If you look at trends in the future of work, then maybe not, argued Daniel Jelski, a professor of chemistry at SUNY New Paltz, on New Geography recently. Despite being a science guy himself, Jelski looks at the ways work is changing and comes to an iconoclastic conclusion. He begins by laying out the basic forces he sees shaping the career landscape in the next decades:

Let’s start with the three Laws of Future Employment. Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do.

Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.)

Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

But instead of looking at these laws and suggesting students study the math and science needed to be one of those running the machines many fear are taking our jobs, Jelski comes to a different conclusion. He acknowledges that the number of science and math grads in the U.S. has been flat over several decades, but he disagrees that this means more students should be encouraged into those fields. Pointing out that competition in these areas is increasingly global, he notes that the amount of American tech and science geeks isn’t relevant. But the global number is, and by this measure competition will be fierce, especially as many technical tasks are now done by computers:

Laws #1 & 2 predict that there will likely be fewer STEM jobs in the future – they are both easily computerized and tradable. People will always be employed in STEM disciplines, many of them highly paid, but they’ll be paid for smarts rather than education. The disciplines will be much more competitive, with older and less talented workers left on the sidelines. Tom Friedman and Alex Tabarrok, reflecting conventional wisdom, are mistaken in maintaining that increasing STEM education is a key to future economic competitiveness.

“So if computerized, tradable skills won’t create much new employment, if any, what will?” he asks. The answer is “non-tradable skills that can’t be computerized. . . . these jobs depend on human-human interaction — empathy.” Counseling, teaching and management are examples. So who is best prepared for them?

Jelski tells of a student he had in a chemistry class, an English major who was busy writing a novel about cowboys while learning about chemical reactions on the side. “Conventional wisdom says this guy is all wet,” writes Jelski, but he feels this kid’s odd combo of interests in cowboys and chemistry might actually be a career winner. Not because anyone needs many cowboys these days, obviously, but because

the skill set needed to write a novel, of which writing may be the least of it. He has to have something to write about, which means nurturing a general curiosity about the world — not just cowboys, but apparently also chemistry. He learns to be a keen observer of people: their appearance, what they wear, their character, mannerisms, and language. He develops the self-discipline and self-confidence to finish a project because it is intrinsically important, not because people say “Wow, that’s wonderful. You’re writing a novel!” Because of his novel my student becomes expert in many skills that can translate into a wonderful career.

The conclusion of the post (which is well worth a read in full) is that skills rather than education count, and writing and empathy are among the skills least likely to be mastered by computers. Counseling might beat computer science in the future of work, according to Jelski, but critics could point out that clinical psychology majors currently have the highest rate of unemployment of any college degree and that being an empathetic, sociable engineer might be the best bet of all.

Would you push your kid toward engineering or empathy for a more future-proof career?

Image courtesy of Flickr user UC Davis College of Engineering

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The role of organizations, individuals and managers in the new workplace
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

But recently ,Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s offered another possible contributing factor, one that gets a lot of consideration here on WebWorkerDaily. “Could the rise of independent work be partly to blame for the rise of inequality?” the article asks in an article entitled “The End of the Job.”

The rise of the contract worker may also be having a more wide-scale impact than previously realized. A growing gap between rich and poor in countries like Canada has been blamed, in part, on a growing number of poor quality jobs. There’s also mounting evidence to suggest that the rise of the throwaway worker has made recent recessions more painful and longer-lasting. Temp jobs? More like a temporary economy.

“It all amounts to a sea change in corporate attitudes about what constitutes a job in the first place,” concludes the article, noting the death of the job-security-for-loyalty model of previous decades. This move toward more independent and contract work is not only another contributing cause of inequality, but also of the general economic doldrums:

The concern is that all of this impermanence risks creating an economy built not on bedrock, but shifting sand….  Companies see contract employment as the answer to uncertain times, but [professor at the School of Labor Studies at McMaster University Wayne] Lewchuk says it may be a case of the medicine being worse than the disease. People who don’t earn as much money spend less, which isn’t good for the economy. “If people stop buying, then companies stop producing and lay off more workers,” he says. “You get yourself into a quicker and deeper hole. Meanwhile, on the other side of a recession, when you start bringing people back, you’re doing it at lower wages and they don’t have the kind of purchasing oomph necessary to get the economic engine started again.”

Of course, the need for companies to grow leaner, including by utilizing more independent workers, is driven by larger economic forces like globalization and better, cheaper technology, so it’s difficult to argue that independent work itself is the root cause of the problem. Pretty clearly it’s an effect rather than a driver of change. But Maclean’s contention that independent work may be a piece of a destructive cycle that’s both increasing inequality and holding back growth seems worth considering.

How much is the rise of independent work contributing to increased inequality? To economic stagnation?

Image courtesy of Flickr user _PaulS_.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

That’s the contention of Jim Ware, the founder and executive director of The Future of Work, in a fascinating recent article for Workspace Design magazine. In the piece, Ware says workplace professionals need to shake up their conception of their role to keep up with the times.

