Collaboration — Collaboration | GigaOM

Collaboration

Hertz’s CIO explains how the company moved from housing all its customer service agents in a call center to having nearly half of them based at home, puncturing any ideas of successful remote workers as elite, highly educated professionals in the process. Read More »

With the Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparations by organizers and athletes. But one other type of news item is surprisingly popular in Britain – stories equating telecommuting during the games with slacking at home. Read More »

 
 

Got a remote gig that allows you to work from home but a home that isn’t exactly palatial? Design pros channel James Bond to offer clever solutions to keep your business and personal life from blurring, even if you’re living in tight quarters. Read More »

Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But studies also reveal middle managers resist the idea. A recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation offers tips on converting them into flex work believers. Read More »

Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And the current management mania for collaboration may be making matters worse for quiet ruminators. Is remote working the solution to the problem, or does it bring its own issues? Read More »

Remote working is often about practicing what you preach. Got an outdoor adventure brand? No chaining your employees to their desks then. Built your company late at night? Forget the nine to five. But what if your company is all about tracking time? Harvest explains. Read More »

Remote work advocates have plenty of scientific ammunition to convince skeptics as study after study has shown telecommuters get more done. But what’s true on average doesn’t hold for every case, new research suggests. For stultifying tasks (and, unsurprisingly, slackers), the office may be best. Read More »

An exec at jobs marketplace Zaarly pens an uncompromising post admitting he’s been converted to remote work skepticism and arguing that for demanding, idea-hungry startups at least co-located teams are definitely the way to go. Is he on to something? Read More »

A new survey released by remote access company TeamViewer today shows that while both genders predict more online meetings in the future, women see more benefits to the practice than men do and are also more demanding of their meeting hosts. Why is this? Read More »

A quarterly report from Elance indicates that with the lengthy economic crisis in Europe showing no signs of coming to a happy conclusion, workers in troubled countries are increasingly turning to remote work as an alternative to finding jobs in their stressed home economies. Read More »

Microsoft Canada’s latest Flexible Working report shows that despite a steady drumbeat of studies validating the idea that telecommuting improves productivity, Canadian managers are still much more skeptical of the practice than their employees, holding back uptake of remote work. Read More »

The results are out on UK telecoms giant O2′s one-day telecommuting experiment and it’s good news for fans of remote work. Sending nearly 3,000 workers home improved productivity, saved money and CO2, and resulted in more sleep and family time for employees. Read More »

More Must Reads

While a host of studies have found that telecommuters are more productive and happier with their work, new research paints a less rosy picture of managing virtually, finding that bosses who don’t share a space with their reports perform slightly worsel than co-located supervisors. Read More »

An appeals court confirms that a Maryland-based software company with a single telecommuter in New Jersey is liable for taxes in the state, illustrating yet again that it’s past time for congress to sort out the rules on taxing telecommuters. Read More »

If miscommunication or fuzzy delegation of responsibility can hurt co-located teams, these mistakes can torpedo virtual ones. That’s why experts on managing virtual teams stress talking not just about what you’re working on, but how you’re going to work on it as well. Read More »

Findings from a new survey that confirm earlier polls showing workers are willing to sacrifice money or vacation time to work remotely may not be shocking, but other revelations about how soon employees expect their offices to go fully virtual may surprise skeptics. Read More »

Rising prices at the pump inevitably prompt a flurry of interest in telecommuting as a short-term solution for commuters’ pain. Should we be thinking longer term, using remote work as a way to restructure our lives to take the sting out of gas prices for good? Read More »

As more and more of working life becomes virtual, there’s one bastion of face-to-face interaction that seems least likely to go remote – the leadership off-site — but at least one high profile pundit thinks it’s time to rethink the annual executive get-together. Read More »

The argument that work is increasingly untethered from the office and will take place more and more in coffee shop–type environments is pretty common, but one futurist is taking “coffeeshopification” a step further, claiming that universities and retail stores will resemble coffee shops as well. Read More »

Gloomy February is generally in need of more celebrations, and it has gotten one: Anywhere Working Week is on now. But this initiative from UK business, government and nonprofits to promote remote work is hardly getting pulses racing. Flexible work deserves a higher profile. Read More »

A new survey from TeamViewer confirms earlier reports that Americans would be willing to make sacrifices for the privilege of working remotely, as well as offering a timely but shocking revelation of what some desperate souls would give up to telecommute. Read More »

The rise of remote work may mean teams can spread out far and wide from corporate headquarters, but ironically, the increasing prevalence of telecommuting could actually lead to denser communities rather than atomized workers as work and life are integrated in one space. Read More »

A round-up of advice from veteran remote workers to those who work from home turns up a rarely cited truth: Your productivity problems may have more to do with what you do than how you do it. Now you just have to admit it. Read More »

Among cutting-edge companies the realities of virtual teams may be fairly old news, but according to several recent articles, the same isn’t true for many mainstream HR departments who are badly behind when it comes to grappling with the implications of widespread remote work. Read More »

A handful of freelancer parties suggest the future of the work-related holiday get-together in a world of remote collaboration may not be so grim after all. It just may require a switch in mindset away from an exclusive focus on employers as the organizing principle. Read More »

A handful of new surveys reveal many Americans are planning to work through the holidays, increasing both their vacation starvation and the risk of burnout. The dreary economy can’t help, but are new ways of working, including remote teams and constant connectivity, partly to blame? … Read More »

The idea of physically manipulating digital data through gestures, as shown in the movie Minority Report, may seem like sci-fi, but there’s much that applies to the desktop of tomorrow. Oblong’s John Underkoffler envisioned the future at the GigaOM Net:Work event on Thursday. Read More »

Gary Swart, CEO of freelancer sourcing site oDesk took the stage at Net:Work 2011 to talk about how work is changing in the face of remote work trends. He started by pointing to a key competitive determinator all companies seek and must compete for: talent. Read More »

Mobility usually means both more hours and more flexibility for workers, but does it also equal more stress? About a third of connected workers say absolutely yes, while another third say absolutely not. What are the differences between these two groups? Read More »

Next week at Net:Work in San Francisco, tech geeks and forward-thinking business folks will gather to discuss the untethered, agile future of work. But apparently it’s not just these private actors that are cheerleading these changes; several governments are getting behind the idea too. Read More »

A few weeks ago we brought you the preliminary results of a Stanford University study into the benefits of telecommuting, suggesting that reluctant bosses might be persuaded on remote work after looking at the findings. Now, one of the authors presents the results via video. Read More »

Sky high gas bills, road rage, unpleasant body odors on packed subways: The many downsides of commuting already constitute a solid argument in favor of remote work. But a recent study offers another reason to trade in your train pass: Your commute is killing you. Read More »

The caffeine may be flowing and the atmosphere comfy at your local coffee shop, but working there isn’t without its annoyances, which is why WorkSnug set out to solicit ideas and develop a ‘Coffee Shop Code of Conduct.’ Now the results are out. Read More »

Work used to be a place. Increasingly, we can get stuff done from nearly anywhere. That’s changing how companies procure talent and workers build careers, but how fast are these changes are percolating through the economy? Today oDesk puts some numbers to the trend. Read More »

Luckily, when Cora Rodenbusch’s programmer husband caught a bad case of wanderlust, she found herself in a dream situation for a would-be digital nomad: employed by an open-minded purveyor of remote collaboration tools eager to drum up publicity and put its products to the test. … Read More »

Tech sites present plenty of speculation on new tech and ways of working. Is this just the jabbering of pundits or is all of it making a difference on the ground? A conversation with Barry Frangipane, the co-author of The Venice Experiment, proves work is changing. … Read More »

Web conferencing tools are a double-edged sword; you can connect with your team anywhere, but there’s no way to know if they’re listening intently or honing their doodling skills. Fear of distraction may be understandable but it’s also misplaced according to experts. Read More »

Usually, remote work involves plenty of communication and self-promotion with near strangers, but psychologists have good news for those who find this reality daunting – selling yourself to strangers is generally much more fun than we expect. And for reasons that will surprise you. Read More »

In a shift that’s analogous to the movement toward cloud computing, work is changing from a place to a network armed with collaboration tools, and this change raising questions about environmental impact. But are we underestimating the green benefits of new ways of working? Read More »

When we say remote work, we usually have one sense of the word in mind –distant from colleagues. But remote has another related meaning: rural. MacKenzie-Childs is remote in both senses. We spoke to the CEO about the benefits and challenges of remote, remote workers. Read More »

Several surveys have found people are willing to take a pay cut in order to have the flexibility to work remotely. Now, a new survey is confirming these findings –- but with a twist. Read More »

A recent study seems to indicate that remote workers commit fewer ethical violations than in-office workers. But why? Is it simply because there’s less opportunity when you don’t see your coworkers? Or, as some experts suggest, could trust be the key difference? Read More »

The traditional office space is in the midst of its most dramatic shift since it was rocked by the creation of the cubicle more than 40 years ago. These new workspaces create fresh challenges for IT departments and technological demands from today’s workforce. Read More »

What lessons has Chuck Robbins, a senior VP running Cisco’s sales team for the Americas, learned from his experience at a company that was not only an early adopter of flexible working, but also builds a number of remote work solutions? Read More »

Having a healthy passion for work and life in balance can be a big productivity booster. But too often, that passion for work can veer too far into workaholic tendencies, especially for web workers. Here are a few tips to make sure your passion is productive. Read More »

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