A recent Gallup study found that 71 percent of US workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work. This suggests that only a third of American workers are deeply engaged in their jobs, which is at least a serious challenge for businesses, and perhaps a serious threat. And the proportion of disengaged seems to be rising.

New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework (or telecommuting), supporting anecdotal knowledge about workers’ desire to work outside of the office. (We’ll be digging more into these kinds of topics at Net:Work on Dec. 8.) Stanford University partnered with a Chinese travel agency to find out if teleworkers were more productive, as reported by Ray Fisman at Slate:

Within a few weeks, the performance of the telecommuting group started to pull away from their cubicle-bound counterparts. Over the duration of the experiment, home workers answered 15 percent more calls, partly because each hour was 4 percent more productive, and partly because home office employees spent 11 percent more time answering phone calls. (Home workers took fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arrived late to their desks, and had fewer distractions.) While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)

And the same sort of business thinking that is interested in productivity of telework also starts to extrapolate about the impacts. If 40 percent of workers — in general — are working out of the office, that means 40 percent of office space — and associated expenses, like furniture, energy, and cleaning — might be productively invested elsewhere. In a 2007 Businessweek report, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of offices space is “a dead zone of darkened doorways and wasting cubes,” and some have estimated that $600B is wasted in direct costs, leaving aside the externalities like impact to the environment, and the costs that employees incur commuting.

Sara Horowitz recently made the case that we really don’t know the makeup of the US workforce any longer, since the US government stopped counting independent workers in any systematic way. However, her research at the Freelancers Union — she’s the founder — indicate that as much as one third of our workforce participates in the rapidly growing freelance economy.

Connecting The Dots

These seemingly independent trends are tied together by the changing mindset of the people doing the work. Young people in particular are increasingly disinclined to commute to a distant office for the sake of ‘face time’, but many people of all ages have personal reasons for wanting to work in a ‘results-only work environment’, where getting the job done becomes the core principle surrounding work.

Giving workers more control of their lives — giving them back many hours of time per week not spent in commuting and pointless meetings, letting them decide when to do what, and putting money in their pockets by cutting commuting costs — has a very serious impact on morale. As the Chinese travel agency example shows, many of the workers reported less ‘work exhaustion’ and were less likely to quit. That seems like a direct antidote to the unengagement risks that Gallup reports US companies are running.

And people moving into telework and results-only work models will need new tools — like the stream-based work media tools I discussed in a recent post here on GigaOM. But with ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, and the proliferation of work media, the technological infrastructure to support telework is very low-cost, and requires basically zero training.

What’s Missing? The Second Place.

But there is a factor that is a potential hiccup. Many folks that adopt a telework or freelance work model and opt to work from home quickly come to miss the social aspect of their old work place.

In the US and Western countries, there has been a growing adoption of coworking spaces, where freelancers, employees of small businesses, or teleworkers can get the best of both worlds: they can work from a work space close to their home — thereby avoiding a long distance commute — but at the same time they can have the support and stimulation that comes from social interaction with well-known people other than your family.

Ray Oldenburg, the urban sociologist, is best known for his notion of the Third Place, like the corner bar, the cafe, or the barber shop, where we can interact with people that we don’t know well, and perhaps with whom we have little in common. He argued that such places are critically import to the health of cities and out societies. He took almost as a given that people would continue their relationship with First and Second Places, the home and the workplace, respectively. But the trends of telework and freelancing means that an increasing means the more people are spending less time in official Second Places, and more at home and Starbucks. But as wonderful as working in a café is, there is definitely a great deal missing.

So it’s no real surprise that the coworking movement is growing at a pace that seems closely linked to the number of people jumping into telework or out of the traditional workplace. Deskmag states there are now more than 1,100 coworking spaces worldwide, more than double the number in 2006. Loosecubes, a service set up to help people find coworking spaces, is tracking over 1,400 locations in over 500 cities, globally.

According to Carsten Foetrsch of deskmag, 72 percent of all coworking spaces become profitable after 2 years of operation, and for privately-run spaces, the number is even higher: 87 percent . So the economics for those interested in setting up and running coworking spaces is compelling.

A Virtuous Cycle?

Looking from a economics viewpoint, all the players have economic motivations to support coworking:

• The office worker saves significant expense and time by decreasing commute time, and those with the longest commutes should have the strongest motivation to shift to telework. Therefore, there is a steady migration to telework as businesses adopt policies to support it.
• Businesses have a strong incentive to increase employee morale and productivity, and to decrease expenses related to the increasingly large percentage of their office space that is underutilized. Even if businesses have to subsidize coworking space use by teleworkers, the net savings are significant.
• As the number of freelancers and teleworkers increase, the demand for coworking space grows, since people need the strong social connections historically offered in the workplace, not just the chance connections afforded by sharing a table in Starbucks.
• Entrepreneurs have strong incentives to create coworking spaces: partly to serve as their own base of operations, but also as a business proposition of its own. Note that the desire of businesses to shed unneeded office space in our down economy also provides lower cost space in which to set up shop.

When you look at it as a system, coworking is a complex societal dance, where the various players are each seeking to  maximize their personal economic situation, and it leads to a new social reintegration. And the result of this migration of workers from the office to the coworking space is a net benefit for the world, too: the decrease in energy use for the unused office space and the decrease in commuting translates into decreased carbon footprints for all involved.

Coworking may turn out to be the pivot in today’s post-industrial transformation of work: a shining example, perhaps, of how large-scale positive change at the societal level can emerge peacefully from the independent pursuit of personal ends.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine. Stowe will be speaking about co-working at Net:Work. 

Image courtesy of Flickr userRob Pearce.

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What lessons has Robbins learned from leading through this transition at company that was not only an early adopter of flexible working, but which also builds a number of remote work solutions? He shared his wisdom with WebWorkerDaily.

Talent

Do experienced managers of co-located teams just magically make a smooth transition to a virtual workstyle? Not according to Robbins, who is a big believer in training, and not just on the technical challenges of web work.

“The technology actually tends to be the easiest part of this whole thing,” he told us, adding that the success of web work is often inhibited by “cultural acceptance by the leadership team that this is how we operate and it’s OK. Some companies equate productivity with being in the office, so I think, first of all, we have to make sure that we provide our leadership with education on things around, how do you manage a remote workforce effectively? What are the things you need to do differently when you can’t walk down the hall and grab them? We give that kind of training.”

Tools

Robbins’s pro-training philosophy extends to tech tools as well. He explains that team members are also trained in how to make the best use the of video conferencing solutions Cisco offers, answering questions like, “What sort of things should you be thinking about when you’re presenting to a customer over video and you’re not in the room and everybody else is? Or if you’re in the room and somebody else is remote, how do you make sure you continue to engage them?”

Video may play a big role for Robbins’s team, but email doesn’t. “Email is becoming the least favorite mode of communication with our team,” he said. Instead of sending individual messages, Robbins’s employees have “a new platform that we actually designed called Quad. It’s named after the college campus quad where everybody gathers. Think of it as Facebook for enterprise. People can build communities around different topics and they have their profile and their status and then we have integrated instant messaging.”

“New technology that enables single number reach for our sales organization,” is the final piece of the puzzle for Robbins’s team. “No matter where you are somebody doesn’t have to keep up with what phone numbers to dial. They dial your office and it rings whatever device you need it to ring,” he said.

Tips

In addition to tech and training, Robbins relies on an outcome-based management style to keep his team running smoothly. To succeed as the manager of a virtual team, “you have move to outcome-based performance, and to the extent that you can, outcome based compensation,” he advises. “That cultural thinking that, if you’re at your desk from eight to five, than you’ve been productive is no longer valid, so you’ve got to figure out how you create outcomes and metrics where you can determine success.”

All of these pieces have come together to create a deep change in attitudes towards flexible working at Cisco, Robbins concludes. “When we first started working from home, for some reason we didn’t want people to know we were working from home. You didn’t want the dog to bark or the kids to come and say something. You were always trying to mute if the dog was coming around. Today, if you’re working from home and your kid walks in, you tell them to say hello to whoever you’re talking to on the other end because it’s such an accepted thing.”

Think something similar won’t be coming to your company anytime soon? Think again, insists Robbins. “Any companies that don’t think they’re going to have to buy in to this approach, I think they’re going to be in trouble. For the first time ever we have conversations with companies about how to build their remote worker infrastructure and their collaboration capability in a way that will enable them to recruit the next generation workforce, because they believe that will be a retention issue. It’s become a strategic recruiting tool for many companies.”

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For example, Stephen Ruth, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, recently wrote a draft book chapter entitled The Dark Side of Telecommuting – Is a Tipping Point Approaching? In it he argues that telecommuting cannot keep expanding without creating significant issues. We called him up and asked him why he is less optimistic than some about the expansion of telecommuting.

“Everybody loves it,” he said, including himself among fans of web work. “I’ve actually looked over thousands of articles and hardly any of them are critical, but the theme I’m bringing up here is that we’re probably at a tipping point. There are about five or six different areas that people don’t seem to be talking about that are probably going to cause the return on investment from telecommuting to start going down if it isn’t already.” So what are some of the things he thinks will be a drag on web work expansion?

• Demographics. “The basic demographic of people who telework is basically wealthy, relatively educated, also relatively satisfied with their jobs, and the new people who come on, they have to come from a different demographic,” explains Ruth. Will new telecommuters be as suitable for virtual work as those already at it? “There may be some factors—temperament, life-style, discipline, work focus ability, eating habits, tolerance for ambiguity, and others—that limit the effectiveness of additional entrants,” Ruth has written.
• The frustrated remainder. If more and more employees flee their cubicles for web work, what happens to those workers who are inevitably left behind? “They are frustrated,” says Ruth, who thinks that managers who remain behind to man the ship are going to face increasing challenges as more and more workers go virtual. As the demands on them grow do the productivity gains of telecommuting shrink?

Ruth concludes: “There is a possibility that once the most qualified persons are working from their homes, cars, restaurants and customer sites at high levels of morale and productivity, there may be some major problems in welcoming the next large group into the fold.”

Do you agree?

 Image courtesy of Flickr user kowitz

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A study entitled Virtual Work Environments in the Post-Recession Era from Brandman University and Forrester Consulting doesn’t paint a rosy picture of managers’ preparedness for supporting virtual work, at least at the large Fortune 500 companies the survey looked at.

While the survey did find that managers at these companies expect the use of virtual teams and remote working to grow (56 percent said that the practice would steadily or greatly increase at their company), skepticism among managers and ignorance of collaboration tools remain high. For example:

• Less than 20 percent of respondents considered social media a viable business tool for connecting with global markets.
• More than 65 percent reported that employees never use wikis, Twitter or Facebook.
• 55 percent said their employers never used blogs or LinkedIn.

The study summarizes the findings by saying: “The prevailing attitude of hiring managers surveyed could be described as viewing virtual teams as a ‘necessary evil,’ a method of doing business that their company must adopt to survive and thrive in today’s changing global economy.”

Charles Bullock, vice chancellor of academic affairs at Brandman, said in an interview that the results were somewhat surprising and suggested that, “it may just be that industry is lagging the technology at this point and they’re relying on some of the older tools such as email and video conferencing.”

“It’s just the way managers were trained traditionally,” he added. “You’ve got to be able to see them. Trust is an issue and I think that will change over time.” Off to boot camp with the laggards then.

And what should they learn there? Susan Gerke, a professor at Brandman who often speaks with reluctant managers, notes, “They’re used to being able to see what people are doing, so one of the key worries they bring up is: ‘How do I know what they’re doing? How do I know they’re working on the right things?’”

To allay these fears, Gerke tries to make sure managers “realize you can’t see what everybody’s doing all the time no matter where they are, and if you do a really good job of setting expectations about what you need and setting up regular times to check in, there are vehicles for staying current.”

The bottom line when it comes to leading remote teams, according to Gerke, “is you have to be proactive and deliberate about things that, maybe, you didn’t used to think about. We’d run into people in the hall and give them positive feedback casually. Now you’ve got to think that through and figure out how you’re going to build that into your regular schedule or you miss giving people feedback; you miss giving people visibility; you miss clarifying expectations; you miss relationship building and then it all falls apart.”

Have the old-fashioned views of middle managers held back remote working anywhere you’ve worked?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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A recent study from The Telework Research Network sheds some light on this question. The study focuses specifically on employees who work from home rather than the self-employed and sifts through data from government sources like the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as industry information from the likes of WorldatWork, to determine who is working remotely and who isn’t.

Besides finding a huge pool of 30.4 million potential telecommuters who could work flexibly and desire to do so but are not offered the chance, the study also revealed that a large number of web workers have a very specific profile. They’re older, well paid, educated professionals. The study found:

• The typical telecommuter is a 49-year-old, college-educated, salaried, non-union employee in a management or professional role, earning $58,000 a year at a company with more than 100 employees.
• Over 75 percent of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80 percentile relative to all employees.
• More than 70 percent of the WAH [work at home] population holds management, professional, sales, and office jobs (compared with 61 percent of the total workforce).

Why is web work so skewed towards this particular demographic? The authors suggest thee possibilities. First, older workers may require more flexibility due to greater family obligations. Having worked longer, they may also have had more opportunity to build the trust necessary to convince their employer to permit flexible arrangements. Finally, it may be that they are at a comfortable enough stage in theirs career that they no longer fear remote work having a negative effect on their advancement.

The first possibility is down to individuals’ particular situations and, whether it turns out to be true or not that older workers benefit most from web work, the principle of allowing employees to work remotely based on need makes sense. But the other two explanations suggest that many managers only hand out web work privileges to senior people with the clout to demand flexibility and ignore any potential stigma attached to telecommuting.

Is this a sensible way to ensure only those who can handle the responsibility of web work receive it, or an unfortunate prejudice that keeps junior staff from enjoying the productivity and loyalty gains web work can provide?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Larry Johnson

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Video game design expert and author J.C. Herz has some ideas for creative professionals. She recently gave the commencement speech at Ringling College of Art and Design, in Florida, and rather than offering bland encouragements to reach for the stars or be of service, Herz got down to business, addressing the nuts-and-bolts issues of arranging your life as a creative professional.

It’s a wide-ranging and thoughtful speech that’s well worth a read if you’re a web worker who regularly has to come up with ideas for a living. Among the many tidbits of advice (make your habits intentional, procrastinate productively, join CrossFit gyms), she offered a taxonomy of different types of creative block and how to handle each:

Getting stuck is a big part of creative work, and it’s really important to be good at getting unstuck. There are two main reasons why creative people get stuck on a piece of work: The first is, you don’t actually have an idea. You may have requirements, and you may have tools. But you don’t actually have an idea that’s going to carry the day, and you’re going to be stuck until you get a solid idea.

The second reason creative people get stuck is that, while they have the idea, executing the idea takes a lot of work, and not all of that work is fun, and basically you don’t want to do the work, because having the idea in the first place was the fun part. The problem is, you don’t get to say “check mate in four.” You actually have to finish the project. So you get mystically “stuck” after the brilliant sketch is done.

It is very, very important to accurately understand which of these problems you’re having when you get stuck. If you don’t have an idea, you need to play around a little, take a walk, have a good conversation, open the aperture. As they say in drawing class, explore the negative space. If you’re balking at the work, you need to stop playing around, sit down, shut up, go offline, and focus single-mindedly on executing the work, and make it real. In either case, if you try to solve one problem when you’re really having the other, you’re going to waste a lot of time.

How do you go about getting unstuck when you feel completely unable to get down to work?

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In the book I talk about one of the major oil companies. They equipped people with new, more portable devices and new smartphones and then the next day, 25 percent of people disappeared. So you’re a middle manager. You’re used to seeing people coming into the office and all of a sudden they vanish, and I think one of the key issues is middle managers learning how to manage when you see people far less than you ever used to. How often should you meet them? How do you keep an eye on them? Obviously, it brings up this whole issue of judging people on results and outputs rather than inputs.

Companies are starting to realize people are unused to this way of managing people. What they’re finding is that the biggest block to digital working is that middle managers aren’t skilled to do it. Organizations have learned that you actually do need to train managers in how to manage people in a virtual environment.

Miller went on to cite companies such as BT and Microsoft in the Netherlands, which have had improved success with virtual working after training their middle managers, so he’s certainly correct in his basic point that the training makes a difference, but is this news?

Five years ago, articles were already noting that when it comes to any sort of telecommuting, “the real impediment is the resistance of middle managers” and arguing that “more managers should be trained.” Back then Chuck Wilsker, president of the Telework Coalition, estimated that no more than 15 percent of firms were training managers for remote work. Based on Miller’s account, more companies have jumped on board, but certainly not as many as would be expected to have gotten with the program over half a decade. Perhaps the real story is how little progress has been made.

Why aren’t more companies training middle managers for the realities of the digital workplace despite repeated calls to send them to web work boot camp?

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To find out, we spoke with cloud computing expert and CEO of InfoStreet Siamak Farah, who explained that the experiences of the government will definitely — if not immediately — change the environment and expectations faced by the private sector, offering four takeaways for businesses:

• Determining eligibility is tougher than it seems. It’s a rare occasion when the government blazes a trail for the business community, but this might be one such case, with agencies figuring out how to best implement distance working. The first step, according to Farah, is to overcome fears of appearing discriminatory and take a long, hard look at who really can telecommute.  “You really need to look at the job function,” says Farah. “Not all people are created equal when it comes to teleworking. If you’re a heart surgeon, you’re not doing it,” he says. While Farah’s example may make determining eligibility sound simple, the government’s experience shows this is actually one of the tougher aspects of implementing web work and an important foundation for a successful telework program.
• The security advantages of the cloud are under-appreciated. While fear of hackers and online security abounds (often for good reason), many times the greater threat is simple human fallibility – just look at the U.K. government’s struggles to get employees to stop leaving secret info on trains. “When everything is in the centralized cloud … there are no files on a physical laptop which could get lost or hacked into,” points out Farah, who notes that storing data in the cloud will allow for innovations like fingerprint log-ons and offers often-undervalued security benefits. The cloud might not be up to CIA-level security, but for most functions, current data protection measures in the cloud should suffice, says Farah.
• Worker expectations are changing. Companies have long held back on telecommuting because they worry about not being able to monitor employees’ productivity. But that objection is eroding, according to Farah, due to the amalgamation of work and life. “It used to be that you punched in at nine and you went home at five and left every single worry at work. But now with iPhones, BlackBerry [devices], iPads and email accessible everywhere, many times personal time is being interrupted for work because that’s what the work requires. The natural progression of that is that employees come back and say, ‘Hey listen, if my time at home belongs to you than how come my time at work doesn’t belong to my house?’” Businesses will need to respond to this demand for quid pro quo.
• Government demand is changing cloud offerings … for the better. This process “is going to increase the number and quality of cloud solutions so businesses have more choices,” concludes Farah.

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Like many offices, people in this place often strike up conversations that last for twenty minutes or more about topics that aren’t work related. Between commuting, lunch breaks, and a requirement to be on-site all day, every day, the lines between work and down-time blur for the in-office worker.

Whereas I see the seven or so hours I spend at my desk as work time. Someone’s paying me for that time. And the moment it’s done, I’m free: I don’t have to sacrifice my time to commuting, so I can turn around and start to do whatever I like. So when some of my colleagues started a half-hour conversation about television shows the other day, my thought was, “guys, I’ve only got seven hours here!”

A half-hour out of my day spent chatting has a big impact on my productivity, especially as I’m only in the office for a limited time, and need to get all my face-to-face work done in that space. This conscious approach to the way I spend every half-hour of my time is, I think, the reason why my in-office colleagues have been surprised that I turn their requests around “so quickly.”

By keeping an eye on the small units of time, I’m able to focus on outcomes: every time I receive a request, I think, “How long will that take?” Often, it’s about fifteen or twenty minutes, so I do it on the spot. For the in-office worker, this kind of request might simply get tacked on to a to-do list and done when it gets done.

Owning Your Own Productivity

When you work remotely, you really come to own your own productivity — you can’t blame an unproductive day on the people around you talking, someone’s farewell lunch taking two hours, or anything but yourself. If your IM contacts are too conversational, you change your status to “Busy” and get to work.

Working remotely lets you own your own productivity by putting you in a position to set your own boundaries. In an office, the boundaries are blurred: people can interrupt us about work or other topics. You might feel you have no time to take a lunch break, perhaps because of the interruptions, or because your office culture may not encourage it. It may be easy to justify starting — or staying — later at work to miss the peak-hour traffic.

Increased flexibility of employment conditions, designed to make employees more responsible by giving them more control and freedom, may go some way to increase in-office productivity. But I think the workplace itself superimposes certain inescapable conditions onto the work arrangement — conditions that preclude the kind of productivity that remote workers can achieve.

For example, an office is like a community. If the people in it don’t interact, you wind up with ghettos, factions and mistrust, rather than openness and harmony. Every boss wants his or her staff to be friends; as long as we get the work done, they (broadly speaking) may not care exactly how we spend our time in the office. The inescapable social machinations of a healthy workplace take time. Many would argue that they contribute to the quality of the work output: a harmonious office does better work than one in dischord; a close-knit team works more effectively than one whose members can’t be themselves with one another.

Striking the Balance: Remote Workers On-Site

For those who alternate between working on site and working from home, these differences can be hard to balance. It takes some intuition and practice to “read” a workplace and understand how it operates. But it’s important to be able to do this — and quickly — if you’re to work there effectively for a limited time, like a day or two per week.

You’ll also need to be flexible about the way you work: while you might own your productivity when you work remotely, you must give up some of that control when you’re working on site.

You’ll probably enjoy the experience more — and achieve better results — if you open yourself up to a sensible level of conversation with colleagues while you’re working on-site. Perhaps leave the headphones in your bag and allow yourself to be engaged by the personalities around you every once in a while. There will be times with deadlines approaching when you can’t talk, but be prepared to relax and chat for a few minutes when you can.

Adjusting to working in an office every now and again can challenge the hard-line remote worker, but that’s probably not a bad thing. How do you adjust to working on-site, or in different workplaces, when the need arises?

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I’ll be discussing this topic in depth at Net:Work with Gary Swart (CEO of oDesk) and Maynard Webb (chairman and CEO of LiveOps) in a panel called Managing Remote Workers: What We Still Need to Get Done; I’m really looking forward to hearing their expert insights. But as many of our readers either work remotely or manage remote teams, I wanted to get your opinions and ideas, too: How can we make the managing of remote workers more effective?

Join us at Net:Work in San Francisco on Dec. 9. Register here!

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