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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It can be too easy to slip into the daily routine of work and the rest of your life without thinking about what you love to do. The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing.

Here are a few suggestions for finding ways to do what you love, and still pay the bills.

Reflect

Before you do anything else, consider what you are passionate about. Think back over the past few months.

• Which projects were you excited to be working on? These are the projects you wanted to work on late into the night — not because you needed to meet a deadline, but because they were so much fun and interesting that you couldn’t put them down.
• Which projects left you feeling energized and excited?
• What was it about the projects that you loved? Were you excited about the data, the technology, the writing, the analysis or some other aspect?

Once you figure out what you love, the next step is to decide how to do more such projects, and reduce the amount time you spend on work that leaves you exhausted and drained.

Rework the Current Gig

If you already have a great job, but spend too much time on work that isn’t interesting, you can often redefine your job over time to end up with a job that you are passionate about. Volunteer to take on a special project that really interests you, and see if you can make it into a full-time job. I work with someone who loves organizing events. She arranged several events as side projects, and when the team grew, she was able to convince management to make events her full-time job.

You can also look for new opportunities within your company, and change jobs to do something more interesting. If you think there’s a need for a role that doesn’t exist, build a case for it based on real data. Convince management that someone needs to fill this role, and that you are the perfect person to fill it.

Have Side Projects

Side projects can be tricky to balance. On the one hand, they can give you something fun to work on that you can control. But too many of them can leave you drained, and steal your focus from other important work or relationships. For me, the best side projects are ones where I don’t care if I make money. If I need the money, such projects become more like work and less like play.

I tend to launch random, fun websites where I can practice my skills while creating something a few friends will enjoy. Over the holidays, I started working on a vegan cookbook. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I know it’s the right project because I have been working on it constantly over the past few days and looking forward to the work. Eventually, I’ll get to build another website for the book.

Make the Leap

If you’re really unhappy in your current job or freelance situation, take advantage of an economy that is starting to rebound. Now is a good time to:

• Build new skills,
• Start working on different types of projects,
• Look for another job, or
• Make the shift to consulting or freelancing.

Take a fresh look at what you really love to do, and consider all the options.

What projects ignite your passion? Share how you have been able to find work that keeps you excited and energized.

Photo by Flickr user Marcy Kellar used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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But the fact is that undergoing continued health treatment while you’re working full-time remains a challenge — especially for the freelancer or contractor. You have fewer hours available to work, but enough tasks to fill a full day; you’re not functioning at full-throttle, but your clients expect you to be; you’re worried about your health, and juggling the stresses that creates in your personal life as well as in the professional world.

The good news is that balancing work and ongoing health treatment isn’t impossible. These are a few of the techniques I’ve used to make it easier.

1. Prioritize your health.

If you require ongoing health treatment, it’s important to prioritize that over your work. While for most of us, work contributes to overall well-being, we need to be healthy if we’re to get the most out of it. Your health is a prerequisite to satisfying work.

Accepting that your health comes first will make it easier to prioritize your work, as well as family and other commitments. It will help you make work-or rest decisions on a daily basis, and help you manage the tasks you have to suit your energy levels as well as your schedule.

2. Schedule treatment and recovery.

If your treatment takes up a certain amount of time each week, block out that time in your calendar — as well as the time you’ll need to recover from the treatment, if that’s an issue. A common beginners’ trap is to block out the appointment time to the minute. Instead, allow yourself a little fat here and there to allow for traveling to and from treatment, any recovery you may need to do, and settling back to work afterward. Also factor in the possibility that you may feel less than fabulous — physically or psychologically — for some time after the treatment.

If your treatment times or intensity change from week to week, block out the time you’ll need as soon as you know what’s going on. Overestimate that time, rather than underestimating it. If you feel good, you’ll be able to get ahead of the game — and that’s great. But if you don’t, you’ll have built in enough downtime to cope with the aftermath of treatment. Better to find you have a clear half-hour of focused work time that you weren’t expecting than to have to attend a meeting or client call when you’re not at your professional best.

3. Speak to clients.

Discussing your personal health problems with clients may seem like a no-no, and there will undoubtedly be times when you’ll cite “other client work” rather than ill health as the reason why you need to set a deadline so far in advance, for example.

