Information and communication technology company 2e2 asked nearly 2,000 workers how they experience the nine-to-five grind. The responses confirmed the results of earlier polls and studies showing workers are actually more productive away from the office: 55 percent of those 2e2 asked said they got more done working from home.

Slightly more surprising was the respondents’ choice of the location where they’re at their most creative. Where do they feel they get their most innovative ideas?

• 47 percent said the best discussions about business ideas come when people get together in a pub or restaurant.
• 24 percent said the office boardroom.
• Online discussions were chosen by 19 percent.

This will be great news for knowledge workers looking to convince the boss to splurge on working lunches and a few rounds of drinks (though, it’s assumed, creativity falls off pretty sharply if you overdo the libations). It’s also food for thought for the laptop addicts among us, suggesting making time to get away from our screens and talk to actual humans is valuable and often overlooked.

But even if these less-than-rigorously scientific findings confirm the enduring affection of Brits for the pub more than any hard and fast intelligence for business leaders, the idea that place influences creativity and that our choice of locale is often knee-jerk and uninspired is worth considering.

Where do you get your best business ideas?

Image courtesy of Flickr user @rgs.

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And that, according to a recent post by former Harvard Business School professor and partner in FutureWork Forum Jim Ware on the WorkSnug blog, isn’t just bad interior decorating, but may also be bad psychology. He writes:

I, like most “knowledge workers” spend almost all my work time in a fairly traditional office environment – four walls, a desk, some filing cabinets, and shelves full of books. Sure, there might be a family photo or two on the wall, and maybe a picture drawn by a child, but the fact is that no matter what I am trying to accomplish on a given day, the place where I am is almost always the same (yes, I usually hold team meetings in a conference room, and sometimes I even have a meaningful “meeting” in a cafeteria or a coffee shop, but let’s face it, most of the time I use the same place to read, write, analyze, list, sort, file, talk on the phone, and even meet with colleagues – at least when I’m not on airplane or in some drab hotel room far from home).

What if I had lots of places to choose among, and could move from one to another as I moved from one task to another? My instinct tells me I’d be a lot more creative in some kinds of places (rooms filled with art work, or with outdoor photos or large windows – or literally outdoor places), more analytic in others (a library, or a bare-bones office?), and thoughtful and reflective in yet another place (a church? a mountain retreat? a sailboat? a café?).

The interesting post, which is well worth a read, detours into office design before concluding with a question for reflection for all of us knowledge workers with the technical capacity to roam far and wide but work habits that hold us back from taking full advantage of that freedom: “When there are so many different kinds of knowledge work, why do we so often try to do it all in one kind of place?” As 2011 draws to a close, it’s an interesting New Year’s thought to ponder and perhaps spur improvements in our work style in the coming year.

Are you stuck in a rut when it comes to where you do your work? Could shaking things up and getting out of your usual spaces improve your productivity?

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Now, halfway around the world in New Zealand, a ZDNet Australia writer is asking whether the ongoing shifts in the way many of us work are going to encourage denser city cores or more spread out population patterns. Writer Darren Greenwood notes that though environmental activists and design enthusiasts often call for denser city cores that demand fewer resource-gobbling cars and encourage us to live in smaller spaces, the connected future of work might actually lead to more people moving further out from these urban cores.

In recent decades, New Zealand has seen a drift from the provinces to large cities like Auckland, mainly due to better job prospects. However, this has made Auckland extremely crowded and expensive, just like many a large Australian metro area.

People just might find that the costs of living in Auckland are no longer worth it, especially if the extra pay is not enough to compensate for loss of quality of life, never mind if you want that garden that the planners are so keen to use on housing.

Employers, too, will soon realize that if you can get people working from home in the exurbs for a bit less, or they can have branch offices in cheaper, neighboring towns and cities, then why be in the city centre?

Thus, one of the main impacts of UFB [Ultra-Fast Broadband] could well be on the shape of our towns and cities.

Commentators have had plenty to say about the possible advantages of greater uptake of remote work for rural areas, as well as how coworking spaces might benefit out-of-the-way communities, but the idea that remote work might be a boon for the exurbs – bane of green campaigners – isn’t one you hear too often.

Of course, there are lots of factors at play when it comes to how our cities and town evolve, including energy prices, climate change and how our collective interest in greener living develops, or fails to. But nonetheless, Greenwood’s insight is an interesting thought to add to the pot.

If you could work from anywhere, where would you live?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Worker101.

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For those moments of doubt, there is no better cure than a conversation with Barry Frangipane, the co-author of The Venice Experiment: A Year of Trial and Error Living Abroad. A middle-of-the-road computer programmer living in Florida with a full-time job, Frangipane decided to see if he could make all the advances in remote collaboration and increased acceptance of telecommuting work for him — by moving to Venice for a year with his wife and keeping his day job.

Sneaking up on the boss

Frangipane knew better than to spring a transatlantic move on his boss all at once, opting instead to inch his way toward greater freedom by slowly proving that, for him, the office was only a hindrance.

“The first thing I did was I started working a day a week at home,” he explains, “and then that gradually grew until I was spending the entire week working from home. Home being five miles away from the office.” From that point it was a surprisingly simple leap from Florida to Italy.

“Once you iron out the technical details and your employer can see that your productivity is actually increasing working from home, then at that point approaching the boss and saying, ‘look, I’m thinking of moving my home. Oh, and by the way, that home is Venice,’ well certainly it’s a little startling, but when the discussion turns to just the facts,” the boss has no reason to disagree.

All upside

Did Frangipane’s customers revolt? Did he miss the office banter or feel like his career was suffering because he was 4,000 miles away? Quite the contrary. “I would say it was all upside,” he says. Leaving aside the benefits of spending a year in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Frangipane actually felt he got more done living abroad.

“In an office environment, there are so many interruptions. One of my partners once said that 32 15-minute interruptions is the entire day. And it makes you think a little bit,” he says. “When I’m working at home people don’t just stop by and stand in my doorway to talk about the ball game. I find myself substantially more productive because I can focus for longer periods of time.”

Dare to dream

Frangipane is adamant that there’s nothing special about him that allowed him to succeed at extreme telecommuting and insists that while living abroad for a year isn’t for everyone, it is for way more people than you’d think. “There was a time when this was just for computer people — web designers and programmers and things — but not so much anymore,” he says, citing the case of a neighbor who works as a customer service rep for a big-box store and has never set foot in the company’s offices.

“It wouldn’t even be noticed if she moved to another country and just continued answering the phone,” he says.

And if you think that Frangipane is simply braver than the average joe, he replies that simply setting a date to leave, informing yourself about your destination and carefully planning your move does wonders to embolden the timid. “Before you go, check the blogs online, check websites and talk to people who have already done it and ask them questions. You’ll see that many of your fears will be allayed,” he insists.

Once he and his wife started learning more about life in Venice, “you start realizing that they’re really just not that much different. Everybody puts on their pants one leg at a time.”

Learning to think Italian

International similarities in dressing aside, there were differences between the Italian way of life and the American, according to Frangipane, and these made a deep impression on him. “I find that things that used to be considered big issues for me, office politics and things, just slide off my back now,” he says. And Italy also changed him in other ways.

“Venice is a town of only 60,000 people and functions as one big family. Everyone knows everyone. They’re happy to shut their stores for a half an hour and just take you to the local coffee shop. They value the relationships so much more than the money that that has certainly changed my focus,” says Frangipane. “I’ve learned that earning that last $1,000 or $10,000 a year is not as important as the relationships.”

How much so? He and his wife already have their eye on Paris for another jaunt abroad.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melename

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But despite a lot of talk in support of new ways of working to help knowledge workers keep their sanity and their families intact, there’s plenty of evidence that some managers are merely paying lip service to the idea.

Recently, HR consultancy WorldatWork decided to take a closer look at managers’ true attitudes towards flexible working, polling 2,312 employees in six countries (Brazil, China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) in late 2010. The results out now show a chasm between rhetoric and reality when it comes to flexible working:

While, 80 percent of respondents claimed to support family-friendly workplaces and arrangements such as remote work, more often than not their behavior didn’t match their beliefs:

• More than half the surveyed managers think the ideal employee is one that is available to meet business needs regardless of business hours
• 40 percent believe the most productive employees are those without a lot of personal commitments
• Nearly one in three think that employees who use flexible work arrangements will not advance very far in their organization

“The good news is that 80 percent of employers around the globe avow support for family-friendly workplaces,” said Kathie Lingle, executive director of WorldatWork’s Alliance for Work-Life Progress. “The bad news is they are simultaneously penalizing those who actively strive to integrate work with their lives.”

The WSJ’s The Juggle blog points out that the WorldatWork findings are consistent with other earlier surveys, including one done by Bain & Co last year that found while flex work programs were widely available, they were very little used.

This gap between what management says and what it does can can result in employees who “go underground, resorting to ‘stealth maneuvers’ for managing their personal responsibilities,” according to Lingle. On the flip side, actually implementing flexible working is tied to lower turnover, among other benefits.

Does flex work rhetoric match reality at your employer?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Philo Nordlund, CC 2.0.

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Notifications

It’s hard to understand just how much better it is to be able to see your work-related emails lined up at a glance on your lock screen as they come in, without having to even unlock your device, until you’ve tried it for yourself. Plus, you can jump to any email in the list automatically with one swipe, instead of having to unlock, open the mail application, scroll and find the right email, then tap on the email. The new iOS notifications can also do the same thing for text messages, voicemail or even with alerts from third-party apps. This makes everything you do on your phone or iPad much, much easier; a boon for busy remote workers who are inundated daily with demands for their attention.

iMessage

While the value of iMessage, Apple’s new text and MMS replacement, may be reduced by being limited to a single platform (iOS only), that limitation didn’t stop BlackBerry Messenger from being a huge hit with the enterprise crowd. iMessage will even work on iPads and iPod touches, devices which don’t normally support text messaging. It’s also smart enough to detect when your recipient can receive iMessages, so iOS-based web workers will be using it whether or not they realize it.

AirPlay mirroring

An iPad 2, coupled with an Apple TV, can function as a mobile workstation, and a presentation tool you can use anywhere there’s a television or video output device. AirPlay mirroring of apps makes it easier to work on presentations and longer documents, especially when you pair your iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard for easier typing. Plus, developers should be able to leverage the new feature to come up with some really innovative two-screen interfaces that could significantly change the way we use mobile devices to get work done.

Documents in the cloud

As part of iOS 5 and iCloud, developers will be able to add simple cross-device syncing of document changes. This will be an incredible boon for remote workers, and especially for distributed teams, who should be able to take advantage of this in apps that let members work collaboratively on a single document. We could see solutions that allow a distributed team to work together on projects as if they were working on a corporate server, instead, using Apple’s free iCloud product, which should be handy for small companies and freelancers.

PC-free

There are mobile workers who can do everything they need to get done on an iPad and an iPhone, especially with the right software support from an in-house IT development team. For those workers, the most important thing about iOS 5 is that it finally severs the essential connection between iOS devices and a home PC. A workstation with an all-day battery and an always-on connection is now within reach, especially for remote workers with relatively light computing demands.

Apple gave mobile workers a lot to be thankful for with OS X Lion, too, including auto save, resume and version tracking for documents built into the OS, but I think the changes made in iOS 5 will have the biggest impact for remote teams. Apple also made a couple changes directly aimed at enterprise customers, like encryption for iMessage and S/MIME support in iOS Mail. If you’ve been waiting for a good time to introduce Apple devices to your mobile workflow, there’s never been a better time than this fall, when iOS 5 is released.

