cases, I learn something from them while also providing them with some feedback. Providing a fresh perspective and looking at something for the first time can often uncover things you miss when you’re very close to a subject.
• Spontaneous connections. Not everyone asks for help or even knows that they could use some assistance. When I see someone struggling with a project or activity, I’ll try to make a spontaneous connection to someone I think might be able to help. However, this only works if it’s unobtrusive and not too pushy. In these cases, I’ll usually point out that I know someone who has been through something similar, then offer to make an introduction. This leaves it up to them to decide if they want the introduction or want to continue on their own. I know that I’ve been grateful for similar connections in the past.
• Organize events. Organizing in-person events and meetups where people can connect and collaborate is another way to pay it forward. We’ve all attended events organized by other people and a good way to contribute back to the community is by organizing our own events, or helping someone else organize one. This gives other people a place to connect with like-minded people while giving you some additional visibility at the same time.
• Community participation. There are many existing online communities where you can contribute some expertise or be helpful as time permits. Answering questions or providing some other help as part of an online community is a great way for busy people to pay it forward and help others while making fewer commitments that they might not be able to fulfill when time is tight.

How do you pay it forward?

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The IPO of professional social network LinkedIn is probably the most significant web stock issue since Google, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on LinkedIn’s impact on the world of work. Though ostensibly a general-purpose social networking tool for professionals, and nowhere near as big as Facebook in terms of number of users (LinkedIn has some 100 million users, compared with over 500 million on Facebook), LinkedIn has become an important tool for connecting job seekers and employers, notably introducing several key innovations that repositioned the standard social network profile as a kind of “digital resume,” complete with features with which a user can showcase their skills and demonstrate their professional reputation.

A Digital Resume

Like other social networking apps, LinkedIn enables its users to build a profile and connect with other users. LinkedIn differs from its competition because it defines a user’s profile in terms of work history, rather than other personal details. At its most basic, it’s simply an online version of the traditional printed resume, listing a user’s work history and academic qualifications. However, coupled with LinkedIn’s reputation tools, the profile becomes much more powerful, giving employers more insight into the capabilities of a particular candidate — an attractive proposition for both employers and job seekers.

A Way to Demonstrate Reputation

LinkedIn introduced two key social network profile reputation innovations: Recommendations and LinkedIn Answers. Recommendations allows users to post endorsements from people they’re worked with on their profiles, which are then associated with the particular job the recommendation is for; they’re like an online version of the traditional reference. Despite concerns that the Recommendations system can be gamed — users offering to give each other fake recommendations to bolster their profile, for example — it does provide a way for employers to screen candidates. Employers using LinkedIn Jobs can even limit applications to users with a certain number of Recommendations.

LinkedIn Answers provides a way for users to demonstrate their expertise by answering business questions posted by the community. These answers are then added to the user’s profile, enabling users to showcase their knowledge and providing potential employers or business partners with more information about a potential candidate.

Recommendations and Answers are complementary. While Recommendations can be used to assess what a particular user is like to work with, Answers is a way to assess a user’s knowledge.

The Future

While LinkedIn would probably like to be more than just a Web 2.0 job board, those functions drive a significant portion of its income, so it needs to make sure its digital resume stays relevant. While a LinkedIn profile was once the best way for people to showcase their skills and experience online,  there are now many more ways to measure a person’s digital reputation — Klout score, Odesk and Elance reviews, and Quora answers, for example — which arguably could be even more valid; LinkedIn will need to make sure it doesn’t get overtaken by these newer services.

Additionally, with an increasing number of freelancers in the work market, LinkedIn needs to cater to them specifically. Currently, LinkedIn’s Jobs section is heavily skewed towards traditional employment, while its Answers section is seemingly mainly inhabited by consultants and freelancers. It should reconcile this disconnect by providing a way for freelancers and consultants to find employment though the service, perhaps by modifying its existing Jobs section, or perhaps by integrating an Elance-like freelance jobs marketplace.

As Stacey noted when the IPO was filed, the funds raised should enable the company to make some savvy acquisitions to round out its business offering, perhaps even including acquiring some companies that currently provide services to freelancers, or reputation-based services. Whether those purchases and its own innovations will keep it ahead of competition like Facebook, the newer reputation-based start-ups, and even the traditional job boards like Monster.com, remains to be seen.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Coletivo Mambembe

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Source: Elance

It should be noted that because this study is the result of an online survey conducted on the Elance site itself, there will likely be considerable selection bias distorting the results towards freelancing, so it would be wise to take these  findings with a pinch of salt. I doubt that a more wide-ranging survey of recent college graduates, for example, would show such an overwhelming number of respondents in favor of freelancing over traditional employment.