I believe it starts with rethinking—from the ground up—the role of a workplace professional. I’ve recently been tracking several debates about the definition of “facilities management” as discussed across a number of LinkedIn groups…. most of the contributors seem to have a very limited view of their jobs. They focus on keeping their buildings open and clean, on controlling costs, on ensuring business continuity, and sometimes on improving sustainability.

In contrast, I believe your job as workplace professional is to support work, wherever and whenever it takes place. And for me “support” means focusing on the work itself, and how it’s being done, almost more than the workplace.

As one senior executive commented to me several years ago, “The most expensive cost of any workplace is the salary of the people who use it.” Thus, the most important measure of workplace effectiveness is workforce productivity, not simple cost control.

This shift in focus, “puts workplace professionals squarely into flexible work programs,” Ware concludes. In order to be effective at providing work spaces that fit with more flexible conceptions of work, Ware says architects, designers and facilities managers shouldn’t shy away from playing futurist: “creating pictures (visions) of alternate possible futures, and then being sure your organization is prepared for any or all of them.”

With the world changing so rapidly and unpredictably, it’s unlikely workplace pros will be able to correctly guess the exact shape of their organizations’ future needs But that’s not the point, according to Ware. Instead of hoping to outdo the neighborhood psychic in accuracy, facilities managers should use scenario planning, envisioning a range of possible futures. What good does this do? The practice enables:

Managers to open their minds to the inherent uncertainties in the future, and to consider a number of ‘what-if’ possibilities without needing to choose or commit exclusively to one most-likely outcome. Scenario analysis enables managers, business planners, and executive teams to develop multiple options for action that can be compared and assessed in advance of the need to implement them.

The bottom line, according to Ware, is that facilities managers shouldn’t just worry about keeping the lights on and the real estate bill down, but should be proactively planning for the future of work. “Enlist your peers in HR, IT, and Finance, and together build the stories of how you believe your employees could be working in three to five years. Then, develop plans for a workplace laboratory where you (and those employees) can experiment with new layouts, new technologies, and new ways of working,” he concludes.

Do you agree with Ware about the changing role of facilities managers?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Major Nelson.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Lynda Gratton is a London Business School professor and the author of The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here, which offers tips to help those after long-term employability weather the many changes under way in the way we construct our careers. Recently, she took to Forbes to expand her ideas, offering a new framework to understand the sometimes-bewildering changes going on around us.

The fundamental shift, she writes, is from a “Parent to Child relationship at work, to a more balanced Adult to Adult” relationship. She cautions that “whilst there are great aspects to being an Adult at work — it also . . . brings with it responsibilities and commitments.” It’s an intriguing concept, but what does it mean in practice? Gratton’s post lays out five ways the future will demand we grow up at work. For example, she writes:

Spending time in China last month I was struck by the upbeat enthusiasm of Chinese youth. It’s clear they have much to play for. It was a stark contrast to an earlier visit to Madrid where I heard at first hand the impact of 40 percent youth unemployment. Being a young graduate in a country with near zero growth is not pleasant, and we know what psychological scarring this experience can have. Context can indeed be overwhelming, and it can feel as if there are no real options against which choices can be made. But looking forward it seems to me that it crucial to see choices even in these potentially more restricted contexts. . . . What is clear is that we are at the beginning of a major re-balancing of world’s growth and prosperity. You need to be very clear sighted about this and work out the choices you have — and then go for them — even if that means re-locating to the other side of the world. Children wait for Parents to make the world good for them – Adults try to make their own context.

Gratton goes on to explain that being fully adult at work means making choices and taking responsibility in other areas as well, including deciding what tech to use and skills to develop. Autonomy at work is strongly associated with lower stress and greater happiness, and, if nothing else, Gratton’s model means more of us making more choices for ourselves. But the downsides are obvious as well. More responsibility means less of a safety net and more hard decisions, with each of us bearing the heavy responsibility of our own failure or success.

Her model also includes giving things up, like expectations of a certain lifestyle or a degree of security that many have come to take for granted. Psychologists tell us that people feel the sting of loss much more than they enjoy gaining something in the first place, so perhaps it is easy to understand why those Chinese youth were so cheerful and those Spanish kids in Madrid so morose. When this idea of being “more adult” moves from the theoretical to the reality of actual human lives, it may face stiff resistance. That doesn’t mean Gratton’s advice isn’t good, just that it’s probably none too palatable.

What do you make of Gratton’s prediction that the future of work demands we all grow up? Is it excessively harsh or strong-but-necessary medicine?

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmunroe

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

With technology and economic developments moving so quickly, it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on today, more or less foresee what career paths will make you a winner in a decade or two. But even if betting on specific jobs is a fool’s game, the Institute for the Future believes it is still possible to say something useful about how to prepare yourself for the careers of tomorrow.

The Palo Alto, Calif.–based nonprofit research center focuses on long-term forecasting and recently released a report titled “Future Work Skills 2020″ (available for free download here) that analyzes some of the key drivers reshaping work — including WebWorkerDaily’s greatest hits like connectivity, smart machines and new media — coming up not with specific, recommended professional paths but instead with broad skills that will help workers adapt to the changing career landscape. What are they?

• Sense-making. The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence. The ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel and adaptive thinking. Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross-cultural competency. The ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking. The ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy. The ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity. Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mind-set. Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
• Cognitive load management. The ability to discriminate and filter information for importance and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration. The ability to work productively, drive engagement and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Check out the complete report for a detailed description of why each of these skills will be key. It also delves into the implications for education, business and policymakers of the projected increase in demand for these skills, noting that current educational establishments at “primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, are largely the products of technology infrastructure and social circumstances of the past.” They will need to adapt rapidly to the changing needs of students, the report concludes.

Do you agree that these skills will be key in the future, and if so, how are our schools doing in preparing students for this reality?

Image courtesy of Flickr user x-ray delta one

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The role of organizations, individuals and managers in the new workplace
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

This bold new untethered, independent workforce spans gender and generations and is currently 16 million strong in the U.S. today. Both at MBO Partners (which helps bring independent consultants and companies together) and in other roles, I’ve been watching and serving the independent workforce for more than 25 years, and I believe that by 2020 more than half of U.S. workers will be independent, leading to a new independent majority.

What the future workforce looks like

What does this future workforce look like today? According to the MBO study this take-charge group possesses not only a high level of self-reliance and control but is setting the bar for a higher standard in the very nature of work. Nearly 79 percent of the independent workers we surveyed stated they are highly satisfied or satisfied with their work situation versus half of non-independent employees who are unhappy and 70 percent who are not engaged or are disengaged. For the independent worker, the litmus test for career success is not position, title or income but a rich life where work fulfills a deeper passion. In the MBO study, 75 percent of independents overall stated that doing something they love was more important than making money while 74 percent stated that they wanted a job where they know they were making a difference.

The MBO study also reveals that of the 16 million, more than 10 million are independent experts — that’s seven in 10 of today’s independent workforce. These experts offer specialized knowledge and skills to the open market. These motivated “solopreneurs” are becoming the talent-of-choice for some of the world’s most successful enterprises, as a recent Aberdeen study of organizations hiring contract talent reveals. This study found that the top reason that companies chose independent talent wasn’t cost — as is often assumed — but rather access to specialists with unique skills and talents who are more highly engaged producing breakthrough results. In this new economy, MBO Partners sees a future of work largely comprised of independent experts, enabling organizations to assemble powerful, hand-picked arsenals of specialized talent.

My vision: A pioneering, independent workforce

If America was built on a pioneering spirit, so too, is its latest work star. Independent workers crave control, flexibility, and enjoyment in work. The needs and motivations of the independent worker ripple through the entire workforce. As workers function as an independent brand, old hierarchies crumble and workers deliver better results. With an entrepreneurial mindset, the American worker can deploy their talents in a global market, in their way and on their own terms.

This is the vision I hope for, but I am also a realist, and I believe there are obstacles today standing in the way. As the rise of independent workers has increased over the past five years, so, too, have the barriers. The surge in government regulations and class action lawsuits have made it nearly impossible for any law-abiding employer to engage an independent worker without the risk of being accused of worker misclassification and paying heavy fines.

On an individual level, another set of very real burdens can hold back the solopreneur, including the desire for a safety net and the need for a proper launchpad into independence. Add to that the growing government regulations, coupled with corporate complexity in engaging independent talent, and what appears is a dangerous path of least resistance — the offshoring of talent. If we do not address the obstacles and complexity around the free and productive use of independent talent, companies — as well as these talented experts — may choose the troubling path of leaving this great country and going elsewhere.

For those that watch the new world of work, I urge you to consider the solopreneur’s needs, goals and burdens as we design new products and services and solutions. It is this individual — expert, experienced, committed and determined, and with rapidly growing ranks — who will help us figure out how to create the future.

The pathway to independence

To support the free and the brave independents — and a future in which half of American workers may be solo businesses — we need a “take-us-to-the-moon” mindset.

To realize this future, I believe we need a passport for independence. Individuals must be able to move from project to project and company to company with better, more robust systems, safety nets and the tools to support them as compliant, independent businesses. This is not the staffing company model that turns independents into employees, but rather an approach that empowers independent professionals to operate as businesses of one with easy and safe mechanisms that pay into and couple with financial and taxation systems that are already in place. These mechanisms would enable independent workers to fund government revenue and build the protection necessary to insulate their clients from misclassification risks associated with issues like workers compensation, general liability and other business insurances.

We would be smart to consider how current work programs, regulations and responsibilities should fit into the new model of work. I believe the private sector must take the lead on this, since government cannot move fast enough, even if they can agree on what to change. If we do not, the tensions, obstacles and overall change management may become overwhelming and stifle a very important, and in my view a very positive, trend to independence.

Let’s take a holistic approach recognizing that it is multi-dimensional. The new work solution set should add to, not dilute, what is already in place and include financial transaction systems combined with an infrastructure platform that addresses the full spectrum of considerations from legal to tax to benefits.

If we can quickly and efficiently support the needs of our solopreneurs, accelerate their growth, and do so without disrupting the regulatory and structural system in which we all work and live, we will create the next generation of growth, prosperity and greatness.

Gene Zaino is the CEO and President of MBO Partners, a leader in the $250-billion-and-growing independent consulting sector. He will be a speaker at the GigaOM Network conference on Dec 8, 2011 and will also moderate a panel diving into the data and real-life perspectives of clients and independent workers today.

Image courtesy of Flickr user MiiiSH.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information  pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

• Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM  putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
• Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
• Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall  usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business
• The Future of Workplaces

A recent Gallup study found that 71 percent of US workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work. This suggests that only a third of American workers are deeply engaged in their jobs, which is at least a serious challenge for businesses, and perhaps a serious threat. And the proportion of disengaged seems to be rising.

New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework (or telecommuting), supporting anecdotal knowledge about workers’ desire to work outside of the office. (We’ll be digging more into these kinds of topics at Net:Work on Dec. 8.) Stanford University partnered with a Chinese travel agency to find out if teleworkers were more productive, as reported by Ray Fisman at Slate:

Within a few weeks, the performance of the telecommuting group started to pull away from their cubicle-bound counterparts. Over the duration of the experiment, home workers answered 15 percent more calls, partly because each hour was 4 percent more productive, and partly because home office employees spent 11 percent more time answering phone calls. (Home workers took fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arrived late to their desks, and had fewer distractions.) While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)

And the same sort of business thinking that is interested in productivity of telework also starts to extrapolate about the impacts. If 40 percent of workers — in general — are working out of the office, that means 40 percent of office space — and associated expenses, like furniture, energy, and cleaning — might be productively invested elsewhere. In a 2007 Businessweek report, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of offices space is “a dead zone of darkened doorways and wasting cubes,” and some have estimated that $600B is wasted in direct costs, leaving aside the externalities like impact to the environment, and the costs that employees incur commuting.

Sara Horowitz recently made the case that we really don’t know the makeup of the US workforce any longer, since the US government stopped counting independent workers in any systematic way. However, her research at the Freelancers Union — she’s the founder — indicate that as much as one third of our workforce participates in the rapidly growing freelance economy.

Connecting The Dots

These seemingly independent trends are tied together by the changing mindset of the people doing the work. Young people in particular are increasingly disinclined to commute to a distant office for the sake of ‘face time’, but many people of all ages have personal reasons for wanting to work in a ‘results-only work environment’, where getting the job done becomes the core principle surrounding work.

Giving workers more control of their lives — giving them back many hours of time per week not spent in commuting and pointless meetings, letting them decide when to do what, and putting money in their pockets by cutting commuting costs — has a very serious impact on morale. As the Chinese travel agency example shows, many of the workers reported less ‘work exhaustion’ and were less likely to quit. That seems like a direct antidote to the unengagement risks that Gallup reports US companies are running.

And people moving into telework and results-only work models will need new tools — like the stream-based work media tools I discussed in a recent post here on GigaOM. But with ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, and the proliferation of work media, the technological infrastructure to support telework is very low-cost, and requires basically zero training.

What’s Missing? The Second Place.

But there is a factor that is a potential hiccup. Many folks that adopt a telework or freelance work model and opt to work from home quickly come to miss the social aspect of their old work place.

In the US and Western countries, there has been a growing adoption of coworking spaces, where freelancers, employees of small businesses, or teleworkers can get the best of both worlds: they can work from a work space close to their home — thereby avoiding a long distance commute — but at the same time they can have the support and stimulation that comes from social interaction with well-known people other than your family.

Ray Oldenburg, the urban sociologist, is best known for his notion of the Third Place, like the corner bar, the cafe, or the barber shop, where we can interact with people that we don’t know well, and perhaps with whom we have little in common. He argued that such places are critically import to the health of cities and out societies. He took almost as a given that people would continue their relationship with First and Second Places, the home and the workplace, respectively. But the trends of telework and freelancing means that an increasing means the more people are spending less time in official Second Places, and more at home and Starbucks. But as wonderful as working in a café is, there is definitely a great deal missing.

So it’s no real surprise that the coworking movement is growing at a pace that seems closely linked to the number of people jumping into telework or out of the traditional workplace. Deskmag states there are now more than 1,100 coworking spaces worldwide, more than double the number in 2006. Loosecubes, a service set up to help people find coworking spaces, is tracking over 1,400 locations in over 500 cities, globally.

According to Carsten Foetrsch of deskmag, 72 percent of all coworking spaces become profitable after 2 years of operation, and for privately-run spaces, the number is even higher: 87 percent . So the economics for those interested in setting up and running coworking spaces is compelling.

A Virtuous Cycle?

Looking from a economics viewpoint, all the players have economic motivations to support coworking:

• The office worker saves significant expense and time by decreasing commute time, and those with the longest commutes should have the strongest motivation to shift to telework. Therefore, there is a steady migration to telework as businesses adopt policies to support it.
• Businesses have a strong incentive to increase employee morale and productivity, and to decrease expenses related to the increasingly large percentage of their office space that is underutilized. Even if businesses have to subsidize coworking space use by teleworkers, the net savings are significant.
• As the number of freelancers and teleworkers increase, the demand for coworking space grows, since people need the strong social connections historically offered in the workplace, not just the chance connections afforded by sharing a table in Starbucks.
• Entrepreneurs have strong incentives to create coworking spaces: partly to serve as their own base of operations, but also as a business proposition of its own. Note that the desire of businesses to shed unneeded office space in our down economy also provides lower cost space in which to set up shop.

When you look at it as a system, coworking is a complex societal dance, where the various players are each seeking to  maximize their personal economic situation, and it leads to a new social reintegration. And the result of this migration of workers from the office to the coworking space is a net benefit for the world, too: the decrease in energy use for the unused office space and the decrease in commuting translates into decreased carbon footprints for all involved.

Coworking may turn out to be the pivot in today’s post-industrial transformation of work: a shining example, perhaps, of how large-scale positive change at the societal level can emerge peacefully from the independent pursuit of personal ends.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine. Stowe will be speaking about co-working at Net:Work. 

Image courtesy of Flickr userRob Pearce.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

That’s what the Intranet Benchmarking Forum is reporting on its blog, where it rounds up new initiatives in the U.K., U.S. and Netherlands to encourage agile working. I include myself with the many Twitter addicts who were already familiar with the Dutch campaign thanks to its catchy appeals to “start your day in a bathrobe, not in a traffic jam,” featuring people being productive in dashing pink dressing gowns.

Obviously, it’s a memorable and much-linked-to campaign, but the slogan wasn’t just for humor. Behind the laughs was a serious message for “New Way of Working” week that encouraged people to cut down on their commuting for the benefit of the three Ps: planet, profit and people.

The Netherlands may be renowned for its forward thinking policies, but the rise of agile working isn’t just some Dutch utopian dream. The much less idealistic governments of the U.S. and the U.K. are also cheerleading new ways of working, according to the IBF post:

Mindsets still seem to be stuck in old ways of working.

This was the message from Norman Baker MP at last week’s Worktech conference in London where he unveiled the UK governments [sic] “Anywhere Working” program. He made the case for agile working practices clearly and unequivocally, citing mounting pressures on transport systems, environmental concerns and business efficiencies as key factors….

There has also been a recent executive order from the US government on “Promoting Efficient Spending” which points to digital and agile working practices as central to realizing efficiencies. According to an article in the Environmental Leader, limiting travel and using alternatives such as video conferencing, and the efficient use of online instead of printed information were both cited by the government as important. Although not a direct agile working campaign, again this adds weight to the argument.

So with governments getting behind the idea, what’s stopping businesses from adopting it? Inertia is IBF’s simple answer and one we’ve heard before. Still, official efforts to encourage new ways or working should help convince skeptical traditionalists (though the government here in the States could pass much-needed legislation that prevents double taxation of telecommuters as well).

And speaking of government actions that would encourage new ways of working, the coworking community has a few requests too. DeskMag recently published this list of 10 things the government could do to help the movement out.

Do you think governments are doing enough to encourage agile work? What other actions might help?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Natuur & Milieu.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Part of the innovation in this new generation of products is that they are — largely — built on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, and getting up and running can be as fast as buying a book on Amazon. And because these applications are social at their core, they can be very viral. One member of a small company’s marketing team decides to manage a project using Yammer or Podio, and she immediately invites four other team members to get involved. This means that the tools are quickly adopted, at least in the small group level. (Note: I’ll talk with Soonr’s Martin Frid-Nielsen, Mavenlink’s Ray Grainger, and QuickOffice’s Alan Masarek about this topic onstage at Net:Work, on Dec. 8.)

The new “work media”

However, the more important side of this social tool innovation is that they are based on activity streams. Users’ activities within these applications are not simply captured in the metadata of directories or the states of information in databases: these activities — such as making a comment, adding a file to a project, or assigning a task to a project member — are published in streams, a la Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other consumer applications.

To distinguish these modern business tools from earlier generations, I use the term “work media.” They share characteristics with well-known social media tools, but they are oriented toward getting work done. And like social media, work media is fluid, with streams of information finding their way to the individual user, who may opt to follow topics, projects, and other users. These applications share the core design metaphor of streams, though they differ widely in how streams are composed, displayed, and shared.

Open tools, closed data

Business has a bias toward privacy, and so work media tools support that tendency by — almost without exception — erecting a password barrier against access to a company or group’s information. Finer-grained access controls are provided for more specific information contexts, such as projects, folders, groups, or other “spaces” managed by the work media apps. In this way, a company can restrict access to a HR group so that only a few HR staff can see the resumes and pay information managed there, for example.

This tendency, along with the relative immaturity of the burgeoning work media marketplace, is rapidly leading us to a very strange outcome: a generation of business software — work media — ostensibly based on the principles of open social media, but which are inherently closed, and which are spawning a million information silos.

But the risks and costs associated with business information stored in these applications is much higher, at least form the view of the companies migrating onto these work platforms. So once a company commits to using a specific work media platform, they may find that the information stored in their projects becomes as fixed as concrete.

Streamed, not structured, data

Let’s lump the information managed in these systems into two piles:

• Concrete, structured, and relatively moveable information, stored in files of various sorts
• Fluid, unstructured, and relatively unmoveable information, such as internal links, social gestures and other application specific metadata

It’s relatively easy to imagine downloading all the files stored in a Yammer account, and uploading them into an IBM Connections instance. But other sorts of information — and semantics — won’t have the same ease of movement.

Consider a hypothetical work media tool — let’s call it Work Talk. Work Talk supports both milestones and tasks, and it also allows tasks to be optionally linked to a milestone. One of its semantic rules is that a milestone cannot be complete until all linked tasks are complete.

Imagine that Work Talk supports exporting all the structured information — files, user identities, and so on — and less-well structured information, like tasks, milestones, posts, comments, and the many relationships between them. Taking that information and figuring how to import it to a tool that is architected differently would be at the least a major programming task and, at the worst, an impossibility. And the semantics of milestones and tasks might simply fail, if the new tool doesn’t implement that capability the same way, even if all that information can be exported and imported en masse.

As the market matures, standards must evolve

We’re at the start of a new era in business software, and there is an explosion of new players and new ideas about how streaming information should be structured and streamed, and how the various bits relate to each other. This is much like the early days of email, when a single corporation might have several different email systems that couldn’t communicate to each other. That problem was solved in two ways: by the emergence of well-defined standards that enabled interoperability across different implementations, as well as the consolidation of the marketplace around a small number of vendors serving large numbers of users.

It’s not too early to see some market maturation. It seems that many of the vendors in the space are making highly similar products, but differentiated around specific market needs (such as integration with specific external tools), focus on specific business functions (marketing versus software development, for example), or emphasizing the size of the company best suited for the tools. I see very little activity on the software standards side, but that usually occurs as the intersection of successful applications, as happened with email and SQL. So, there is no immediate solution in sight, and I wager that a large number of headaches are going to arise from the proliferation of work media tools, especially when vendors go out of business, or when companies outgrow the tool they selected. And there is no simple advice to give to prospective or current users of these work media tools. It is inevitable that these tools will diverge in functionality, and even if two systems are very similar that doesn’t mean that it will be possible to easily and cheaply port from one to the other.

Despite these risks, I believe there are great benefits inherent in the use of work media, and because of those, the rapid adoption of these tools will continue at an unprecedented rate. Just like the adoption of the automobile and the airplane, though, we are going to see a few crashes.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

What is the impact of coworking on larger corporations? How are they responding?

Mark Greiner: Businesses are recognizing the importance of choice to their employees. By providing options in how and where their employees work, they’re noticing increases in workplace productivity and morale. Corporations can’t ignore employees and their individual choices anymore. If they do, it will be at their expense.

Frank Graziano: The importance of meeting with others and collaborating in a very intentional way is also rising. In the future, you’ll likely see more shared spaces, and less square footage dedicated to individual work areas.

How is Steelcase responding to this shift in work patterns?

Graziano: We often say “space matters.” And more and more, you’re starting to hear the heads of large corporations say how important their spaces are. It helps them attract and maintain the best talent.

In the past, we’ve spent quite a lot of time implementing designs to raise efficiency. Now we are also looking at how we can use design to galvanize the culture of an organization. What kinds of shared assets might we put in place that evoke new behaviors on campus and help our employees understand the larger details of the projects they are working on? I would say that we, and many of our customers, are beginning to understand that communal spaces — really well done communal spaces — are central to an organization.

Can you describe some of the types of corporate workspace experiments you’ve seen?

Greiner: One example is right here at Steelcase, where we just remodeled our cafeteria. Now we call it a “WorkCafé.” It’s not just a place to have a healthy meal; it is designed as a productive retreat throughout the day. From a range of settings and postures to a Barista serving cappuccinos; employees have lots of choices.

Graziano: We have the same things that you would have in a coworking space, but, of course, we don’t charge memberships. And the interesting thing is, our employees seem to be selecting this as one of their preferred places to work. It’s become a rich place for fostering interactions across departments.

Why do you think companies are now willing to invest in these shared spaces?

Graziano: Technology is one factor. As corporations move their desktop technology to handheld devices and the cloud, it’s now that much easier for employees to have the independence to work from anywhere. But ironically, with these new freedoms, we are still dependent on ‘place’ to situate our work.

What do you mean?

Greiner: Well, since we can work anywhere, when we do consider where to work we look for a place or space that supports us in achieving a productive outcome.

Graziano: We have to look at how individual devices work and how they can bring content to a group situation. For instance, if five of us are meeting in person, we all can’t look at your iPhone. Collaborative environments require technology that allows each of us to share our individual cloud connection so it can be reviewed by the group.

How would you describe your personal work style?

Greiner: Certainly Frank and I are both highly mobile workers. Even when I’m in Grand Rapids, I’m mobile between the various buildings of the campus, moving from a project room to a more communal space and then to my home base. I start almost every day at one of four cafes in town. I have my breakfast, I read the paper, I do some e-mail, and I plan what I’m going to do for the day. So I often arrive on the corporate campus around mid-morning.

Graziano: We refer to this as being ‘on’ work vs. ‘at’ work.

Steelcase works with hundreds of large companies. Are most of them evolving in the way you’ve described?

Greiner: Absolutely. The pattern used to be that you’d go to the office, sit at your assigned desk, go up three floors for a meeting, walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, go back to your desk, and work there the rest of the day. Now employees have a choice. And as a result we see corporations embracing many new patterns of what we have categorized as alternative work. Within this broad landscape, coworking is becoming a viable option for many.

Don Ball is the co-founder of CoCo, a co-working and collaborative space with locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. He will be discussing the implications and applications of co-working for larger organizations at Net:Work on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Todd Ehlers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 2: benchmarking IT’s readiness for the new digital workforce

Plenty, argues a recent piece by Rieva Lesonsky on MSN’s Business on Main site, which argues that the tepid pace of small business hiring, while obviously impacted by the dreadful economic situation as a whole, is partially down to rise of freelancers and platforms, like oDesk and Elance that enable small firms to find them. She cites a study from the Kaufman Foundation from earlier this year as evidence:

The Kauffman Foundation suggests the job deficit is actually not recession-related. In fact, Kauffman’s study, “Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation,” shows that new employer businesses have declined 27 percent since 2006. However, when newly self-employed workers are added to the mix, the level of startups hasn’t declined, but instead has “held steady or even edged up since the recession.”

To put this in perspective, in the 1990s, new businesses opened their doors with about eight employees; today, that’s down to five. The culprit? The traditional business model doesn’t apply anymore, due to a number of factors, including technology and a globalized market.

Essentially we’ve created a contingent, freelance economy. There’s still money to be made, innovations to be marketed and ideas to be harvested. The difference is that many businesses today are choosing to hire on an as-needed basis, relying on a freelance workforce.

Numbers from office space provider Regus earlier this month tell a similar story. A survey of 12,000 companies worldwide by the firm found “47 percent say they plan to hire freelance staff and 44 percent plan to hire remote workers over the next two years.”

But this decline in small business hiring might not be entirely a bad thing, according to a recent piece by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. In it, he notes that while small businesses are beloved by politicians, they are less productive than large firms and therefore do less to raise living standards. Countries with miserable recent growth like Greece and Portugal have some of the highest percentages of workers employed by small firms, he also points out.

Maybe the rise of the freelancer will make for a more dynamic economy even if it means less small business hiring. Does that sound plausible to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user billsoPHOTO.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise
• Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are Broken
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

But not everyone is fretting about a future of work dominated by machines. Business leaders, technologists and economists are peering into the future of work, but futurists are too, and at least one of them sees reason for optimism. A little competition from machines might improve humans, writes James Lee on the World Future Society blog:

David Autor is an economist at MIT who . . . writes that labor markets worldwide are rapidly becoming polarized and he sees a clustering of job opportunities at opposite ends of the skills spectrum.

At one end of the spectrum are low-paying service-oriented jobs that require personal interaction and the manipulation of machinery in unpredictable environments. Examples might include driving a vehicle in traffic, cooking food in a busy kitchen, or taking care of cranky pre-schoolers. Unless people decide to freight their toddlers to India for cheaper childcare, these tasks will still need to be performed locally . . . To the extent that many service jobs involve human interaction, they also require skills such as empathy and interpersonal communication.

At the other end of the spectrum are jobs that require creativity, ambiguity, and high levels of personal training and judgment. These jobs tend to pay well, because they require skill sets that are more difficult to replicate.

The job opportunities of the future require either high cognitive skills, or well-developed personal skills and common sense. In a nutshell, people will need to be either “smart” or “nice” to be successful . . . Luddites should take notice — computers just might push us to do work that is meaningful and enables us to become better people.

There are several possible objections to this argument, the first being that a reasonable level of shared economic prosperity also underlies the better angels of our nature (i.e., innovation, creativity and kindness). Few symphonies get written or breakthrough products designed by people struggling to buy food, and we tend to be meaner when we feel threatened or shortchanged. If anything close to some of the more apocalyptic economic scenarios came to pass and advancing technology created an unemployable underclass, then the negatives to humanity would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.

Plus, there’s the gut instinct reaction that a certain percentage of people will always be jerks and intelligence will always fall on a bell curve, no matter what sort of economic system we develop. Being smart and nice have always worked well for some. So has being a dictatorial narcissist, and, sadly, maybe it always will. Or maybe adjustments will be made and more machines employed, but our economic system will remain much the same as it has through previous shifts in technology.

