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Telecommuting is worth serious sacrifices: Valentine’s Day edition

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:01:52 +0000

Last year Staples asked telecommuters exactly how much the flexibility of being out of the office was worth to them and discovered people were prepared to make some pretty significant sacrifices to keep working remotely. One in five told pollsters they’d give up 20 percent of their pay and more than half were willing to permanently shut off their favorite TV show.

Now, online meetings software firm TeamViewer is following in Staples’ footsteps, asking essentially the same question of 2,500 Americans and finding them willing to make even more surprising sacrifices for the chance to telecommute. The results confirm that most of us believe telecommuting is on the rise – 83 percent of respondents thought so – and also that there’s an unmet appetite for more flexible work arrangements out there. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they believe that more people want the option to telecommute.

More surprising perhaps were the things people were willing to give up to work away from the office. TeamViewer says survey respondents were willing to sacrifice:

Social media – 34 percent
Chocolate – 29 percent
Smartphone – 25 percent
A salary increase – 17 percent
Half of their vacation days – 15 percent
Daily showers – 12 percent

If the lack of concern for personal hygiene expressed by more than one-in-ten Americans has you concerned than be warned that we haven’t even gotten to the Valentine’s Day twist yet, and it’s probably more shocking. Everyone may be running around buying roses and chocolates today, but a small minority of Americans told TeamViewer they’re feeling less romantic than most. Five percent of respondents said they’d even give up their spouse to telecommute.

These folks probably don’t have exactly ideal marriages in the first place, so we’ll file that finding in the entertaining trivia folder. Nonetheless the results overall are another piece of evidence that the national appetite for remote work is expanding, creating pent up demand for flexibility.

What would you give up to telecommute?

Image courtesy of Flickr user terren in Virginia.

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Who telecommutes the most? Not developed nations, new survey finds

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:03:49 +0000

Telecommuting may seem like a privilege of the professional and fully wired, so you may have assumed the practice was most prevalent in the developed world. But when Ipsos recently surveyed a total of 11,383 employees with Internet connections from 24 countries for a survey released Monday, they found quite the opposite.

While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

India: 56 percent
Indonesia: 34 percent
Mexico: 30 percent
Argentina: 29 percent
South Africa: 28 percent
Turkey: 27 percent
Canada: 8 percent
France: 7 percent
Italy: 7 percent
Sweden: 6 percent
Germany: 5 percent
Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

Image courtesy of Flickr user diongillard.

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Businesses using 4G primarily for remote workers, survey finds

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:13:06 +0000

Consumers are a bit baffled by the term and not every expert is convinced that 4G services are all that much better than good, old 3G (plus, 4G is still years away for large parts of Europe), but whatever the average joes or pundits like the geeks who write for GigaOM say, business is moving forward and planning to make the most of the latest 4G services. How? A handy new connectivity survey from Yankee Group offers some insight, summarized nicely in this chart. The conclusion: In the eyes of American business, the primary use of 4G is for telecommuter and remote worker access, with nearly half of companies planning to use it for that purpose within two years.

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Using Social Media to Keep Up with Colleagues

Dawn Foster — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:30:15 +0000

Working from home has many advantages. I have an office with a door and a window, a fully stocked kitchen with all of my favorite foods and a much shorter commute involving a few stairs and no traffic. However, I don’t have co-workers hanging around where I can bump into them in hallway to catch up on the latest news or just to socialize for a few minutes. It’s important to make sure that you don’t lose this connection to your colleagues just because you don’t work in the same office.

For many of us, social media helps to fill this gap. Not all of your colleagues are going to be on Twitter, Facebook or other social websites, but hopefully, you can at least keep up with a few of them. This can also be a sensitive topic for many people, so don’t be offended if some of your co-workers don’t accept your friend requests.

I know a few people who carefully separate their work and personal lives and aren’t interested in mingling them. One person I know has a “secret” blog where he talks about his family using only family member’s initials to respect their privacy, and he keeps this completely separate from his Twitter account and other professional blogs. Other people pick one social website, like Facebook, for personal activities and others, like Twitter or LinkedIn, for communicating about work. Many of us don’t make these distinctions, but it is important to respect your colleagues’ choices.

It can be difficult to keep up with everyone, so it can help to have ways to keep up with your co-workers to avoid losing their updates in the wave of updates from other friends. Here are a couple of tips:

Friend Lists in Facebook

Friend lists in Facebook perform two very useful functions. First, they can allow you to filter the information you see in your news feed based on how you’ve grouped your friends into lists. For example, you could have a work list that you can check separately to see what your colleagues have been doing. A quick check in the morning and another at lunch would help you keep up with people at work while minimizing the time you spend on it.

The other way to use lists is to control privacy, so for those of you who want to maintain privacy while also connecting with co-workers on Facebook, you can still limit how much information they see. If you spend a lot of time partying with friends or to respect the privacy of your children, you might consider hiding photos from your coworkers as one example.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are another good way to keep up with work friends, especially since many of the commonly used Twitter clients have built-in support for the feature, allowing you to use lists separately in columns or other views. I know some people who keep separate lists for professional and personal contacts, which is a good way to keep the streams distinct.

In my case, most of my friends work in the technology industry, so I don’t separate based on work vs. personal friends. However, I do keep a separate list of family and close friends where I want to read every tweet. I also have a short list of people that I like to follow more closely because what they say is almost always interesting and relevant for me, and I try to read as much as I can from them.

The best thing about this approach is that you can expand it to include leaders in your industry or people in similar jobs at other companies, broadening your virtual water cooler out beyond your immediate co-workers.

How do you keep up with your colleagues when you work remotely?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

20 Ways to Fail Miserably as a Corporate Web Worker

Dawn Foster — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:00:13 +0000

Last week, I discussed 10 ways to make sure that you are a successful corporate web worker, but there are also plenty of things that you can do to screw it up.

The challenge in corporate web working is to be able to consistently prove that you can accomplish just as much, if not more, while working remotely as you could in a traditional office setting. You’re also fighting the perception some people have that “working from home” is really a euphemism for goofing off.

As a result, you need to work extra hard to make sure that people know you are productive, and there are so many things you can do to ruin your chances of being a successful. There are also plenty of things that your company can do that will make it difficult for you to be successful, but I want to focus on how avoid the many things that you can do to limit your chances of being a successful corporate web worker based on your behavior when working remotely.

Here are just a few examples of ways to make sure that you’re never allowed to work remotely again.

Refer to working from home as a “day off.”
Brag about how little you accomplish while telecommuting.
Spend all day on Twitter and Facebook talking about everything except work. Make sure that your co-workers and/or your boss is connected to you on those networks so they can see your bragging.
Start a side business and spend all day working on your personal projects, instead of work.
Don’t bother to set any goals or figure out what materials you need to do your work from home.
Better yet, make sure that you leave some important documents or technology at the office to make sure that you can’t do much work.
Make sure that you don’t have the infrastructure you need for working at home (such as a phone headset or solid Internet connection).
Squeeze in as many household chores as possible and plan to do big piles of laundry, dishes and home improvement tasks while you are at home.
Ignore all of your email and don’t respond to any messages.
Don’t answer the phone or return voicemails.
Make sure that you set your IM status to offline and ignore any incoming IM.
Take long naps. Bonus points for sleeping through scheduled meetings.
Fall asleep during your conference calls. Snoring is optional.
Refuse to speak during conference calls, especially if someone asks you a question.
Don’t bother to mute the phone line on conference calls when your kids or pets come tearing through the room.
Spend all day catching up on your soap operas, cartoons or other television shows.
Take conference calls or other business calls with the television on in the background.
Don’t bother to change out of your pajamas when you have video conferences over your webcam.
Don’t accomplish anything tangible or complete any deliverables.
When your boss asks what you did when you were working from home, just shrug and say “not much of anything.”

Some of these are obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, but they do represent real things that people sometimes try to get away with when telecommuting. This isn’t to say that you can never to a load of laundry while working from home, but any of these activities can get in the way of being productive or prevent you from coming across as a responsible professional. We need to think carefully about how our actions might be perceived by our managers, co-workers, customers or other business people that we interact with on a regular basis. At the end of the day, most people are measured by their output. If you consistently get a lot of great quality work accomplished, your chances of success are much higher, but you don’t want a few bad habits to reflect poorly on your work.

What are your favorite examples of what not to do as a corporate web worker?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Vaarsi used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

10 Secrets to Being a Successful Corporate Web Worker

Dawn Foster — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:00:13 +0000

I’ve been on both sides of the fence as a corporate web worker. I’ve been one myself, telecommuting from my home office, and at other times, I’ve managed people who worked from home both part-time and on a permanent basis.

Telecommuting and working from remote locations works well for me, and it has worked for many, but not all, of the people that I’ve managed. I’ve seen examples of both extremes: people who were incredibly successful as web worker and those who got their telecommuting privileges revoked.

Being able to work from home is a nice benefit, but only if you can continue to successfully perform your job, and there are a number of things that you can do to help improve your chances of success. Here are my top tips for being a successful corporate web worker.

Office space. Start by finding a place where you can work remotely without distraction. I’m one of the lucky ones with my own dedicated home office with a door that I can close to distractions. If the best place you have to work is a kitchen table and you have family or roommates at home, working from home might not be the best option. The key is to find some arrangement where you can focus on your work. This could be a location in the house, a coworking space or even a garage / workshop.
Set goals. Know what you plan to accomplish and set goals for what you will accomplish when you are working remotely. Obviously, you should do this anyway, but it becomes even more important to have solid goals when you are working outside of the office, since you’ll need to be able to justify your efforts to your manager who can’t just walk by your desk to see you hard at work.
Know what you need. Make sure that you have everything that you need to accomplish those goals that you outlined. Do you have access to that document you need to update and solid connectivity to all of your networks in the office? Nothing ruins your day like planning to complete a specific task and realizing that you left some critical piece of documentation or technology sitting in the office.
Great output. In most corporate environments today, you’re judged on your output. If you can demonstrate to your manager that you have consistently high quality output while working remotely, your chances of success are pretty good.
High volume of output. Quantity is just as important as quality when it comes to working remotely. If all you have to show for your day of remote work is one really high quality email, you probably aren’t going to be successful. Make sure that you are cranking out the deliverables to prove that you are working hard and not goofing off.
Focus on work. Stay focused on your work-related activities, and remember that you are working from home, not taking a day off. Save the laundry, dishes, and other household chores for after you finish a solid day of work. You should be doing the same work, just from a different location.
Be present. Because you aren’t in the office, you’ll need to find other ways to keep in touch with your coworkers. Stay online, keep your IM client open and use any other collaboration tools available so that your colleagues can see that you are online and available to them.
Be responsive. Respond quickly to email and phone messages to demonstrate that you really are working and that people can get answers from you regardless of your physical location.
Planning. Plan your remote work days to focus on a couple of big tasks that require quiet concentration, but that you can show off at the end of the day as solid accomplishments. I like to save big creative tasks for the days I’m working at home where I can focus with fewer distractions. Creating reports, documentation or writing presentation materials are all great remote tasks for me.
Show off. I know, nobody likes a showoff, but the harsh reality in business (any business) is that people are busy, and if you don’t tell your manager how awesome you are, then she might not notice. Make sure that you take the time to let your manager know exactly what you accomplished when you were working remotely. If she knows that you will do a great job regardless of where you are doing the work, then she’ll have no reason to doubt your ability to work remotely, and it won’t reflect negatively on you when it comes time for that yearly performance review.

What are your secrets for being a successful corporate web worker?

Photo by Dawn Foster used with permission.

Telecommuting and the Untethered Employee

Imran Ali — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:00:40 +0000

As part of a special report on Work/Life Balance, BusinessWeek ran a “Telecommuting: Once a Perk, Now a Necessity,” an interesting story on how remote workers and telecommuting are now being seen as necessary developments for many organizations, rather than perks afforded to a privileged few amongst their workforce.

Driven by the need to reduce capital expenditure, many employers are encouraging workers to move to home offices. Here are a few interesting takeaways.

A healthcare provider is supplying free broadband and gratis office furniture, complete with a couple of delivery guys to set it all up.
the amount of money saved by working from home: $15 a day for lunch, $70 a week in gas and wear and tear on a vehicle.
To entice employees into telecommuting, Capital One is offering laptops and Blackberries, and the $1,000 managers can supply to workers to improve home offices.
At Capital One, office space will now be allotted by function, not title. Square footage will be based on office presence, not rank, with the new workplace will be less about working alone and more about working together.

There’s a bunch of phraseology strung throughout this article that I think is really pertinent to the web worker. Really what we’re talking about is the “post-geographic, untethered worker” — the web is simply an enabler for many disciplines and industries. I’m going to stop using “telecommuter” and go with “untethered” worker from now on!

There are some interesting inferences to be made from Gelb’s story and that of her employer – could coworking be seen as a potential “halfway house” for employees? Could smart employers provide coworking credits to their newly untethered workers, or perhaps stimulate the development of sponsored coworking spaces that benefit workers who might live in proximity?

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Just What Do We Call Ourselves, Anyhow?

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:00:00 +0000

We are (obviously) fond of the term “web worker” to describe the WWD audience. But there are other terms that get thrown around a lot: “digital bedouin” is popular among the cutting-edge set, “telecommuter” seems to be the darling of the mainstream media, while “teleworker” gets heard in government circles. But as the folks over at Plantronics point out in launching their TeleWho? contest:

It’s 1973 — Elvis has popularized the sequin jumpsuit, the country is embroiled in Watergate, and the term “telecommuter” is first coined.

No doubt because it’s not catchy enough for advertising, the Plantronics folks want to replace “telecommuter” with some other term for “today’s always-connected-but-not-always-in-the-office worker.” Actually, they want you to come up with it for them.

The entry form is simple: contact info, your new term, and an explanation. The prizes include $1700 worth of home audio gear and Calisto Pro phones, which we called “the web worker’s dream phone” last year. So winning won’t make you rich, but five minutes of work with the right idea might get you a nice new bit of gear.

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