While some people may argue that freelancing has only become more popular as jobs have become harder to come by following the economic downturn, the Elance study shows that many millennials actually choose freelancing over traditional employment. Only 27 percent indicated they would prefer to work as an employee, while 42 percent stated they prefer the freelance lifestyle. Web working is popular, too, with 54 percent saying they plan to telecommute at least some of the time — a lifestyle choice probably made easier by freelancing. It seems freelancing is making these millennials happier: 53 percent say they are happier when freelancing than when working as an employee. Encouragingly, despite a somewhat weak jobs market, particularly for younger people with less experience, 78 percent of respondents said they were either “Optimistic” or “Very optimistic” about their chosen career path.

Source: Elance

The study also looked at millennials’ job search habits. Unsurprisingly, many respondents reported they use online methods to find work. Online job ads (Monster.com and Craigslist, for example) were popular with 94 percent of respondents, but social media (Facebook, LinkedIn) was also used by 40 percent. The study also shows that 56 percent of respondents think that a digital resume (a LinkedIn profile, for instance) is the most effective tool for landing a job, compared to 44 percent who prefer a more traditional resume.

Despite the selection bias that’s probably skewing these results, it’s interesting to see such a positive attitude towards freelancing in younger people. Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice. If more younger people really are actively looking to freelance rather than take up traditional employment now, it could point to an even bigger shift toward freelancing in the years to come.

Photo courtesy Flickr user {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}, charts courtesy Elance.

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Distributed Training Technology

With screencasts, webinars and all the other online training tools out there these days, you can address many of the problems that slow down virtual training. For many team members, you may find that the most difficult part of learning a new tool is getting to see it in action, but screen sharing technology (available in many tools, including Skype and join.me) can help here.

Practice Makes Perfect

If you consider how training usually works when everyone necessary to the process is gathered in one place, you may still see some potential problem areas. When it comes to learning a new tool, many organizations follow a similar training pattern. The trainer goes over how to use the tool, following some sort of guidelines that the trainees will have access to. Then the group breaks up, and the trainees have a chance to put what they’ve learned into action, asking questions and helping each other along the way. That group dynamic is difficult to replicate online.

Estimating the Time You Need

There’s no iron-clad rule that states distributed teams needs X more hours of training on a new tool than an in-office team. But because of the nature of a distributed team, it makes sense to budget a little more time for training, even if you’re only making a trainer or an expert available to answer questions when you’re putting training into practice.

There’s no perfect training method that can speed up online training, either. Different team members learn at different speeds. Fortunately, those who push to be allowed to work out of the office on their own may have an incentive to work harder to get a new tool down pat.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Zak Hubbard

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Typically, you’ll have little face-to-face time in which to give the right impressions, effectively communicate job-, team- and culture-related information, and create appropriate expectations. In some circumstances, you may even need to induct the person remotely, which makes the task even tougher.

In any case, your remote recruit’s future performance in your team will depend, in part, on your ability to induct them successfully. There are four key factors to consider.

Access to Systems … and People

Of course, every team leader will ensure that the new recruit has access to the work systems they need: email, the intranet, the company’s shared file system, wikis, version control — as well door keys and building access codes if they’re coming on-site for induction.

Your remote worker already feels the tyranny of distance — even if they work remotely by choice. It’s important to communicate that you’re expecting them on Day 1, that their input is valuable, and you’re excited about having them join your team.

Fail to organize systems access in advance of their arrival, and they may infer that they’re an afterthought, troublesome, or that their work isn’t important. That negative perception — even if it’s acknowledged as just a twinge of hesitation — can be insidious, damaging the potential for a  successful working relationship with that employee in the longer term.

Good team leaders will also ensure that their new team member has access to the people that they’ll be working with, and will need to speak to on their initial projects. If the remote team member is only in the office for a day’s worth of induction, it’s a good idea to at least introduce them to project stakeholders or clients on the day.

Having some face-to-face contact with the people they’ll be working with really is important. You may not need to arrange a fully-fledged meeting with a stakeholder: a quick “hello” in the lunch room lets both parties put faces to names, and a casual conversation may start the working relationship on a more natural footing than an official meeting with an agenda and a whiteboard.

For the same reasons, if you’re inducting the new recruit remotely, try to get them talking — over Skype or even on the phone — with those stakeholders as early as you can.

Finally, consider giving your new remote team member a “buddy” for their first few weeks — someone who they’ll work closely with, can ask questions of, and has the time to help the new recruit settle into the role and organization remotely. If you take this route, have the buddy help induct the new recruit on Day 1, so that the foundations of this working relationship can be formed from the very beginning.