Do you think more automation and technology will force humans to up their game to compete?

Image courtesy of Flickr user RedCraig

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Sure, working for yourself can be empowering and, by spreading the risk of losing a job across a range of clients, actually offers an increase in job security for some, but independent contractors can’t join traditional unions (though the Freelancers Union aims to provide some of the same services) or engage in group bargaining. Does this matter?

The AFL-CIO met last Thursday to discuss the question, hosting a forum entitled The Future of Work and New Ways to Build Power.  (For those looking for the really deep dive, a video of the 90-minute webcast is available here.) A quicker round-up of the discussion comes courtesy of labor relations blog In These Times, which reports:

“We all carry around the mental mood of the workplace, where we have an employer and a worker. And our laws respond to that. But that no longer corresponds to reality,” panelist David Weil of Boston University said Thursday at “The Future of Work and New Ways to Build Power,” held in Washington D.C.

More than 10 million U.S. workers are currently classified as independent contractors and not allowed to organize legally…. The only way organized labor may be able to fight for these workers is by engaging in nontraditional labor campaigns that do not seek traditional collective bargaining arrangements at their heart.

Some in the labor movement sees the New York taxi drivers’ 15-year effort to win pay increases and improve working conditions as an example of how the labor movement can fight for workers in industries traditionally difficult to organize.

“We need to follow lead of the taxi drivers alliance,” says Justin Molito, an organizer with Writers Guild of America East. “The decentralized nature of work is creating a new decentralized nature of resistance they will not be able to stop.”

Of course, labor union membership has been on the decline in the U.S. for years, with a tiny 6.9 percent of private sector workers belonging to a union in 2010. Connected work and the rise of the so-called “gig economy” clearly isn’t responsible for this decline.

But that doesn’t mean the decline of unions won’t affect how well the future of work provides for workers of the future. Already many commentators feel that the feeble state of unions has something to do with rising inequality and fewer Americans sharing in the fruits of economic growth. It remains to be seen if independent workers can use decentralized resistance, or some other means, to get a square deal from employers without collective bargaining.

Are you worried about workers being able to advocate for themselves and protect their rights in a future full of independent contractors?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Fibonacci Blue.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

In 1991 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted a brief summary of the World Wide Web (or W3) project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, writing:

“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the Web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”

It’s safe to say that Berners-Lee’s invitation to potential collaborators went fairly well. That initial web page has expanded to more than 19 billion pages (at the last count) and there are millions and millions of workers across the globe who rely on the World Wide Web to go about their daily lives. In those 20 years, the changes to the workplace that have taken place thanks to the Internet are nothing short of remarkable. Email is as good a place as any to start.

You’ve got mail

Try to explain the workplace B.E. (before email) to someone under 30, and you could be describing life in the 19th century for all the relevance it has to their working day. Back then, we lived in a world in which quaint technologies such as the fax machine prevailed. With the fax machine, it was not unusual to wait days for a reply.

Later, when Web-based email began to grow in popularity, it transformed communication in the workplace. You could now receive a response to a question within minutes, especially once broadband connections became more commonplace. You could send information and documents to colleagues around the world at the click of a button.

Email overload

But technology was now developing at a pace that seemed astonishing even to those who worked in the industry, and email, after a honeymoon period, hit problems. “Too intrusive,” said some. “Too much of it,” said others. “Not quick enough,” moaned the rest.

When consumer-based instant-messaging technologies infiltrated the workplace – AIM launched in 1997 and Yahoo! Messenger (then Pager) in 1998 – users were suddenly able to communicate with co-workers in real-time. Years later, these tools would often be integrated into a platform that also included voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), shared whiteboards, video conferencing and file transfer features.

It was around this time that social networks also began to establish a presence. Some of these are undoubtedly more consumer-focused, but there can also be no denying that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had a massive impact on working life, too. The ability to communicate and share content with your extended network (and beyond) has transformed many of our traditional working practices. As well as enabling businesses to engage in two-way conversations with their customers, these social networks are now a central part of the recruitment process. Last year, I wrote a piece on how Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can enable you to find a team of peers without breaking the bank of recruitment agencies. You can tap into your workforce’s network and find like-minded, talented people to become part of your company.

Getting ready to collaborate

The net result of all the technological developments outlined above has been to change the very fabric of how we work. We now live in a collaboration economy. To share and communicate information, ideas and innovation has never been easier, or come more naturally to the workforce. The emergence of the Web has given rise to a global working village, with location and time zone utterly irrelevant. You can work as closely with someone in another country as you would with someone sitting opposite; work from home or on the move, and even send files from your mobile handset to someone on the other side of the world.

This has all been made possible by the World Wide Web. From Skype to smartphones and social networking to SaaS, it’s all underpinned by the internet and the changes to the workplace of 20 years ago are just extraordinary. With a global mobile worker population set to hit 1.19 billion by 2013, one can only wonder what the Internet will bring us next. Bring on the next 20 years!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter@Bandrew.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinknew.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce