Zaarly exec Shane Mac, for example, recently published a piece in VentureBeat, which we highlighted here on GigaOM, arguing that a remote set-up stinks for startups who need their staff in close proximity to form a company culture and generate the maximum number of ideas by sparking their thinking off each other. Mac makes a compelling case for the usefulness of physically close teams, but not everyone in startups is buying it.

ProofHQ, a British company that sells tools to help review design work, for example, has been remote from day one. “The company has literally never had an office with employees in it,” founder and CEO Mat Atkinson told GigaOM, explaining that having had an earlier experience starting a company with VC backing, he opted to bootstrap ProofHQ and avoid venture money, necessitating he skip the office as a budget-saving measure. Plus, he found a development team in distant Poland and wanted to be able to serve customers globally right from the outset. The result is a team spread from the west coast of America to the Middle Eastern country of Qatar.

So did he experience the squeeze on ideas and the less binding company culture that Mac predicts? “From our experience it just simply wasn’t the case,” says Atkinson, who uses constant Skype chats, regular video calls and daily scrums for each area of the business to keep his team collaborating and innovating. He also insists on regular face-to-face meet-ups for the team.

“I do understand when people say face to face matters and I agree with that. We make an effort to do things face to face both virtually by video conferencing, as well getting together in person, but I disagree when people say it’s the only way to make it happen,” he says, though he concedes that working at a distance is tougher on managers. “Remote working works really well for the team, but if you’re managing people, you have to put more effort into it. I would say it takes probably 20 percent more effort.”

Besides admitting that a distributed setup is tougher on managers, Atkinson also acknowledges that those looking for venture money might have a reason to shy away from a remote set-up. “If you’re looking to go down the venture capital route then your VCs will probably want you to be co-located and co-located close to them,” he says. “I know that’s breaking down more and more but I think VCs are still skeptical of companies that work remotely.”

But it’s not just VCs who Atkinson sees changing their minds about remote work. According to him, skeptics like Shane Mac are slowly going to the way of the dinosaurs. “There has been a real transition in the perception that people have of working remotely. In the early days it was seen as kind of odd — it’s never going to work. Now customers that we talk to about it are very interested. I have quite a lot of other early-stage technology companies wanting to talk about how we’ve managed the business, and it’s just not seen as weird. When we recruit now, people see it as a positive rather than a negative or a neutral, so I think there’s a massive change in people’s perceptions at all levels.”

Within five years, Atkinson feels, remote work will be as unremarkable as cubicles and laptops seem now – even for startups — and its posts like this, discussing the issue as contentious, rather than the practice itself, that will seem odd.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy of Flickr user dierken.

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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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian.

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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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