Also consider relieving the buddy of some work tasks in those weeks, and arranging their schedule so that they’re around and accessible whenever the remote recruit needs them.

Understanding Process … and Culture

If they’re going to perform well within your team and your organization, your new remote team member will need a solid understanding of the work processes you want them to adhere to. If you have these documented, Day 1 is the time to hand that documentation over. If you don’t, sit down and discuss them in as much detail as you can.

While you won’t want to overload team members with information they’ll easily pick up on the job, remote workers won’t necessarily have the opportunity to ask quick, incidental questions about this stuff once they’re up and running from a remote location.

If they’ve worked remotely for a while, they’ve probably developed their own approaches to problem-solving from a distance. Are those the approaches you want them to use in your organization? An inability to raise colleagues on IM to ask a question, for example, might lead them to guessing how a process might work, with time-consuming — or potentially disastrous — consequences.

Make sure your new recruit understands what they need to do to adhere to key work processes. Ideally, you should also give them access to a source of relevant information that’s always available online (not a human being).

The other element your new remote worker will need to begin to understand from the outset is the company culture. Among other things, this will impact who, or where, they go to when they have a question about those processes you just outlined. But it’ll also influence the speed and ease with which they’re integrated into their immediate team, as well as the wider organization.

Culture is often overlooked in remote worker induction — probably because, unlike processes and passcodes, it’s not often written down and flowcharted. Yet how close your new team member feels to their colleagues, and how strongly they feel they’re a part of your organization, will depend largely on this point.

In those first few days on the job from a remote location, the team member will have a lot of questions — as well as work to do. How they juggle the demands of working without experience or knowledge of your systems — and respond to the questions that other team members ask them — will set a foundation for future working behavior. Whether or not you manage to get the new recruit online for the first weekly team meeting, project meetings, and so on, will be similarly important.

Getting it Right

The way you communicate company processes, attitudes, and philosophies throughout the first weeks of a remote recruit’s tenure will not only set future expectations within that person; if you choose methods that don’t communicate effectively, you may undermine that person’s ability to ever fully meet your expectations for performance.

But the care you take on Day 1 to give them access to systems and people, information on processes, and a feel for your culture is crucial. If you’ve inducted remote recruits — or have undergone induction as a remote recruit — we’d love to hear your thoughts. What works, and what doesn’t?

Image by stock.xchng user zoostory.

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Content Monetization Manager (Department: Production)

There are an incredible number of ways to monetize content coming onto the horizon. The days of CPM being the only game in town are over. Affiliate links, daily deals, in-text ads, sponsorships, promoted on-site Twitter feeds and remnant inventory optimization: It’s all coming your way if you make money from content. How to best utilize these monetization strategies for your users, your content, your site design and your bottom line is a tricky thing. The content monetization manager will make use of all of the content monetization tools available, the underlying usage analytics, and the CMS, and will constantly A/B test monetization strategies and page layouts to maximize revenue, while preserving the user experience.

Webmaster 2.0 (Department: Marketing)

Pretty much no one has the title of “Webmaster” any more. But like all things retro, it’s coming back. The new webmaster, much like the content monetization manager, will be responsible for fine-tuning every detail of the corporate website to produce the desired result (sales or leads). Websites are becoming much more dynamic, more content-heavy (including text, images and video), and blurring with corporate blogs. Tools of the webmaster 2.0 include Google Analytics, SEO, Salesforce integration (for closed-loop data), and the CMS. The job will include lots of A/B testing of landing pages, cohort analysis and a healthy dose of keyword and inbound linking SEO.

Amplification Manager (Department: Marketing)

As social media evolves and expands, it also becomes more diluted. Many social media vanguards have now pushed Tweeting and Facebooking down to the internship level (partly because it is so time-consuming). What is emerging is a radical new philosophy of amplification: the ability to use social media, SEO, virality, and sharing as a powerful mechanism for promotion. While most social media managers would sum up the first five years of social media as “engagement,” the next five will be about “amplifying.” Like having sharing buttons in all the right places, cross-posting, SEO, targeted retweets and Klout scores (amplification being a big part of this score). If you’re not amplifying, you’re dying.

Game Mechanics Designer (Department: Engineering/Product Management)

Just like almost every website has a sharing feature, every application in the next few years will have game mechanics. Easy to understand, but harder than you think to design, game mechanics will become a full-fledged job. Just like any application development company worth its salt has a studied and knowledgeable UX person on the team, the game mechanics designer role will become just as important and prevalent.

Employee Mechanics Designer (Department: HR)

The future of the employee experience will be much like Foursquare. You’re in sales and made 50 phone calls in a day? Great, you just got the “Heavy Dialer” badge. You’re in QA? Well how many bugs did you close out today? Check the company QA leaderboard. It’s all coming; Marc Benioff is already talking about integrating these kind of features into Salesforce.com.

