One of the most compelling and frequently cited explanations is that middle managers just aren’t that into the idea, distrusting their employees to keep working without supervisors watching them like hawks. You’d hope that over time managers would get over this fear, but a new survey out of Canada suggests that trust issues persist. Microsoft Canada’s recently released Flexible Working report surveyed 1,249 employees and 642 bosses and  found that while 55 percent of employees feel they’re more productive working from home, only a quarter of bosses agreed.  Why were Canadian managers less than crazy about remote work? They gave Microsoft a numbers of reasons:

• Just shy of half (49 percent) said the inability to talk face-to-face
• The same percentage complained about lack of focus
• 26 percent disliked the  lack of accountability
• 22 percent opined that that employees do less work

Still, despite the skepticism of bosses, almost half of them (42 percent) support remote working arrangements for their employees. That stat just reinforces the inevitability of remote work, according to Carolyn Buccongello, vice president of human resources at Microsoft Canada. “Boundaries between work and life are blurring. You may dismiss this as a Generation-C issue but this speaks broadly to all generations. There are pros and cons to this new way of work, but it is not going away and technology can become the key to resetting those boundaries,” she says.

She also called for bosses to rethink their distrust and focus on employees’ results, not face time. “A flexible workforce begins with leadership teams building a culture of trust and a vision that focuses on individual results rather than how much time they spend at their desk,” she says.

What, if anything, will finally convince middle management to embrace virtual work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user alexindigo.

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The results are now in, and while the fact that more and more knowledge workers are importing their smartphone and iPad addictions to the office probably won’t surprise you, the extent of the use of these devices and employees’ willingness to pay for them might. The survey found:

• Globally, one-third of devices being used for work are non-Microsoft.
• One-quarter of devices used for work are mobile (i.e., smartphones and tablets).
• In Europe and North America many workers choose which devices they use themselves: Seventy-three percent select their own smartphone, 53 their laptop and 22 percent even choose their PC.
• Forty-eight percent pay the entire cost of their tablets themselves; 41 percent shell out for their laptops.

That might be good news for mobile workers looking to get stuff done on the go and on devices of their choice, but it adds up to less cheerful reading for Microsoft. The report concludes that “mobile devices will become the majority of devices used for work, surpassing PCs” and “Windows’ device share will fall below 50 percent by 2016.” It goes on to suggest this will demand a shift in marketing on the part of Microsoft, obliging the company to target individual workers as much as IT decision makers. “Think about that for a minute,” says Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst who co-authored the report, in a blog post coinciding with its release, continuing:

Microsoft’s share of OSes on shipping PCs is still far above 90 percent and declining only incrementally in the face of growing Apple Mac share. Microsoft’s share of PCs in companies is even higher. But seen through the eyes of the workers, not IT, Microsoft is down to about two-thirds of the devices they use to get work done. With the strong growth of mobile devices — personal or issued by IT — and Microsoft’s minuscule share of mobile devices, that means that Microsoft’s share of the OS on devices used for work will continue to erode.

Do these numbers surprise you at all?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Johan Larsson

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The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, VP and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Plantronics is on the cutting edge of a shift in how people work, and how smarter and more personal computers, such as mobile phones, are allowing this shift to happen.

A personal assistant for everyone (no, it’s not Siri)

InstantMeeting on the iPhone

Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and making delegating them affordable for all. In the case of InstantMeeting, it means I can work right up until a minute before my conference call or hop in the car knowing I’ll get a reminder when I need to get on the call, and will effectively touch a button to connect. I do have to manually enter some conference numbers because the app can’t read the bridge information, but it’s pretty solid. It’s similar to having someone outside my office connecting my calls so I can move seamlessly through my work until the exact moment I’m needed.

Expensify lets me snap a picture of my receipts and then automatically scans them for the relevant line items to create an expense report in a few minutes. The mobile app allows me to take those pictures on my mobile the moment I get my receipt and shoot them to the cloud, where Expensify does all the heavy lifting. My days of scrounging receipts from the bottom of my bag and taping them to copy paper are over, as are my efforts to then transfer that information to Excel.

Siri, of course, takes all kinds of dictation like a pro and helps find nearby restaurants, services and other items much like a real personal assistant would. Vlingo also does some of this for Android users. There are scores of other apps such as TripIt Pro making it easier and less time-consuming to book and keep track of travel, something those lucky souls who have worked at a company with a travel bureau will be glad to learn.

This isn’t just nice; it’s necessary

Just as computers helped drive productivity thanks to replacing typewriters with word processing software and calculators with spreadsheets, these new apps will help boost productivity for the masses who don’t have an assistant at their beck and call. And given that workers are being asked to do more in a day, gaining those two or three hours back each month that it takes to pull together an expense report, or the thirty minutes required to book a trip (or even avoiding the hours lost to flight delays) is a necessity.

And as we handle more and more information coming at us, it’s harder to sink into the uninterrupted flow of work, so being able to maximize that time knowing your phone can ping you when you have to join a call and then connect you can help you relax into work. Yes, these apps all take some time to set up and learn how to use (some may require you to invest in setting up rules so the app can better learn what you need from it), but much like training an assistant, the effort pays off. And thanks to advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, better data processing and algorithms, employees don’t have to pay quite as much to offload non-core tasks.

