This fear of distraction may be understandable, but it’s also misplaced according to a recent post on Management Issues by Wayne Turmel. Among several tips to keep team members engaged when communicating at a distance, Turmel suggests simply acknowledging that being far away can make us a bit paranoid. We demand more reassurance and attention from remote colleagues than we would ever expect face to face:

Just because they do something else for a moment doesn’t mean they’re not hanging in there. If you’ve never “zoned out” during a face-to-face meeting, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din. Few of us are so riveted by what’s going on that we can’t do something else for a brief period then re-engage. Unless you’re specifically asking for their input, they will probably be back.

Turmel makes a great point about the insecurity that is born of working via the web rather than in person, but there are other reasons to stop stressing about getting your team’s undivided attention during remote meetings. Simply put, harnessing “backchannel” communications such as texting or tweeting, may work better than prohibiting them, whether you’re presenting in person or from 10,000 miles away.

For example, SXSW presenters Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney have argued on A List Apart that the old expectation of a passive, silent audience is out of date and speakers should aim to engage rather than enrapture their audiences. They focus is on traditional conference speakers but the point holds for those presenting or speaking remotely:

Conventional conference wisdom is that speakers are fighting a war for the audience’s attention. On one side, there’s the speaker, armed with beautiful slides, succinct bullet points, a commanding stage presence, and a great speech. On the other side is Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, YouTube, etc. The audience is in the middle, torn between datastreams.

The backchannel irritates many speakers. But giving the speaker the power to cut audiences off from the backchannel would be, we think, the wrong solution…. It’s time to empower the audience…. We need to react in meaningful ways. Not just clapping or booing, but actually communicating and conversing…. The model of the rapt audience so enthralled by a speaker that you can hear a pin drop actually prevents this kind of meaningful reaction.

Their solution is a Twitter-like app to allow audience members react to the speaker and each others’ comments in real time. But managers looking to utilize rather than suppress backchannel interactions on a conference call, for example, don’t need to invest in any special technology.

As we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, experts like Seth Godin and veteran remote managers like Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick both recommend simply allowing participants to use text chat as a second communication channel running under the main speaker during conference calls and remote meetings.

“When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen,” Godin says, suggesting this controlled distraction increases participation, enables real-time commenting and tracks the flow of later ideas for later examination.

When it comes to distractions during remote meetings are you a hawk or a dove? Should managers give tech-enabled (perhaps tech-engendered) distractible minds a channel to productively wander or crack down on the equivalent of high-tech doodling?

Image courtesy of Flick user DoNotLick.

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He thinks it will result in fewer jobs. Politicians may be wrangling over various approaches to job creation, but the right and left seem to agree that with nine percent unemployment, America needs more jobs. Not Godin. He thinks we need to get over the idea.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created….

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

Godin seems pretty gloomy about Americans’ employment prospects, but he claims that, in fact, he’s an optimist. We may not soon see the return of many jobs, but work is forever, according to Godin.

I’m not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

There are a couple of points worth making about Godin’s vision of the new job-less way of work. First off, Godin’s idea of earning money through “earning attention” doesn’t sound that far off from the ideas of You Are Not a Gadget author Jaron Lanier who argues in this very long, very interesting interview that the only way the Internet won’t destroy the middle class is if we find ways to monetize the products of our “hearts and brains.”

It’s worth pointing out that, level-playing field or no, making something non-replaceable with your heart or brain that will stand out in a crowded marketplace and that others will pay for is a really tall order, as anyone who has ever tried to create a viral video, design a logo or write a story can tell you. Captivating people is far harder than powering through paperwork in accounts payable or repeatedly fabricating the same metal widget. Are enough people capable of doing this to maintain a middle class? Can we train more people for the new economy by altering our education system?

Reservations aside, the fact that lots of steady, location-based, routine jobs are disappearing seems indisputable. Project-based, location-independent, creative work appears to be the way of the future.

Is Godin right that jobs as we once understood them aren’t coming back? Are we ready for this reality?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Hugo90.

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“Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow.”

Photo by Ste3ve

Godin also points out that this will be a stressful time as many people struggle to find essential, valuable work that is less likely to be outsourced to other locations. This isn’t really a new feature of the work landscape. Peter Drucker was talking about the focus on knowledge workers from the 1950s, and outsourcing has also been a concern for many years.

While outsourcing isn’t new, the rapid increase in the number of remote workers is. According to WorldatWork, “the number of employee telecommuters in the U.S. increased 39 percent, from 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008.” Businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working as it lowers overheads — see Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required). Anecdotally, I seem to see more and more people working remotely from home offices and coffee shops.

What does all of this mean for us? As a culture in the U.S., we have moved away from a traditional worker mindset where 9-to-5 office jobs were intended to last for decades and many aspects of our lives were tied up with our employer (pensions, health insurance, etc.). Now we need to embrace a freelancer mindset, with a focus on the work rather than the employer.  This puts many additional burdens on the worker: health care and retirement, for example. Work may last only days, weeks or months, rather than years, and we need to be able to demonstrate our value regardless of whether we are working remotely or in a cubicle. We need to be flexible and ready to embrace new jobs, new work, new technologies and new business models at any time.

I always try to keep an eye on the future by looking for new opportunities and clients. I also make sure that I’m keeping my skills fresh by learning about new technologies and continuing to tweak the services that I offer for clients as the business environment changes.

What do you do to prepare for changes in your work life?

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I know it has only been a week, but here are my first impressions about the impact reading feeds is having on my life and work.

1. They make me look smarter. Over the past week, I used Tweetburner to immediately post what I was reading when I was reading it to my Twitter page. On those mornings that I was immersed in feeds, I think I looked smart and informed. Either that or crazy or not busy enough actually getting work done.

2. They give me interesting fodder for breakfast conversation with my husband. Unfortunately “new media” is not his area of interest so he paid me back reading me articles about bears and other wildlife topics.

3. I read more blog posts in one week by Seth Godin than I had in the last several years. I don’t mean to neglect Seth. He’s smart. I like him. I learn from him. But I stray from reading blogs in general because I can’t seem to find the time. Reading feeds over eggs and coffee carves out time to learn from the masters.

4. I learned about new paths to productivity. Tracking the feed of Brazen Careerist led me to an interesting blog post from Penelope Trunk and one that I need to read again. Productivity is my obsession. The information in her post is like giving a compulsive hand washer more soap.

5. I learned more about Twitter apps which can only increase my Twittering effective. From Twemes to Hashtags to Twidgets, I devoured this short and snappy post and still wanted more. Increasing my Tweet effectiveness is actually important to my work since I use Twitter to source story ideas, to get answers to my burning tech questions within minutes, to market projects (both mine and my clients’), and to connect with my peers on a regular basis.

6. What I read in feeds last week had either a direct connection or impact on what I do every day for work. I discovered some interesting blogs and sites such as: Brand Tags – an experiment in the 1-word associations people make with brand logos (branding is an important aspect of the work I do to market companies and nonprofits online); the post Social Media FAQ#5: How Do I Takl to my Executives About Social Media (always interested in seeing how people communicate social media to non-tech types – helpful in my pitches to potential clients); and Drop the Excuses and Start Participating (interested in the impact of social media on traditional PR as I’ve moved from the traditional to the “new PR” over the last 10 years and into social media in the last few years.)

It remains to be seen if I can keep up with my feed reading over time. In the meanwhile, I’ll absorb as much knowledge as I can to expand my understanding of this ever-changing industry and to improve what I do and how I do it.

What was the latest thing you read via your feed reader that has had an impact on the way you work?

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