Much like the game mechanics designer designs the incentive and engagement structure in your application, the employee mechanics designer will design the internal game that is your business, which will include an ever-evolving set of rules that must be aligned with the current goals of the company.

Metrics Manager (Department: Finance)

The metric manager’s job is to extract data from every nook and cranny of the company. Once the stream of data is flowing, it’s then time to put it in a data warehouse and do interesting things with it. Pretty charts and pictures usually are the most engaging place to start, but departmental dashboards and daily metrics emails will be more useful. Metrics managers will love statistics and Tufte.

Crowd Manager (Department: Crowd and Community – A New Department)

In the next 10 years, every company will leverage the crowd in some shape or form. Whether it’s directly through building applications in Mechanical Turk or sponsoring designs in 99Designs, or indirectly by managing a sub-crowd in a marketplaces like Trada (for advertising) or Napkin Labs (for design). How you interface with the crowd, how you incentivize them (payment, praise, virtual currency, rewards), and, more importantly, how you teach your own company to work with them correctly is key.

In case you don’t want to work for anyone (how very Gen-Y of you) — there are also some amazing self-employment opportunities arising as well:

Crowd Worker (Self-Employed)

Having a boss is so 2010. The next generation of workers will be gainfully self-employed working in the crowd whenever and wherever they want. As crowdsourcing marketplaces (such as Trada’s performance-based advertising marketplace) reach critical mass and generate real dollars for their workers, full-time livings are being made by a few. Soon the few shall be the masses. 2011 will be the year that crowdsourcing as a viable business and a viable job becomes a reality.

Expect the increase in the self-service workforce to drive the need for new regulation (and opportunity) around individual and group-buying healthcare. It would also be a good time to invest in Starbucks, the primary office-space of the crowd-crowd.

Life Coach 2.0 (Self-Employed)

It used to be the good old days where you could just pack your old self in a box, move to another town, and start over. Unfortunately, with everything in the cloud, your former self is destined to keep following you. What you need is some expertise.

The new life coach will be versed in online reputation building and PR. They’ll know about services like About.me before you do. They’ll be monitoring your Klout scores and crowd reputation. Breach some etiquette on Twitter or make some public faux pas – no problem – your life coach can just SEO that away for you in a few weeks.

As the future become about reputation, engagement and online social profile, we’ll all need a little help smoothing out the edges. Life coaches will need to know about building reputation, scoring algorithms, and how to be a better you (at least statistically speaking).

Personal Trainer 2.0 (Self-Employed)

The future of the self is measurement. How many footsteps did I take today (FitBit)? How many calls at work did I make (employee game mechanics)? How did my Klout score go up or down? Am I meeting my workout goals on DailyMile?  The old personal trainer/nutritionist role will morph into a digital age version of itself, focused on measuring first, optimizing second. Skills will include technology (measurement), data management (storage), analysis, and medical and privacy law.

Niel Robertson is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO of Trada Paid Search, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace. You can find Niel on Twitter at @nielr1.

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According to a report from oDesk, employers in December continued a previous trend of looking to hire mobile developers, especially those skilled in developing iOS applications. The “Mobile Apps” category has jumped from 19th place to 10th over the last year. This underscores predictions made in Simon’s recent article for GigaOM Pro, “Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011″ (sub. req.), and Aliza’s discussion of the ubiquity of mobile platforms.

The three most frequently-posted job categories (unchanged from the previous year) are web programming, web design and blog/article writing. In addition, the SEO, data entry, and graphic design categories continue to be popular.

The report also showed a very large (319 percent) increase in postings for translation jobs, and for those with expertise in such languages as Spanish, German and Korean. Technical skills used in web development, such as PHP, HTML, CSS, WordPress, Photoshop, SEO, MySQL, and JavaScript, hold most of the top ten ranked skills requested. The top ten skills list also includes English and writing.

The “Online Employment Report” also found that job postings for business planning and market strategy professionals more than doubled from 2009, with a 123 percent increase in hiring.

The report shows that the three top countries of origin for contractors employed through oDesk are India, the Philippines and the U.S., followed by other central European and Asian countries, and Canada.

The report concludes that “Online work is creating an economy of opportunity — where work is not linked to location, but to skills, experience and abilities. This shift towards a flexible, on-demand workforce is becoming an established hiring model for companies of all sizes to get more done with less, scale to meet demand, and increase efficiency. For employees and contractors, this allows them to manage their own work-life balance, get paid based on merit, and access an entire world of work opportunities.”

Which of your skills are employers most interested in today?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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