Despite (or maybe because of) these adjustments to my work day, I manage to meet or exceed the expectations for my job. My employer is flexible about when I work as long as I get the job done, and I occasionally pull some late nights, early mornings or do work on the weekend to make sure that I’m taking care of the community that I manage.

All of this flexibility works for me, and it looks like I’m not alone. According to a recent study by a group of researchers at Brigham Young University, people who telecommute balance work and family life better than those who work in an office, but only when flextime is also part of the plan. These researchers analyzed data from more than 24,000 IBM employees from 75 countries to find that telecommuters using flextime could work 57 hours per week before work starts to interfere with their personal lives, while the number was a paltry 38 hours per week for traditional office workers.

This isn’t just an IBM phenomenon, either. About a year ago, I looked at a Cisco study of its telecommuting employees that found:

69 percent of the telecommuting employees see increased productivity.

67 percent said that their work quality improved.

80 percent had an improved quality of life.

One of the biggest surprises for Cisco was that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. This isn’t really surprising to me as I spend more time working when I telecommute. For one thing, I shave over 1.5 hours of driving time out of my daily schedule. I also tend to start work as soon as I get up around 6am and then take a little break later in the day to go for a quick run, take a shower and put on something other than my pajamas. This lets me get a jump on the work day and take a break when I need it, thus increasing my productivity while allowing me to be flexible with my time.

Smart companies should be taking a serious look at web working as a way to improve employee productivity while saving money that they would spending on extra office space. By being creative and flexible about working arrangements, both companies and employees can benefit.

How do you benefit from telecommuting and flextime without sacrificing productivity?

Photo by Flickr user gibsonsgolfer used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Since I’m currently working full-time in a corporation with part of that time as a web worker, I’ve been thinking more and more about the way that corporations are run compared to freelance and other types of web worker businesses.

Planning and Strategy

Most corporations have whole teams of people who are responsible for planning and strategy. They look at the next few years to determine the best direction for the organization over the longer term, while coming up with shorter-term plans to make sure that they can execute on that longer-term strategy. Some web workers spend an appropriate amount of time strategizing, but I see too many web workers making mistakes by avoiding it entirely, or taking it to the opposite extreme and spending so much time planning that they don’t have time to do the work that pays the bills. Either extreme can be devastating for web workers, especially freelancers or small startups. Spending time setting your strategy and creating your plans to achieve your long- and short-term goals are important for all web workers, but be careful about how much time you spend.

Budgeting

Corporations have formal budget processes where expenses are planned, approved and adjusted throughout the year. We’re currently reviewing our Q3 budget requests at work, and I’m remembering how rigorous this process can be within a corporation. You need to be able to clearly explain how much you will spend and what it will be spent on, along with being able to justify exactly why you need to spend that money. Sometimes you even need to compete with your peers to demonstrate why your request is more critical than the others. While a complex budgeting procedure is overkill for freelancers and smaller organizations, having a slightly more rigorous process can be beneficial. Even for freelancers, looking at your projected income for the year or the quarter and deciding how much of that should be spent on expenses is definitely worth the time you’ll spend. Once you have the amount you can spend on expenses, you are in a better position to make appropriate trade-offs between the many conferences, supplies, equipment and other expenses to determine which ones you can realistically afford and which ones you can skip for now. Don’t forget to revisit this budget if there are any changes (positive or negative) in your income or when you encounter unexpected expenses.

Training

As an employee of a corporation, I have certain required training classes that I must take along with other opportunities for training that I can choose to take if needed. As a web worker, especially as a freelancer, it’s easy to get busy and neglect training. When time taken out of the day for training means hours that you can’t bill clients, this can be a tough trade-off. However, a web worker with stale, out-of-date skills is unlikely to be successful, so at some point you need to make time for some type of training to learn new things. However, you don’t need to attend formal, classroom training to improve your skills. A great way to get some training without sacrificing income as a web worker is to take on an assignment that stretches you just outside of your comfort zone and requires some additional learning on your part. I’m also a big fan of picking up side projects or other activities outside of work to learn new skills. Even just spending an hour or two a week learning a new tool or technique on your own can make a big difference.

What are some other things that web workers can learn from corporations?

Photo by Flickr user ell brown, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The challenge in corporate web working is to be able to consistently prove that you can accomplish just as much, if not more, while working remotely as you could in a traditional office setting. You’re also fighting the perception some people have that “working from home” is really a euphemism for goofing off.