For more on how apps, computing and broadband will change the way people work, come to our GigaOM Net:Work event in San Francisco next week.

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As we’ve covered before, when more workers spend more time away from company headquarters, the size of offices may shrink. But will campuses change in any other ways?

It’s a question that the MIT Technology Review tackled recently via a photo gallery of innovative offices built to serve a more mobile and collaborative workforce. The photos are worth checking out at the magazine’s site, but what general lessons can be gleaned from taking a look?

Giant conference rooms give way to smaller collaboration spaces. MIT cites Microsoft’s newly renovated offices in Redmond, Washington as an example of this trend. “Pods” helps small teams there come together for short bursts of creative collaboration. “In these temporary work spaces, teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a time.” MIT writes.

Small but not cramped. With more workers out of the office, companies may need less space but that doesn’t mean they want things to feel cramped – or for team members to worry about finding space to work at the office when they need it. To solve these issues, “Steelcase, an office design company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed to use minimal space but create an open feeling through strategic placement of drawers and privacy panels.”

Privacy amidst collaboration. People may now be coming to the office more for collaboration than to buckle down on individual tasks, but even in the midst of group work, team members still occasionally need privacy to make a call or hammer out a conflict. A “pod-like installation with adjustable privacy screens allows for semi-private meetings in communal areas,” is the answer at Steelcase.

Bringing the outside in. Research shows simply seeing nature is good for your brain and your productivity. Some offices, like Rackspace, an IT hosting company, are taking advantage by bringing the outside in, with spaces that “mimic a garden, complete with decking, swings, and fake grass.”

Is your physical office space ready for the workstyle of the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user :mrMark:.

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This update brings Word into line with the Excel and OneNote Web Apps, which have had co-authoring features since launch, and also with its main web app competitor, Google Docs.

When Word Web App was released, I was told by Microsoft that co-authoring wasn’t available as it was “too distracting” for users to have others come in and edit a document they were working on. Clearly, Microsoft has changed its mind on this point, but it has also put a great deal of work into making sure the Word Web App co-authoring experience doesn’t confuse. As shown in the image below, there are notifications to alert users when a collaborator is editing the document, and there are also notifications to alert users when a specific section is being edited. To prevent conflicts, only a single user can edit a paragraph at a time; when a user starts editing a paragraph, a lock is placed on it until the document is saved. If a collaborator saves the document, a notification pops up, letting the user know that they need to save the document to see updates.  It’s certainly a less fluid collaboration experience that Google Docs’, but presumably one Microsoft believes is less distracting for users.

Let us know what you think of Word Web App co-authoring in the comments.

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Signup and Setup

Office 365 is relatively straightforward to set up, only requiring users to enter a few details; you don’t need to be an experienced IT admin to get going.  After signing up with Office 365, it takes a little while for Office 365 to bring online the hosted instances of Exchange and SharePoint, but the whole process takes less than ten minutes. With Google Apps you’ll need your own domain and will have to verify it (Office 365 will provide one for you), which means that setup is more involved and will probably take a little longer, but there is a wizard to help step you through it.

Admin page/Dashboard

The Office 365 admin page has options for managing users and passwords, websites, and for managing your Office 365 subscription. Google Apps has a similar Dashboard page, which also allows admins to add additional apps from third-party vendors via the Google Apps Marketplace.

Email

Office 365 provides Outlook Web App, which has a very familiar interface for users of the Outlook desktop app. Google Apps uses Gmail.

Calendar

Word processing

Spreadsheets

Presentations

Note that you cannot edit presentations with Google Apps, only view them.

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Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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1. Atlanta
2. Dallas
3. Phoenix
4. Seattle
5. Denver
6. Boston
7. Washington, D.C.
8. San Francisco
9. Houston
10. Minneapolis

Microsoft is hardly the only one to draw up such as list. Forbes crowned some cities “Telecommuting Heavens” (go Albuquerque!), Money magazine did a list all the way back in 1997, and a company called CartridgeSave has drawn up international rankings for some reason. The general idea behind all of them seems to be to find places with excellent tech connections and community, good lifestyle and cheap living. But are these lists useful?

The affordability of a city is certainly an important consideration and objectively provable, but there are lots of lists of good value places to live online already. And for savvy pros willing to pay, good Internet connections are available nearly everywhere these days, except perhaps some very rural locations.

Lifestyle, meanwhile, seems pretty individual. Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would strap boards to their feet and subject themselves to freezing weather to hurtle down a hill, so the appeal of the Rocky Mountain ski havens is limited for me. Obviously, large swathes of the population would vehemently disagree. Heat or cold, slow moving or zinging with energy, surfer-friendly or musician-filled, our preferences in places to live make determining a single measure of lifestyle appeal difficult to impossible. Which is the whole point of web work: enabling individuals to escape from corporate determinations of which locations are best.

Is there such a thing as a good city for web work, or is the choice entirely personal?

Photo courtesy Flickr user DearEdward

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In the book I talk about one of the major oil companies. They equipped people with new, more portable devices and new smartphones and then the next day, 25 percent of people disappeared. So you’re a middle manager. You’re used to seeing people coming into the office and all of a sudden they vanish, and I think one of the key issues is middle managers learning how to manage when you see people far less than you ever used to. How often should you meet them? How do you keep an eye on them? Obviously, it brings up this whole issue of judging people on results and outputs rather than inputs.

Companies are starting to realize people are unused to this way of managing people. What they’re finding is that the biggest block to digital working is that middle managers aren’t skilled to do it. Organizations have learned that you actually do need to train managers in how to manage people in a virtual environment.

Miller went on to cite companies such as BT and Microsoft in the Netherlands, which have had improved success with virtual working after training their middle managers, so he’s certainly correct in his basic point that the training makes a difference, but is this news?

Five years ago, articles were already noting that when it comes to any sort of telecommuting, “the real impediment is the resistance of middle managers” and arguing that “more managers should be trained.” Back then Chuck Wilsker, president of the Telework Coalition, estimated that no more than 15 percent of firms were training managers for remote work. Based on Miller’s account, more companies have jumped on board, but certainly not as many as would be expected to have gotten with the program over half a decade. Perhaps the real story is how little progress has been made.

Why aren’t more companies training middle managers for the realities of the digital workplace despite repeated calls to send them to web work boot camp?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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The Internet provides companies with a great way to reach out for new ideas. But if you use the web to gather ideas, it’s also important to think about how you ask for them, and what you’ll then do with them. Idea generation — also known as ideation — is generally the first step in an organization’s innovation process.

Two ideation process examples

The TSA’s ideation process starts with a site called the IdeaFactory. Enabled in April of 2007, the site is described as being “created to empower TSA employees to suggest and promote ideas to improve their workplace and the way TSA does business.” Employees can post, rate and comment on ideas. The IdeaFactory team goes through the ideas, and then it processes those that are best suited to the agency’s strategic goals or are especially popular.

LG’s process is much more formal. External collaborators are asked to submit a proposal for a solution related to a theme or specific issue noted on the company’s Collaborate & Innovate site. LG provides a downloadable template asking about the team proposing the solution, the stage of technology development, intellectual property issues, etc. The LG Collaborate & Innovate team then evaluates the submissions and responds within four to eight weeks (a detailed description of the process is available here).

The TSA and LG examples are ongoing practices, but ideation can also be event-focused, such as IBM’s Innovation Jams.

Event-focused ideation

IBM has been “jamming” since 2001. Innovation Jams are focused online brainstorming and collaboration sessions held around a specific topic designed to spark innovation. The process has grown, and the company now offers it as a consulting service. As an indicator of the size of this process, in 2006, $100 million was granted to the top ideas generated by 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients (from 67 companies) and university researchers who participated in two 3-day phases, with contributions made 24 hours a day from 104 countries. (More about the Innovation Jam process.)

What makes ideation work?

Whether you use a single event or an ongoing process, the process you use to ask for ideas matters. Researchers recently had the opportunity to follow a grassroots innovation platform at Microsoft to identify design challenges and opportunities in the process. The researchers were able to track type of participation with platform, and through interviews with recent and top contributors and managers, dig deeper into participant motivations. They followed 1,491 users who made 2,211 votes, 488 comments and contributed 315 ideas around the topics of business problems in peer-to-peer advertising, identity-based system services and social computing. Overall, the researchers felt that participation was low, given that the organization had over 95,000 employees at the time.

As a result of their study, the researchers identified a variety of recommendations for increasing participation and overall value in the innovation process, but these three struck a chord with me:

• Foster meaningful participation. In the Microsoft study, only a small percentage of the corporate community participated in the pipeline. To improve participation, the researchers recommend incentives and clarification of how to balance regular work duties with contributions to the innovation process.
• Use business-relevant criteria in the voting process. Digg-style voting systems, as used in the Microsoft system, do not take business value into account, and the author’s passion for an idea may be diminished if too few votes are received. The researchers suggest that capping the number of votes a user can give, or asking users to rank ideas, can solve these problems.
• Support the process of innovation within the system. In the Microsoft example, the innovation platform is only used for a part of the idea pipeline, which means that users become unaware of the status of ideas as they move forward outside the system, leading to frustration. The platform also fosters the misconception that innovation is easy. Adopting a macro-level process of innovation in the system would allow the entire idea pipeline to be captured as it unfolds.

That last recommendation — to support the process of innovation within the system — is echoed in a comment by Edward Bevan, IBM’s vice president for technology and innovation programs, speaking about the IBM Jam process: “Idea generation is in some ways the ‘easy’ part — and darling star child — of innovation, whereas advancing, refining and building support for those ideas is the really tough part. . . .” Ideation needs follow-through to provide value.

Today’s top innovation management system vendors hope to facilitate ways of advancing, refining and building support for ideas — as well as idea generation. Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking with people from some of these vendors (first up, Brightidea) about how to best support innovation that comes from anywhere. Hint: It’s never just about the tool.

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