But in the case of ongoing clients or intense contracts, it may be best to talk about your health-related commitments up front. Don’t be shy or feel bad about doing this: even us hired human resources are real people, and as we’ve already established, your health is your top priority. A caring client with sensible expectations will be more than willing to accommodate your time requirements, so long as you explain them up-front and ensure that they’re on the same page as you are.

Most clients don’t want you to be available 24/7: they just want to know that you care about the work, are responsive within reasonable time frames, and will maintain open communications with them. Again, the first step in doing that is to explain your needs to them up front. Don’t lie, avoid telling the truth, or try to participate in Skype meetings from the doctor’s waiting room. Be honest, and your working life will be far less stressful.

4. Use technology to your advantage.

OK, so you may not be participating in meetings from the doctor’s waiting room, but you may find that, if you need to travel for treatment, or your appointments leave you less time to deal with contacts in person, technology can be a big help.

Document sharing, wireless connectivity and a smartphone, shared task lists, automatic reminders, and other time- and task-management tools can really help you stay organized and on top of both work and the rest of your life. Providing colleagues with access to your working files can help you avoid client panic — and the associated guilt — and ensures projects keep moving even if you’re out of action for a day or two.

That said, take care that technology doesn’t simply see you working more hours, or working when what you actually need is space to attend to your health. Yes, you may be able to respond to email on your phone while you’re in the doctor’s waiting room — but don’t take the fact that you’re connected to mean that you must attend to work in every spare moment you can get.

5. Be flexible with yourself and your clients

We all have good days and bad days, but when you’re not in peak form, the bad days can be more frequent, or more difficult to work through. After a period of ongoing treatment, you may be more easily able to anticipate its after-effects and allow yourself meeting- or deadline-free days as appropriate. But you may also have bad days that you don’t anticipate.

That’s fine — everyone has sick days, right? Don’t panic: just do what you can, and talk to clients if you need to push out deadlines or deliverables by an extra day or two. Perhaps you’ll be a bit flexible the next time the client wants a deliverable turned around quickly, or you find that meeting a deadline means working a few hours on Saturday. Flexibility is the way to juggle the ups and downs of ill health, and the passion you have for your work, without guilt or pressure.

6. Make the most of the good days

Depending on your condition, you might find yourself motivated to work at odd times, or keen to catch up on client work over the weekend. I usually take advantage of these times as opportunities to make hay while the sun shines. Ongoing health treatment can really eat into your time and work rhythms, so you may simply find yourself reveling in having a whole day clear of appointments — finally you can sink your teeth into a job and really make some progress!

On those days I try to pay attention to the aspects of my work that I really enjoy, and to acknowledge the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing good work. Since work contributes to my sense of well being, contribution and capability, I try to pay attention to those times as much as possible.

Ongoing health treatment is a burden at the best of times, but this approach has helped me to ensure that it has a minimal impact on my working life. Have you had to work through periods in which you’ve had to take time out regularly for health reasons? What advice can you add?

Image by stock.xchng user lcs9.

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Web workers don’t need to actively seek jobs to find them. These days, the jobs find their way to us. Job ads are part of the information overload that plagues web workers.

Once upon a time, we had to scour newspapers for jobs. Then we began to rely on friends and web working contacts to let us know about cool opportunities. But now even the most steadfast web company employees are being bombarded daily (or weekly, or monthly) with job offers.

It’s not just social media that’s the culprit — although personal recommendations of some job opportunities via social media certainly adds to their appeal. Web workers routinely have job searches set up on job networks; we have LinkedIn profiles and blogs. We’re constantly receiving tweets, emails, IM and calls from companies that are interested in our skills.

If information technology jobs are to the 2010s what factory jobs were to the Industrial Revolution, then web company owners have some serious competition to consider. Web workers can secure work in any industry, with employers of any size.

Sure, your hip little web outfit might have pool tables, a bring-your-pet-to-work day, and a flexible start time, but unless your company can also compete on the basics — pay rates, expectation of working hours, staff development, company culture — it’ll likely lose staff to the ebbs and flows of the job information that’s coming our way every day.

Here are the five benefits the web workers I know want in their next job (and feel they’re not getting now).

Stability

Even here in Australia, where the GFC had mercifully little impact on the local job market, the web workers I know are tired of restructures, layoffs and retrenchments. For those in other countries, the frustration must be considerable.

But stability also implies predictability: Can we expect our projects to run on time? How often are we fighting fires as a result of inadequate processes? How frequently are we called on to work unpaid overtime at the last minute? Perhaps it’s just me, but web companies seem often to have higher expectations of what their staff will do for them — and be able to achieve — at short notice than organizations in other industries.

Career Plans

Pool tables and iPhones do not a career plan make. While perks are cool, many web workers would like to have some idea of where they’re headed, career-wise. If they can’t see a career progression through your organization, they may well begin to listen to the job-seeking hubbub in their social networks, be they online or off.

The swift growth of web companies means that often, human resources essentials like periodic performance reviews, career goal-setting, and so on, can be neglected, leaving web workers with little idea of where they might be headed with their current employer — or whether that employer even cares.

Remuneration

Those job sites have a knack of sending web workers ads for well-paid jobs. If your web business can’t afford to keep up with market rates — or better them — you may well have trouble attracting or retaining good staff.

Contracting, too, is a growing field where web workers can often earn better rates than they would as a permanent staff member — and it delivers that other great benefit: flexibility.

Flexibility

The numbers of people who wish to work remotely, part time, or with more flexible hours is growing; several of my contacts have left employers who wouldn’t compromise on the full-time, on-site work philosophy. And why not? Lifestyle matters, and in a competitive market, employers who don’t offer flexibility lose out.

Trust

Linked to flexibility is trust: many of the constraints that we face in the workplace reveal that our employers simply do not trust us. Blocking access to certain websites, refusing to consider a policy of remote work, unrealistic non-compete clauses in employment contracts: all of these are common in the web work environment, and are clear signs of the kind of mistrust that poisons company culture.

If you’re interested in learning more about the needs of remote workers, and how to build and manage a successful virtual workforce, it’s something we’ll be covering in depth at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9.

These points sound elementary. So why are so many of them lacking in web jobs? What do you seek when you look for work on the web?

Image by stock.xchng user minasi.

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Although I work “remotely”, I do value meeting with my clients in person — so much, in fact, that I make regular time to see each of my contacts. The frequency of that contact usually depends on how important the client is to me, and how much I want their business, but in all cases, I find the face-to-face time really valuable.

Working full-time would mean that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my regular contact schedule. I wouldn’t have a lot of time to be in touch with them electronically, either. And, as a freelancer, my fear was that once I was out of sight, I’d be out of mind. Two months is a lifetime to some of my clients, and I didn’t want to get to the end of my contract and discover that I’d lost half my clients.

Taking a Relationship Break

Employed teams working in disparate locations have it easier than the freelancer. For one thing, you’re paid for the time you spend building relationships, and your employer requires you to work together. So whether you like it or not, you know you’re likely to have contact with your remote colleagues.

The remote freelancer is faced with a different dilemma. Time is money, so relationship-building and maintenance needs to be efficient as well as effective. If your primary means of client contact is, say, video calling, and you have a client who doesn’t want to do that, it matters — you either have to choose some other method of contact, or risk losing the client.

Finding a solution that meets everyone’s needs is important, and fortunately it’s usually not too difficult. My strategy involves using social networks and making sure I stay on top of ongoing work discussions via email, but my after those methods, my preferred approach was face-to-face meetings. And that method had been successful for my clients and I … until I landed a full-time contract.

Making it Work

How do remote freelancers handle these kinds of relationship breaks? While I didn’t want to lose contact with my clients, I didn’t really want them loading me up with work while I had a full-time gig, either. It’s a tricky balance, but it’s not impossible. As most freelancers know, all too often promised work falls through and deadlines are pushed out — we have no choice but to manage our workloads, and our clients’ expectations, accordingly.

The approaches I took to managing the break between myself and my clients varied, but it did have some basic, common features. First up, I made sure I had all my clients’ phone and email details handy, and knew where each client’s projects were at.

I then discussed the fact that I would be working on a two-month contract with each client in turn. This gave both myself and my clients the opportunity to explain our expectations for that period — which tasks would be completed, what progress we wanted to see, and so on — so that we were on the same page when my contract job began. This proved very handy in the ensuing weeks, as we communicated via email, SMS and the occasional phone call about the progress of various jobs.

The other thing I did was made sure I was in contact with my clients through the social networks they prefer. Some of them don’t bother with social networking at all, but some do, and I wanted to remain top of mind for these guys.

Since I don’t have my own blog or site to which clients can subscribe, social networks are a good way for me to stay in the minds of my clients, and promote my skills to them. By connecting with them all on their preferred networks, and making sure I updated my status on those networks whenever I had information that might be of interest to them, I could help reduce the sense that I was unavailable to them — even though, for most of each day, I basically was.

As the weeks drew on, I kept a reasonably tight-laced task list, which included notes about contacting clients and following up on prior discussions we’d had. So the kinds of contacts I’d usually complete as a matter of course became work tasks — to-do items — in themselves. By treating these contacts a little more systematically than I might otherwise, I was able to keep track of what I was doing and avoid the sorts of brain misfires that can happen when you’re working nights as well as days.

This is how I handled a necessary break in my remote client relationships — and survived to tell the tale! What tools and techniques do you use to keep yourself on clients’ minds, even when you’re out of sight?

Image by stock.xchng user pixelstar.

The fun part of being a community manager is that every day is different, and you never quite know what to expect. Sometimes, I’ll have a pretty nice plan for how I want to spend my day, but then something in the community jumps out and has to be taken care of instead of following my original plan. This constant uncertainty is what makes it such a fun job — assuming you like flying by the seat of your pants, which I do. The difficult part about describing what community managers do every day is that the job is completely different depending on the type of community that you manage. I manage an open-source developer community, so it’s worth bearing in mind that my day might be very different from someone who manages a community of fitness enthusiasts, say. Let’s get started with a look into my life.

6:00am: I get up, put on the kettle to make some tea, and jump right into email. We have a large group of community members in Europe, so my day starts really early to take advantage of a little overlapping time to respond to critical items before they leave work. I start with all of the mailing list email, because I’ve gotten pretty good at processing this kind of email even before that first cup of tea. I try to avoid responding before I am fully caffeinated, but I can at least sort through it all and archive the things that don’t require anything from me. At this point, I move on to other email and see if there is anything urgent. Now, if I wake up to a big pile of spam or a gigantic flame war somewhere in the community, all bets are off because I’ll need to deal with that first.
7:00am: This is usually when I try to step back, assess the situation and start to plan how I really need to spend my time over the course of the day. I’ll take a look at my task list and juggle my tasks around to figure out what I need to do during the day and make sure that the tasks are appropriately prioritized. At this point, I’ll usually start poking around on IRC to see if there are any interesting discussions or questions, and I start answering those emails that I sat aside earlier.
9:00am: Around this time, I often check into other areas of the community and browse my community-related feeds and related communication: New blog posts, recent changes from the wiki, Twitter, etc. I’ll usually spend some time here responding to people, reading wiki pages and cleaning up wiki edits, and more responding to email.
11:00am: This is my break time. After working 5 hours straight, I’m usually ready for a break, so this is when I try to go for a run or work out, shower and eat lunch. Depending on the day, lunch is often consumed over the keyboard while I catch up on anything that came in during my run.
1:00pm: You probably noticed that most of my morning was spent in reactive, tactical, process-related activities. Things in my community start to quiet down considerably when all of the Europeans are asleep, so this is when I do all of my work that requires thinking, focus and strategy. I’ll often ignore email for big chunks of time in the afternoon while I focus on getting real work done. Today, for example, I spent all afternoon planning a way to overhaul some of our community communication processes and documenting these ideas so that while I’m asleep tonight, my friends in Europe can provide me with some feedback. During this big chunk of focused time, I often work on writing tasks (blog posts, community documents, etc.), metrics, strategy and planning.
4:30pm: This is my wrap-up time. I take a final look at my to-do list, finish any last minute tasks, respond to email, and do one last check on various areas of the community.
5:30pm-ish: Around this time I call it quits on most days.
Later: I usually try to check back in a couple of times in the evening and one last time before I go to bed. I try to avoid getting sucked into work, but if something critical comes in, I can deal with it.
Throughout the day: Like most people, I often have phone calls and meetings sprinkled around the day, along with email, IM, forum posts and more.

Now, I have many days that are far from typical. Some days I have 6:00am or 10:00pm meetings or, even worse, meetings all day. I also spend a fair amount of time traveling to conferences or have days where things are blowing up all over the place, but the above is as close to typical as I’ll ever get as a community manager.

How do you spend your day?
Main photo by Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography, used with permission.

Alarm clock photo by Flickr user mela sogono, licensed under CC 2.0

Robot clock photo by Flickr user I am K.E.B, licensed under CC 2.0

Culver city clock photo by Flickr user vmiramontes, licensed under CC 2.0

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As an independent operator, I take jobs when and where they come up, and sometimes that involves using employment websites and formal job-seeking channels. I’ve found that embarking on an online job hunt takes more than just a great resume, time, and resilience. Personally, I find the whole process pretty strange, but the characteristics of web-based recruitment set particular challenges for the independent web worker.

A Virtual Product

At its most basic, employment is the commoditization of skill. If you enjoy your work, and you enjoy being paid, you’ll likely be happy to package yourself in a certain way for a certain job possibility, role or employer.

But for web workers, the application, interview and selection processes may all be virtual. Jobs are offered by third-party recruitment agencies who advertise the positions through websites. Frequently, applicants may not know which company they’ll actually wind up working with if they get the job they’re applying for.

Operating on such limited information can make us feel a bit like virtual products: A carefully selected combination of skills and talents packaged to fit the job description. If we are to the recruiter what an e-book is to a reader, our resumes and folios are the Photoshopped mockups of a physical book that reassure buyers of what they’re getting.

To get around this feeling, I’ve tried to develop an extremely strong resume that reflects myself, and my skills, very clearly. If the ad provides a contact that I can ask for more information, I call them to find out whatever else I can about the role. Finally, I focus on securing work that takes in as much of my offering as possible, so that I feel more fully applied in my work — like a chef, rather than a vending machine.

My Careering Career

Anyone who’s worked on the web for more than five minutes probably has a complex history, skill set, and range of talents. When you think of the roles you’ve had, and the companies you’ve worked for, the path you’ve taken to your current position may look more like crazy paving than the yellow brick road. To combine all of those experiences into a coherent resume can be extremely difficult.

A good place to start may be a recruitment agency in the field you want to work in: They can provide invaluable feedback to help your resume more concisely detail your past, and position you to get wherever it is you want to go. Alternatively, a professional resume service may be able to assist, but look for one that has proven experience preparing resumes for your discipline or field.

Remote Worker, Remote Perspective

As a remote web worker who lives in the country, rather than the suburbs, I’ve noticed that when I read those big, flashy job ads from my tree-house in the countryside, I can find myself feeling less than adequate.

It’s easy to feel removed from the fast-paced, big-city hubbub when, well, you are. Although you might work for clients that are bigger, more demanding, and more interesting than those offering the jobs you’re considering, appearances matter. And job ads always make the hiring company sound stellar.

Sometimes, it’s all too easy to be intimidated by recruiterspeak — so much so that you may not even bother applying for the job. I usually get around this pitfall by reminding myself how high-powered some of the jobs I’ve had have looked on paper. “Stakeholders” is just another word for “the people you’ll work with”, after all.

Your Details On File

Submit your resume for any position, and if that role was advertised through a recruitment agency, your details will be kept on file. Many companies that advertise their own jobs also keep applications “just in case”.

This explains the unexpected calls I occasionally receive from recruiters “updating their databases” who think I’m still with a company I last worked for three years ago, or — even less likely — expect I will know their brand and remember submitting my resume to them!

It’s good practice to keep a list of the agencies to which you’ve submitted your resume, so that when you are actively looking for work, you can send them all your most current resume. But whatever you do, you can’t make them call you!

Try to be kind when someone you don’t know, from an agency you’ve never heard of, calls (or worse — texts) you about “a job I thought you’d be interested in.” It’s true that if they put you up for the role, they may request a hasty meeting to look you over before you meet their client — but, again, try to be kind. Yes, maybe they just want to get a human being in a chair at the client’s office so they can get their commission. But you can, and should, be as discerning as you like in your hunt for your next web job.

How do you find job hunting online? Do you reply on web-based job seeker services, or are you more focused on using your personal networks to find work?

Image by stock.xchng user Cieleke.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution