These findings could suggest that remote work is best suited for senior-level folks and the highly educated – the designers, programmers and content producers that many of us generally picture when asked to imagine laptop-toting virtual workers. But outsides of cafes in places like San Francisco, there’s a whole other side of the remote work revolution going on, one that’s focused on lower skilled employees like customer service agents who are seeing their place of work move from call centers to home offices and living rooms.

Take Hertz’s “Journey to Home” program as an example. The rental car company originally housed its customer service agents in an Oklahoma City call center, but over the last few years has been transitioning to have nearly half of its agents working out of their homes. Why?

“From a disaster recovery perspective, if you put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket sits in the center of the United States where a lot of natural disasters can happen, you put yourself at risk for major interruptions to the business, so we decided that it would be good to have another center of gravity,” Joe Eckroth, Hertz’s CIO, told GigaOM.

Secondarily, he explains, “as you begin to mature a market where you’re already drawing a lot of the workforce, competition starts to rise. In Oklahoma City, a lot more call centers are coming in. Remote work allowed us to broaden the pool of people we could draw from. It’s allowed us to attract students, part-time workers, full-time people who couldn’t necessarily, because of life circumstances, travel every day to go to work.”

What started as a disaster preparedness and recruitment initiative has had plenty of side benefits, according to Eckroth. “It has exceeded our expectations for sure,” he says. “The actual performance results on the sales side and on the customer service side were in all categories as good as we were getting in a tightly managed call center and in I would say about half the metrics they were a little bit better — places like employee satisfaction. Productivity is as high and in some cases higher,” he says, and that’s not even including the sustainability gains from so many saved car trips (and the bonus to employees from not having to buy so much gas at about four dollars a gallon.)

Hertz’s experience shows that less glamorous remote initiatives can work, but Eckroth stresses that success requires careful thought and planning. “We took some of our best and brightest people and we made it their sole mission to make it work,” he says. “It wasn’t a part-time job. It wasn’t something on the side.” Hertz’s experience shows getting highly motivated, highly communicative managers is key, but so is getting the right employees, and they aren’t necessarily the same people who would thrive in a traditional call center.

“Anybody can try to work from home, but it takes a certain set of disciplines. It takes a different mentality for somebody to stay motivated, to be undistracted and succeed at home. If you just took the average guy in the call center and sent them home, there would probably be a fairly high failure rate,” Eckroth says, noting that in fact some of the Oklahoma City call center’s star employees tried remote work and subsequently requested to return “to the box,” as Eckroth refers to it.

To make sure Hertz hires folks with the right combination of a self-starter mentality and basic tech savvy, the company has set up a detailed profile of the kind of person it’s seeking, putting candidates through thorough testing to make sure they have the skills to succeed. “I don’t think we knew how different the hiring profile might be,” Eckroth admits. “We didn’t modify our initial hiring process enough to accommodate that, and so that’s something we learned pretty quickly over the course of the first year or so. We changed our competency model.”

Besides figuring out exactly what you’re looking for in at-home agents and testing stringently to make sure candidates have these qualities, is there any other recommendations Eckroth has for other firms contemplating taking agents out of the box and sending them home? “Benchmark,” Eckroth suggests, noting that more and more firms are taking a remote approach and have wisdom to share. “Go out and talk to some people who have done it and get their lessons learned.”

Also, ensure no one feels like an afterthought. “This is a part of the organization. Treat it as such. Agents at home are every bit as important as the guys sitting in the box. I do a periodic video for all agents in our customer care, but once in a while I will uniquely do it just for the at-home agents with a specific message to them. Call them out and recognize them for some of the unique things they do. They should always know that they’re a part of a thought-out strategy. Pull in some of the really good people. They can come in for a few days or a week and work on special projects. It makes them feel that much more part of the team and not like they’re just a contractor out there. If that mentality builds, you’ll begin to create a second-class citizenship and that can be a disaster.”

Should more companies consider letting their less highly skilled employees skip the drive in to the office and just stay home?  

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Just this week interest turned to Britain’s civil servants who are being urged to work remotely to avoid adding to the expected congestion on the city’s already packed roads and trains. The announcement, which might seem ho-hum in some tech-savvy circles, raised a few eyebrows in Britain with the  Daily Mail declaring government workers get “a gold medal for skiving!” (the British English equivalent of slacking off) for being allowed to telecommute for seven weeks this summer. The article notes that “business leaders” are complaining about the probable reduction in useful government work that the policy will bring.

“Business groups criticized plan that has led to fears of a massive reduction in government work as the country tries to pull itself out of recession,” says the paper. “They said it sent out the dangerous message that Britain would close down for almost two months,” it continues, quoting Pierre Williams, from the Federation of Small Businesses, as saying: “A lot of private sector workers will feel rather surprised that the public sector have decided to work from home during the Olympic games.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister was forced to deny that staff would be “skiving” at home, reassuring the public that no less work would get done. Meanwhile, other stories are offering businesses looking to offer staff options, tips on how to make flexible working successful.

With study after study confirming that remote work actually boosts productivity for most people and most tasks, the most surprising fact about the boom in remote work this summer in London may be the fact that’s it’s controversial at all, revealing to converted virtual work fans the deep well of skepticism that still exists in substantial pockets of the business community.

In four years when the Olympics are held again, will remote work have become so mainstream that a bit of an uptick during the games will be far less remarked upon?

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If you have a huge pad then keeping your spaces for work and for chilling physically separate is a non-issue – just locate them in different parts of your home and simply close the door on your home office when you’re done for the day. But what if you’re an urban dweller or otherwise living in tight quarters for budgetary, environmental or lifestyle reasons? How can you keep your work life from invading spaces that should be used for chilling?

Design site Apartment Therapy tackled this issue recently, citing a clever strategy an Australian design firm used to solve this issue in a Melbourne apartment. Nexus Designs created what the blog dubs, “a top secret slide-open home office,” using a moveable door that’s artfully camouflaged to appear like just another wall when closed (pictured — check out Apartment Therapy for a full slide show of images). The result is a secret space both James Bond and design aficionados would be proud of. The flexible space solves the issue of being “forced to work in the place where you normally relax and kick back to watch zombie flicks,” as well as doubling as a guest bedroom.

Of course, professionally designed secret walls don’t come cheap, so Apartment Therapy notes that the general principals that make this solution successful can be applied to come up with cheaper alternatives. The blog boils it down to three essential considerations:

• Keep it subtle
• Create fine lines between spaces
• Never underestimate the power of lighting

The post suggests curtains might replace fancy sliding doors for those on more modest budgets and goes on to double underline the lighting issue, stressing that you should “be judicious with lighting. Make sure when the walls are down that both rooms can flow into each other, but when separated, they can function independently as well.”

How have you used design to keep work and relaxation separate?

Images courtesy of Earl Carter for Nexus Designs.

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Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

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We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

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For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

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We all know that some personality types find that the lack of structure when telecommuting hobbles their productivity. And most of us have experienced the phenomenon that some environments are less conductive to certain types of work than others, from noisy offices interrupting concentration to sunny days luring you away from a stack of unappealing tasks. Now a new study by economist E. Glenn Dutcher that’s soon to be published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and was outlined recently in The Wall Street Journal, put this anecdotal evidence that remote work productivity gains vary depending on the person and the task to the test. The WSJ’s Week in Ideas column summarizes:

Researchers assigned two tasks to 125 participants. The first was rote and repetitive; the other involved coming up with as many unusual uses for ordinary objects as possible, a test often used by psychologists to measure creativity. About half the participants did the tasks in a supervised lab, the other half remotely.

On the uncreative tasks, people were 6 percent to 10 percent less productive outside the lab. The fall-off was steepest among the least productive third of workers. (People who reported procrastinating on their homework were also, unsurprisingly, poor telecommuters—as were men.) On the creative tasks, by contrast, people were 11 percent to 20 percent more productive outside the lab.

“Lack of structure often abets creativity,” concludes the column, but the inverse is just as obviously true. The abundance of alternatives at home, from that suddenly urgent load of laundry to the siren song of your favorite guilty pleasure TV show, can make it harder to get routine (read: mind-numbing) tasks done. For these less exciting to-do items, this new research suggests, locking yourself into working by heading to the office might be a better bet. And if you’re prone to picking up the remote rather than face even relatively enjoyable tasks, this is probably even more true.

Do you find you have to corral yourself into certain environments to get boring tasks done, and if so, where do you head?

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One such remote work doubter just proclaimed his skepticism loudly on VentureBeat. In the post, Shane Mac, the director of product at local jobs marketplace Zaarly, announces that he has been converted from his earlier belief in remote work and argues strongly for co-located teams for startups. He offers seven reasons for his change of heart, ranging from the logistical (remote communication slows down the speed of decision making and takes extra work) to the more nebulous, including:

Hallway conversations are priceless. You can’t create true serendipity over instant message. It’s crazy to think that one discussion can make, break or change the path of a company, but sometimes, those “accidental conversations” do turn into some magical idea, approach or direction.

Passion in person is contagious. I’d argue that it’s almost impossible to convey passion accurately to someone at a remote location. If you think back to times when you’ve been convinced to do something, it usually results from face-to-face interaction. It’s harder to influence and create change through the digital highway. Also, in-person passion helps to create a social pressure that makes people work better. If the person next to you is working late, it’s much easier to ignore if you can’t physically see staying in the office longer.

Company culture is key. Culture binds a company early on, so maintaining that culture in multiple locations requires extra effort and even a separate “culture team” — members of management who ensure that the culture is universal across the company…. it’s hard to live and breathe something if you aren’t actually breathing the same air.

Also, in a gripe that may be of particular interest to the many companies peddling online meeting platforms, Mac isn’t buying the effectiveness of the virtual whiteboard. “I haven’t once seen a collaboration session for a critical decision happen successfully from sending files back and forth,” he writes. When it comes to whiteboards, the real deal, he feels, is key.

None of Mac’s issues with remote work are completely out of left field – even the most ardent of location independents suspect from time to time that they’re less bonded to their team and less able to generate and act on serendipitous ideas or encounters when they’re at a distance. And it’s easy to see how these concerns would be most relevant in a start-up atmosphere. After all, the autonomy and life-work balance that remote work can bring are mostly of benefit to those that are trying to maintain a career that won’t drive them crazy over the long haul, rather than founders in the startup scene where it’s pretty much par for the course to work like a lunatic short-term in hopes of an eventual payoff and easing up of your schedule.

So perhaps the truth about remote work isn’t that it’s a binary yes-no choice, but rather a sliding scale with workers you’ve never met a world away on one end and teams that fall asleep under their desks together on the other. One side offers an engaged but not obsessive worldwide pool of talent and the ability to sustain a career without driving yourself batty with office politics, repetition and horrid commutes, the other a short-term burst of productivity in a hothouse of ideas with a high potentiality for interpersonal conflict, burnout and stunted personal lives if you try to keep it up for too long. Viewed that way, varying degrees of remote work make sense for different teams, with the only true mistake being misjudging exactly what sort of structure your team needs.

What’s you reaction to Mac’s take down of remote work for start-ups – amen, absolute disagreement or something in the middle?

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TeamViewer surveyed over 2,500 American adults and found that more than three-quarters of both sexes (77 percent) feel online meetings are on the rise. With companies squeezed for cash, technology improving and teams increasingly spread out geographically that’s really no surprise. Slightly more head scratching were the responses when pollsters asked about the benefits of meeting remotely. In short, women saw more advantages to the practice than men did. Here’s how the sexes viewed various potential benefits of online meetings:

• Save money on transportation costs: 78 percent of women saw this benefit, compared to 71 percent of men
• Less time wasted traveling to meetings: 77 percent vs. 71 percent
• Less nerve-wracking than in-person meetings: 37 percent vs. 26 percent
• Participants are less distracted: 22 percent vs. 16 percent

Women were also much more demanding of the hosts of online meetings, with a whopping 81 percent of female respondents saying organization was important in a host compared to 68 percent of male respondents who felt this way. 64 percent of ladies also said being fast-paced was important. Only 52 percent of men agreed.

The fact that relatively few folks of either gender think participants of online meetings are paying closer attention than in in-person gatherings is hardly shocking considering how many of us have started clicking through emails when an online speaker started droning. The other differences between the sexes are slightly more puzzling.

Are women, who still tend to bear more household responsibilities, just more in need of and aware of the scheduling flexibility and time savings online meetings provide? Does the fact that, on average, fewer women are hard-charging, room dominators increase the appeal of online meetings? Are women just ever so slightly more likely to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear? And what’s to be made of women’s sterner demand for organized, quick-moving moderators – is this dislike of rambling just another function of their harder-pressed schedules?

What do you make of these survey results? 

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All of the gloom and doom is a stress for bankers and politicians, but for workers on the ground the challenges are severe and immediate, and their ability to influence their situation (short of immigrating) limited. But the quarterly Global Online Employment Report from online job board Elance released today suggests there is at least one refuge from the economic storm that workers are increasingly utilizing– remote work.

The analysis of hiring across the globe on the site showed a sizable growth in earnings for contractors in crisis-stricken European countries. Greek workers on the platform earned 122 percent more compared to the previous year, while Spanish contractors earned 142 percent more.

“One of the benefits of online work is the ability for contractors (and businesses) to ‘escape’ their local economies. A number of countries in Europe have weak economies and the workers in these countries are seeking work online. It’s a great solution – temporary or permanent,” said Kjetil Olsen, vice president, Europe at Elance said in a statement accompanying the report.

Konstantina Zoehrer, head of business and strategic partnership development at Athens coworking space Loft2Work, confirmed in an email that, unsurprisingly, space members are hungry for alternatives to largely non-existent local jobs. “What we see is a increasing demand of targeted networking and skill development as there is a trend towards entrepreneurial activities,” she wrote, explaining that her space has tried to help along those looking to sell their services outside the stricken traditional job market. “We adapted our pricing policy to the current socioeconomic circumstances,” she said. “As a social enterprise we work towards the integration of inactive workforce in the labor market.”

In an overview of the embryonic Greek coworking scene that appeared earlier this year in coworking magazine DeskMag also confirms the general thrust of the Elance findings. Terrible economic realities on the ground, “have added fuel to the growing trend of independent and contingency workers who make up the majority of the membership at coworking spaces,” wrote Anna Cashman.

Do you think the economic crisis in Europe will spur the uptake of remote working? Will the effects outlast the crisis?

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