As a result, you need to work extra hard to make sure that people know you are productive, and there are so many things you can do to ruin your chances of being a successful. There are also plenty of things that your company can do that will make it difficult for you to be successful, but I want to focus on how avoid the many things that you can do to limit your chances of being a successful corporate web worker based on your behavior when working remotely.

Here are just a few examples of ways to make sure that you’re never allowed to work remotely again.

1. Refer to working from home as a “day off.”
2. Brag about how little you accomplish while telecommuting.
3. Spend all day on Twitter and Facebook talking about everything except work. Make sure that your co-workers and/or your boss is connected to you on those networks so they can see your bragging.
4. Start a side business and spend all day working on your personal projects, instead of work.
5. Don’t bother to set any goals or figure out what materials you need to do your work from home.
6. Better yet, make sure that you leave some important documents or technology at the office to make sure that you can’t do much work.
7. Make sure that you don’t have the infrastructure you need for working at home (such as a phone headset or solid Internet connection).
8. Squeeze in as many household chores as possible and plan to do big piles of laundry, dishes and home improvement tasks while you are at home.
9. Ignore all of your email and don’t respond to any messages.
10. Don’t answer the phone or return voicemails.
11. Make sure that you set your IM status to offline and ignore any incoming IM.
12. Take long naps. Bonus points for sleeping through scheduled meetings.
13. Fall asleep during your conference calls. Snoring is optional.
14. Refuse to speak during conference calls, especially if someone asks you a question.
15. Don’t bother to mute the phone line on conference calls when your kids or pets come tearing through the room.
16. Spend all day catching up on your soap operas, cartoons or other television shows.
17. Take conference calls or other business calls with the television on in the background.
18. Don’t bother to change out of your pajamas when you have video conferences over your webcam.
19. Don’t accomplish anything tangible or complete any deliverables.
20. When your boss asks what you did when you were working from home, just shrug and say “not much of anything.”

Some of these are obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, but they do represent real things that people sometimes try to get away with when telecommuting. This isn’t to say that you can never to a load of laundry while working from home, but any of these activities can get in the way of being productive or prevent you from coming across as a responsible professional. We need to think carefully about how our actions might be perceived by our managers, co-workers, customers or other business people that we interact with on a regular basis. At the end of the day, most people are measured by their output. If you consistently get a lot of great quality work accomplished, your chances of success are much higher, but you don’t want a few bad habits to reflect poorly on your work.

What are your favorite examples of what not to do as a corporate web worker?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Vaarsi used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

However, it isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. There are a number of downsides associated with freelancing, which is why I’ve made the decision to go back to a full-time corporate job as a community manager. I’ll still be a web worker, collaborating with people around the world online, but I’ll be doing it as a full-time employee.

Turning Hobbies Into Paying Gigs

When I began freelancing, I was excited that I could turn things that I was passionate about and doing for fun as hobbies into something that people would pay me to do. I could do fun work and earn money! This worked for me for quite a while, and maybe it continues to work for some people over long periods of time. For me, those things that I used to do for fun all became work, and they became less fun as they started to feel like work. I also realized that I really didn’t have hobbies anymore, and I was just spending all of my time working, which left me burned out, tired and grouchy.

Pressure

On a related note, I used to enjoy speaking at conferences, blogging and attending events when I used to do them mostly out of a passion for the topic, and because they were fun. As a freelancer, these became business development opportunities. I started feeling a big weight on my shoulders and pressure to speak or write only about topics that were directly related to my consulting practice so that I could use them to get more business. Attending events shifted from hanging out with my friends and meeting new people with interesting ideas to meeting people who might need my consulting services. All of these activities became less fun as a freelancer.

Logistics

Anyone who has ever freelanced full-time knows that the logistics can be complex, painful, time consuming and sometimes expensive. Taxes are much more complicated and time consuming even when you have an accountant do them for you because there are so many things you need to track. Independent health care plans are expensive and not nearly as good as when you get them through your employer. Retirement savings is also more difficult, and you can’t save nearly as much in an IRA as you can with a corporate 401k, especially since most employers match at least a portion of your contribution. I can be very detail-oriented when I need to be, so I was able to manage all of the logistics without any big issues, but it was just one more thing that I didn’t enjoy doing.

Could I have made changes in my working style to make all of this manageable and still be happy while maintaining my sanity at the same time? Maybe. For now, the best choice for me was to go back to working for a company. I’ll still continue blogging and playing with cool technologies, but I’ll go back to doing this evenings and weekends in the hope that they start to feel less like work and more like hobbies again. If not, I’ll just have to find some new hobbies. Bridge, anyone?

What is your least favorite part of freelancing, and how do you overcome the dark side of freelancing?

Photo by Flickr user weeta, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

On the surface, it can seem like a good way to cut down on goofing off, but the reality is that many people use these sites to get information and, increasingly, to communicate with customers. While this can be a problem for some employees, it can cause a devastating productivity issue for those of us who do most of our work online.

I worked for a company a couple of years ago that blocked IM. We could use IM within the company to communicate with other employees, but it was blocked for any IM outside of the firewall. I like using IM for getting quick answers and checking in with people. While this may not sound like much, it was a big inconvenience for me because I worked with many consultants, contractors and customers who were not employees of the company. It didn’t take me long to find a way to bypass the corporate policy by using a new and nearly unknown web-based IM client. For me, the goal was to get more done as efficiently as possible, despite the obstacles.

When spending time working remotely and telecommuting, these social tools can be a great way to keep up with co-workers and colleagues. I often use Twitter to get answers to tough problems or find information that I need to do my job, since I can’t just drop into the office of another employee who might have the answer. Blocking social web sites only makes it more difficult for many employees to get their work completed efficiently. Let’s face it, those employees who are spending four hours a day goofing off on Facebook will find another way to spend their time goofing off, and the real solution is to deal with the problem employees, not to use broad policies to deal with a few isolated performance issues. Many employees will simply see this as a challenge to be overcome by finding interesting technical solutions to circumvent the technology used to block the web sites.

How have similar company policies impacted your productivity on the job, and did you find ways to get around those policies?

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In describing the company and product’s history, Walker and Khalil indicated a corporate culture that was very much based around the notion of web working. While this isn’t completely unheard of for a large corporate, web working is a style that’s more closely associated with freelancers, startups and smaller organisations.

Khalil pointed me to a post on the company’s blog that discusses some of the cultural and technological adjustments the organisation has made as it needed to manage offices in Sydney and San Francisco:

• Internal communication is oriented around the Confluence wiki product: bringing together product management, HR, marketing, business metrics, template emails and PR.
• Task and project management, such as customer requests and bug reports, are tracked and managed using the company’s own JIRA product.
• Email is discouraged as a collaboration tool, being displaced by Confluence and JIRA, but still employed for 1-to-1 and “broadcast” communication.
• Lightweight tools such as Flickr and, notably, Delicious bring other collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities.

Interestingly, the company’s internal and external blog authors number around 160: an extraordinarily high figure for a 200-person company, with 80 percent of its staff publishing and sharing their work.

Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, I ran into Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho‘s director of marketing, responsible for leading efforts to promote the popular web-based office suite.

Like Atlassian, Zoho’s  solution to geographically distributed staff in many different timezones is to employ its own products and services as a component of the company’s culture. More so perhaps, with a thousand staff in offices from India and the U.S. to Japan and China, the web-based foundation of the company is critical. Vaca related how even the company’s COO works from home in order to minimize time wasted in physically commuting.

What both Atlassian and Zoho’s utilization of web working indicate is that it’s a working pattern that’s very much suited to large, mainstream, multinational organization – something we discussed a while back in Telecommuting Trends and our coverage of the emergence of Smart Work Centres.

Read more about Atlassian’s web worker culture and tools in An Insiders Look: Part 1 of 2 on how we (Atlassian) collaborate.

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After you set up an account with FairSoftware, you can create as many projects as you like. Each project has participants, and you assign shares to them to indicate their share of the profits. There are mechanisms for share vesting and voting on proposals, as well as payroll and sales tracking – the idea is that you form your team, you build your product, and you sell it via FairSoftware: you can have a purchase button on your own site, but all sales must go through FairSoftware, who take a cut (9.9%) of each sale to cover their expenses and profits.

There are certainly attractive points to this proposition, especially if you want to only build software instead of building a company at the same time. Having someone else handle the details of sales, credit cards, tax reporting, and splitting the money can free you to focus on your core skills of design and development.

The whole structure is governed by the Software Bill of Rights, a legal contract that you enter into with the other project participants. This is where things get a bit iffy for me: this is 3700 words of legalese which, like any other legal agreement, I would urge you to get professional advice on before signing. One thing to note is that the agreement is explicitly opposed to open source projects. Another is that there is a mechanism for throwing people out, which might give some pause (though it’s always a good idea to be explicit about how a contract can be ended). On the plus side, the contract is also explicit about how a project can get out to another legal entity entirely.

All in all, I like the idea of outsourcing some of the e-commerce and tracking functions for a small startup, particularly one that’s just throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. But I’m less sanguine about the prospect of using a one-size-fits-all contract to manage these functions.

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