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Sure, there are web conferencing services, such as GoToMeeting, where you can share your desktop, present audio over phone or VoIP, and even push out polls, but what if you want to produce a more media-rich presentation that you can share with your virtual team for training purposes? And archive it? And repurpose it?

Knoodle offers a training solution that provides a presentation with a split screen; you can have text or PowerPoint slides on one side of the screen and video on the other, then sync the video and audio with the slides so they automatically advance at the right time. The Knoodle presentations are more engaging than screencasts or audio slideshows.

You can combine multiple assets — PowerPoint slideshows, video, images and text — and also add also add test quizzes or surveys into your presentations to allow viewers to become active participants in the information exchange. You can capture video as you produce your presentation with your web cam, or opt not to use the video component and just sync up audio.

Once your rich-media presentation is complete, you can share a link to it, export it as an MP4 file and email it, or embed it on your site, your blog, or within your intranet. You can also reuse and repurpose assets you’ve uploaded to create new presentations quickly and easily. As an admin, you can create and manage groups, invite group members,and manage and track who has viewed the presentation you’ve created. You can share the presentations internally (for training your team, for example) or externally (for providing publicly accessible training, demos and educational tools).

Knoodle offers a 30-day free trial. Pricing ranges from $14.99/month to $149.99/month, based on usage and the number of people watching the presentations. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

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1) What are the deliverables and when are they due?

One of the biggest challenges for a virtual workforce is how hard it can be to actually create something. For teams that rely heavily on technology and computers, there’s constantly something vying for our attention (email, Twitter, Facebook, new tools and gadgets, etc.); simply staying focused on the task in front of us for more than five minutes is hard enough, let alone actually completing it.

How to fix it: It’s important to clearly understand what you’re trying to create and when it’s due.

2) Is everyone on the same page?

It’s surprising to see how often my team and I are on completely different pages with our understanding of goals and tasks for a given project, even with seemingly clear instructions to start.

How to fix it: Get everyone on your team in the habit of always using one common phrase, “Repeat it back to me.” Or at the very least, wrap each communication with a quick rundown of the highlights, especially next actions.

3) How and when do we communicate?

Much of the problem around a distributed workforce is a direct result of poor, inconsistent or even non-existent communication. How often and through what medium are you and your team expected to communicate with each other, and if you are the leader of that team, are you regularly monitoring what tasks have been completed and assigning new ones?

How to fix it: Establish clear expectations for the frequency and method of communication. Set one clear channel for communication and stick with it.

4) Is there trust and integrity throughout the team?

In a virtual environment, where you can’t just “pop in” to check on other members of your team, it can be hard to trust handing off important tasks and projects to others, which is why it’s so important to regularly evaluate whether or not team members are consistently meeting their responsibilities and commitments.

How to fix it: Schedule regular performance evaluations to monitor the team’s overall ability to meet deadlines and deliverables, and keep an eye out for weak links within the organization who consistently fail to meet expectations and honor commitments to members of the team.

5) Is everyone working to improve communication, feedback and organization?

We all have different ways of working. One person on your team may prefer an itemized task list in an online project management application, while another may prefer pen, paper, and a to-do list, but no matter the individual preferences, at the end of the day, everyone must come together to create a desired outcome. If you’re not succeeding at that, someone has to be responsible for fixing it. You may work individually to improve your own personal productivity and effectiveness, but as part of a distributed team, it’s important that your team share the responsibility for constantly adjusting and improving communications, feedback and organization.

How to fix it: Regularly check in with the individual members of your team to get their opinions about where communications, productivity, organization and effectiveness are lagging, and then get their ideas for improving it.

6) Is time allotted for innovation?

Periodically cleaning off our desks is something most of us take for granted, but it’s necessary working time, nonetheless. The same “housekeeping” processes should exist for the tools and systems within our team. There should be time for team members to explore possibilities for improving the overall setup. Just as rearranging and modifying our physical spaces can improve effectiveness and performance, so can tweaking and adjusting our virtual space.

How to fix it: Every other week or even once a month, designate a “clean up day,” where team members spend time finding creative solutions for regular problems and glitches in your current system, as well as cleaning up those already in place. Even something as simple as cleaning up files and inboxes can go a long way toward improving productivity and order.

Managing any team is not easy, and a virtual team adds additional challenges into the mix, which is why you should always be asking the questions and then making adjustments to maintain and improve overall performance.

What steps do you regularly take to improve the effectiveness of your remote team?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Travis Isaacs

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Start Small and Occasional

Keep your distributed team small and not entirely off-site when you’re first trying out remote working. Choose a pool of employees that you know can handle extra work, and won’t have a problem with working extra to make up for lost time in case you find a distributed work environment runs counter to your company’s culture or the nature of your work.

Don’t necessarily create your team using only employees who’ve expressed interest in working remotely in the past, and don’t only choose teammates who have a proven history of working well together. Doing so might encourage a success for your trial, but it won’t reflect the real experience of a wider remote working program, which may or may not be exclusively volunteer-based or consist of individuals with a known ability to succeed when working together.

Mare sure remote work isn’t all your team does right away. Add a day or fund remote work during weekends or off-hours. This will ensure you don’t jeopardize your day-to-day business while employees get acclimatized to the new work situation.

BYOT

Use a bring-your-own-tools (BYOT) model for equipping staff to work remotely; provide an equipment stipend and allow workers to choose their own equipment. This is a good idea for a number of reasons:

• Decreases learning time for new or unfamiliar tools.
• Decreases cost (in some cases).
• It seems to boost worker morale in companies where bring-your-own-smartphone and computer programs are already being tried. This might be because users aren’t struggling with devices they’re not comfortable using, or just because they feel like they have more control when they can pick their own equipment.

Use this policy for software, too, to an extent. Often workers will have a better idea of what software works in certain situations than IT departments or company management. Granted, there will be some software that has to be mandated by the company (although remember to stay platform-agnostic where possible) but for everything else, it’s better to allow team members to make their own choices, for the same reasons mentioned above.

Document Everything

Remember that this is an exploratory project, with the aim of determining whether adopting a wider program will be successful. To that end, make sure you and your test team document as much as is possible. That means keeping detailed records and producing reports.

Producing this documentation will obviously be a time-consuming process no matter what, but you can help streamline the actual work required by your trial team members by automating as much as of it as possible. Consider using time and activity loggers on work-specific hardware, and prepare easy-to-understand and complete reporting forms for commonly occurring events, like email interactions, use of collaborative software and IM conversations.

Begin and End

Lastly, remember that if you really want to gather useful data, you should have a firm beginning and ending date in mind for your remote work test project. You don’t necessarily have to share this with team members (they may behave differently if the project has a set time period) but you should avoid the temptation to let it continue on as a permanent fixture without a break. Even if it’s working, an end date will provide the opportunity to step back,  take a look at what happened, and accurately reflect on why it succeeded so that you can replicate that success with other distributed teams going forward.

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Davinci Virtual, a U.K. provider of “virtual office services,” for one, says yes, reporting an increase in demand for its services it attributes to the spike in fuel costs.  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in car-centric Atlanta, government researchers found a 75 percent jump in the number of telecommuters (though they still account for only seven percent of workers). That’s good news when it comes to reducing carbon emissions due to commuting, too.

But there’s still plenty of possible telecommuters with jobs that are compatible with remote working who have yet to take up the option. The Mobility Choice Coalition says that out of a potential 9.6 million workers already able and permitted to telecommute, only 5.2 million are currently logging on from a distance two or more days a week. What’s stopping the other 4.4 million? The MCC suggests, “individual firms or managers may tacitly discourage telecommuting even where it is permitted by policy.”

Are you one of these reluctant managers, tempted by the possibilities of virtual teams but still harboring doubts? Perhaps rising oil prices could be the final factor to push you to adopt web working. After all, The Oil Trap a project of Lisa Margonelli, the director of the Energy Policy Initiative at New America Foundation, claims:

The average family of four making $50,000 a year spends nearly $8000 a year on their cars, maintenance, and fuel combined–more than they pay for taxes or medical care.

Eliminate some or all of that cost and that’s a big chunk of change you can use to attract the best talent that won’t come out of your pocket. At a price of $3.50 per gallon, Americans will spend $41 billion on gasoline this March. What else could we be doing with some of that money if more of us were web workers?

(Image courtesy Flickr user A Siegel, CC 2.0)

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Viability

Before beginning any remote-work arrangement, you’ll need to ensure that it’s a feasible option for your situation and company. Although there are many cases where employees can get just as much work done (if not more) working virtually as they can in-house, there are certain situations where it might not be a realistic option, such as if your company requires a large amount of direct, in-person contact with customers and colleagues.

Viability of remote working not only applies to the circumstances surrounding the company, but also to the individual employees considering the possibility. You must determine on a case-by-case basis if a person has the discipline and motivation to maintain his or her responsibilities without direct supervision.

Finally, is it viable from a logistical standpoint? Are the resources, tools, and technology available to support this kind of work arrangement? Establish a checklist of all required items for creating a successful remote work situation, such as:

• Computer and equipment needs,
• Internet connectivity needs,
• Software needs,
• Security needs, and
• Communication needs (phone, voice mail, email, fax, IM, etc.).

Performance Expectations

How will a remote working arrangement affect performance expectations? Will it impact how performance is measured, how assignments are distributed, or how deadlines are established and monitored?

Scheduling and Availability

Especially in the early stages of remote working, getting used to new norms of availability and scheduling can be a challenge. Business owners and managers might expect employees to be available during set times, while employees would rather work during times when they’re most productive, which is why it’s important to communicate these expectations clearly from the beginning. Questions to consider include:

• Will employees be expected to come to the office a certain amount of time each week?
• What will be the terms regarding overtime?
• Will the employee be required to track hours worked each day or week?
• Will the employee have vacation and sick time?
• Will employees be required to maintain set “office hours,” where they are available by phone, IM, or email?
• Will employees have a standard response time for communications?
• Will employees be required to attend certain company functions, meetings, or events?

One important consideration is that it’s not always in the best interest of productivity to increase the number of meetings between employees and management staff simply because of a remote working arrangement. Having meetings for the sake of it wastes time that could be spent more productively.

Designated Work Space and Time

Another big consideration with remote working is that the lines between personal time and space and company time and space can quickly blur, so it’s important to establish guidelines before beginning the arrangement:

• Will the employee be permitted to work whenever he or she chooses? For example, is it acceptable for an employee to break work into blocks of time over the course of a week that may not be in line with more traditional work schedules?
• Will the person be expected to have a designated workspace that is separate from the rest of his/her home?
• Will the person be required to have child/dependent care during certain hours?

Expenses

In addition to personal versus company space and time, you also must establish clear lines between personal and company expenses:.

• Who will be responsible for purchasing and maintaining equipment, software and supplies?
• Will the company reimburse the employee for utilities or other expenses associated with conducting business activity at home?

Also, don’t forget to consider taxes and insurance. Both the employer and employee should meet with qualified professionals to understand the implications of a remote working arrangement.

Evaluation and Review

With any remote working situation, it’s a good idea to start with a trial period to see how well the arrangement works for both parties. Also, be sure to set regular performance review to be sure that work continues to be performed at or above expectation.

In the end, a good majority of businesses can support the option of working remotely, but whatever your business, the first step is setting up solid guidelines that keep you and your team on the same page so that you’re productive and profitable.

What guidelines does your company have in place for remote working?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Dominic

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Before going down this path, however, accept that there are some roles where web working won’t be an option, at least not in the foreseeable future. Some roles cannot be done remotely, and keeping things together in a central office location ensures that workplaces where high security is at a premium can keep a closer eye on what’s happening with their IP, for example. But if you don’t do that kind of job, employers should have little reason not to consider allowing a remote working setup.

The obvious argument for allowing a web working arrangement is that an employer saves money on overheads when they allow employees to work from home. They don’t have to furnish or maintain a physical office, and even if they pay workers a stipend for maintaining their own office space, it tends to be much cheaper.

But the less obvious argument, and one that should be much more convincing to many employers, is that your productivity will soar if you’re able to start working remotely.

More Hours in the Day

Working from home obviously eliminates the need to commute. That provides extra time that can be spent doing actual work. Even if an employee wakes up later and calls it a day earlier working from home, there’s less time spent getting settled in, and the reduced stress that comes along with not having to commute will pay off in greater focus.

In fact, a recent study of remote working by Ciscofound that 66 percent of employees would take a lower paying job if it meant they could work from home and avoid a commute. While it may seem a bit extreme to ask for a pay cut, you could keep that in your pocket if you think it’ll turn the tide in your favor.

Lunch and the time spend it represents also tends to go down for those working at home. Even if you make your own lunch every day from scratch, it will take less time than it would to get something at work, and get settled back in once you return.

That same Cisco study also found that 45 percent of respondents who did work from home would work, on average, an extra two to three hours a day. A full quarter of those polled worked four additional hours compared to when they actually had to go into the office. All for the same salary they’d made before. It’s hard for an employer to argue with potential gains like that.

Hours Are More Packed

Even if you don’t work more hours than you would in an office, other studies have shown that the time remote workers spend doing work is much better spent than it would be otherwise. A U.K. study by the Cranfield School of Management found that employees working from home put in more and better quality work in the same time as their office-based counterparts.

What seems to happen is that people who are allowed to work from home feel a sense of gratitude towards their employer, and they then compensate for that benefit by working harder. It makes sense. Why give your company any excuse to put things back the way they were?

The IT Block

Your most difficult roadblock in convincing your employer to allow you to work remotely is probably going to be the IT spend. Chances are, you’ll need devices to work from home, and also software and support. Those things aren’t cheap.

The best way around the IT block isn’t to try to say it won’t be a problem. Instead, admit that remote working does require an IT investment, but point out that that is an investment in your company’s future. The sooner a company can get on the borderless IT bandwagon, the better.

A recent study found that remote working increased 42 percent between 2009 and 2010. Some say that number is much higher. Regardless of what source you trust, it’s impossible to deny that offsite employees are a permanent fixture, and businesses will have to move to that model to stay competitive. Framed in that context, building up an IT department’s expertise in dealing with remote workers is a wise and well-justified spend.

It’s not always an easy sell, but convincing your company to let you work from home can and has been done. Focusing on what it will mean for their bottom line, especially from a productivity perspective, is a great way to open minds.

If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities and challenges that a distributed workforce presents to businesses, check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December.

Photo by Flickr user jnyemb

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Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

A disaster of a different variety hit many corporate environments this week when McAfee pushed an update to computers that sent computers crashing to a halt, crippling many systems. As a Mac user, I was spared, but I watched co-workers and friends at other companies trying to figure out how to fix their dead computers. Days later, many corporate IT departments are still dealing with the aftermath. Needless to say, this past week was a tough one for many corporate web workers.

While web workers tend to be able to work on the road, extended unexpected travel delays can be difficult and stressful, especially for people spending days in airports just waiting for a seat to open up. This can be a huge drain on productivity when you are focused on managing a difficult situation instead of being focused on work. Likewise, computer issues that result in a non-functioning system can be bad enough for employees in an office, but it can be devastating to the productivity of a remote employee who can’t just walk over to the IT department for a quick fix. I was in the office during the McAfee issue, and watched as people wandered around looking lost and wondering what they could possibly do without their computer.

These are just a couple of examples of things that can be very disruptive, but here are some ways to be a little more prepared and stay productive during those difficult times.

• Contact information. Is all of your information about how to contact the IT department sitting on on your computer or on a network drive somewhere? In this case, be prepared by going old school and carrying a piece of paper in your wallet (or a note in your phone) with contact information, especially phone numbers, for your IT department, corporate travel agency, manager and other key people. This helps to ensure that you can get in touch with the people you might need to contact for a work emergency, regardless of where you are, whether you have an Internet connectiot or whether your computer is working.
• Alternatives. If at all possible, try to make sure that you always have some kind of alternative system that you can use when your primary computer is out of commission. I know this isn’t always practical, but even an old laptop, a netbook or smartphone can work in a pinch when you are having critical systems issues. Just make sure that you know what caused the first issue before booting up that other device and letting it suffer the same fate.
• Adjust. Don’t hesitate to adjust your work day to accommodate these disasters by running errands during the day and finishing your work in the evening when your equipment is back up and running. In the case of extended travel, work in chunks when you have some downtime in between focusing on catching that next flight. Make the best of a bad situation by getting some other personal tasks out of the way so that you can focus on work when you get things back under control.
• Think. Most of us are probably working on projects that require some time to think, plan or strategize. Forget about the computer for a while, and sit down with a piece of paper to sketch out some ideas or plans. While you may be used to thinking in front of the computer, I’ll bet that you can still make progress without it.

What are your tips for staying productive in tough situations?

Photo by Flickr user qmnonic used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

I’ve been on my fair share of remote writing projects, including technical writing, contributing to books and writing for publications. Working on such projects and hearing from clients and colleagues about successful (and less so) remote writing projects, I’ve come to see that actions of both the writer and the client can influence the outcomes.

Here are my five keys to successful remote writing projects gleaned from my technical writing career:

Good documentation. I couldn’t agree more with Thursday’s recent post about the need for telecommuters to have good documentation. Managing a remote writing project can be a challenging task, so project artifacts like statements of work (SOWs) and status reports can be a helpful audit tool for both the writer and the client. You should also consider documentation for remote writing projects to include style guides, templates and source material for the writing assignment(s).

Remote access. Many of my remote writing projects require access to the technology systems I am contracted to document, so remote access is critical to the success of much or my work. Even if you aren’t a technical writer, a remote login can be useful to gain easy  access to project files, internal mailing lists, collaboration tools, and the like. You should also not just look to just the client to provide remote access and tools for the project. Because as you are bringing in outside expertise some clients may also look for you to bring new ideas like Google Wave to the table. As a remote writer, you should also plan for some redundancy for times when your home office Internet connection goes down, or you have other communications issues.

Technological self-sufficiency. In talking with colleagues and clients, the need for remote writers to be technologically self-sufficient has been a recurring theme. A writer’s technological self-sufficiency needs to extend to being able to diagnose technical problems and being able to communicate these potential issues in a proactive, clear and concise manner.

Mutually agreed upon publishing formats. Agreeing on publishing formats up front may seem like a common-sense move, but with the proliferation of MS Office alternatives, it is important that everybody on the team can open and manipulate the documents with a minimum of issues.

Managed document review cycle. Getting editorial and technical reviews of a your work completed can sometimes be a struggle, thanks to conflicting reviewer priorities and no writer on-site, standing at the reviewer’s door when the review is late. So it is best to implement a managed review cycle of documents you are writing, including accountability for yourself, accountability on the client/team side, review guidelines, and a schedule.

Do you work as a remote writer? Share your tips and advice below for successful remote writing projects.

Artwork by stock.xchng user: dmpop.

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