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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With the arrival of summer weather, it’s natural for workers’ minds to turn to enjoying the sunshine and their attention to drift a bit from spreadsheets, sales targets and the like. So what’s the cure for this summer slacking? The Chicago Tribune tackles this seasonal worry facing managers each year and comes up with a list of suggestions. Primary among them is an increase in web work.

Reporter Jan Weigel speaks to Bryant Rice, director of business consultancy DEGW, who suggests that rather than fight against your employees’ urge to flee the office, managers should let them listen to their impulses:

Because of technology people can work from wherever they want, and we encourage this for worker productivity. Ten percent of the people might abuse this and not do the work, but 90 percent will do it and be happy about doing it remotely.

We see that employees will actually do more when they are not in the office because they don’t want the boss to doubt they are working. Very few people will abuse this privilege because they view it as a perk.

Are you more thankful for the flexibility of web work in the summer months?

Image courtesy Flickr user jan chill

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But the truth is that there are many laws that can potentially impact telecommuters and web workers. You have to have a clear picture of possible problems up front.

Benjamin Wright is an attorney specializing in the issues surrounding working online. He points to six key questions that web-based workers must keep in mind:

1. Are there any legal restrictions on your ability to conduct business from your home?
2. Do you have a clear contract with the employer explaining the relationship, compensation, tax issues, reimbursement for expenses and ownership of property (such as who owns the laptop you are using)?
3. Are you an independent contractor or an employee, and do you understand your resulting tax obligations?
4. Is the actual work you’re doing legitimate and legal?
5. Have you taken care to protect any sensitive data or information you have access to?
6. Do you need any special license or credentials to do the sort of work you’ve taken on?

Disregarding any of the above questions could easily wind up leading to major issues for any virtual staffer who ignores them.

Home offices

For many web-based workers, the best work space available is a spare room or space in your home. However, many municipalities and counties put limitations on what you can do in your home. Wright notes, “Some cities limit a citizen’s ability to conduct business out of their house, especially when the activity creates traffic, deliveries or noise. Some rental leases will also forbid the conduct of business out of an apartment.”

Employment status

When you work virtually, you are more likely to be asked to work as an independent contractor than if you’re going into an office every day. As such, you need to be aware of what your obligations are. “If you are an independent contractor (rather than an employee), you need to understand your state and federal tax responsibilities, including accounting for income, payment of estimated taxes, retention of receipts, and documentation for deductions such as home-office deduction,” Wright explains.

Employment contracts

Because there can be major tax issues if an employer tries to list you as a contractor  rather than as an employee, you do need a contract in hand.You also need that contract to detail your compensation and obligations.

Legitimate work

It’s not unheard of for a web-based worker to take on a project from someone she’s never met. That can make it harder to understand exactly what you’ve been asked to do. “Make sure you understand the full nature and legality of what you are doing. Some work-from-home schemes trick people into supporting illegal activities like online gambling or money-laundering. Make sure you know who your employer really is,” Wright points out. “If the work is too good to be true, you should be suspicious.”

Security and privacy

You may very well be handling information that must be kept secure and safe. That can take the shape of requirements to lock up files or computer equipment in your own home, or even take things a step beyond. Wright suggests, “If you are handling sensitive data (like personally-identifiable information pertaining to individual customers or patients), make sure you understand and implement proper security procedures.”

Licenses

It can be surprising to see how many jobs are subject to licensing requirements, depending on where you live. Wright points out a particularly problematic example: “For example, in some states a person doing computer forensics work — which can even include some kinds of computer repair — must have a private investigator’s license.”

Image courtesy Flickr user Sam Howzit

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Jay Mulki, a business professor at Northeastern University, has been studying the issue, conducting surveys of telecommuters and is currently analyzing the results. In advance of the release of the research, Mulki gave a sneak peak of his developing findings to the University’s website. Based on what he says, workaholism and web work are likely to be linked. He said:

As expected, remote work and telecommuting increased productivity for the business and provided flexibility for the employee. But we’ve found people often have difficulty getting away from work, and as a result, the work-family balance may actually be getting worse. Some people can manage it, while others can’t and often experience conflicts in their work and life. In the second part of our study, we are actually looking at whether the work-life balance is real or a myth, and how managers can help employees achieve this balance.

Rather than a challenge solely for the web worker, Mulki went on to say that this was an issue for managers to tackles as well as individual team members:

Smart managers are directing their people to have the discipline to start and stop work at specific times. They are also encouraging them to set up their workspace as if they are in an office setting. There are times when all employees will put in extra time, but we’ve found that some teleworkers feel obligated to work more hours and worry they can’t disengage from work. They are feeling that the work is always there.

As the manager of a dispersed team, do you feel it is your responsibility as well as your employees to ensure they draw a firm line between work and the rest of their lives? 

Image courtesy Flickr user ryantron

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Recent research presented at the Academy of Management by University of Michigan management professor Susan Ashford reveals you’re not alone. For the study, Ashford interviewed a selection of solo workers from IT professionals to graphic designers and novelists to find out what challenges workers who leave the office behind for a more self-reliant work style are facing.

These challenges, it turns out, are more often internal than is generally acknowledged. “When you read the practical literature on working from home, people talk about creating an office, getting file drawers and managing your time, and there’s nothing wrong with those things. They’re all important, but they don’t talk about what’s going on at a level underneath that, which is really more about how you manage your ego,” Ashford told WebWorkerDaily in an interview.

Ego management was a general problem throughout her interviews as solo workers struggled without the supportive structure of an office “that creates incentives whereby you work even if you’re not motivated. Your boss is sitting there. Your co-workers are around you. You just work.” Take away that structure and questions about the value and meaning of work start to bubble up more frequently.

That’s why “people who work in regular jobs have mid-life crises. People who work on their own just have daily crises,” says Ashford.

So what was the key to handling the many, mini crises of ego-taxing web work? You need careful thought about how to conceptualize your work and what it means to you. Before switching to solo work, Ashford’s interviewees told her,

You should do some deep exploration of who you are as a person and what motivates you, what undermines you, that kind of thing. We just want to get a job. We go into a groove and we don’t do as much of the exploration of who we are. But who you are is so prominent in solitary work. You are the tool through which you do it all, and if you don’t have a good understanding of that, it’s pretty easy to get thrown off the track.

The work of ego management doesn’t end with some self-reflection before you embark on the web worker lifestyle. Ashford’s interviewees continually strove to conceptualize their work in a larger way, to understand its meaning. Take the rug maker she spoke with, who after five hours in her basement hooking away at her latest creation, reminds herself that “long after I’m dead my rugs will be in homes around the country and giving people pleasure.”

Nor is it as simple as finding the discipline to pretend you’re at the office when you’re really at home, one man who worked as a mathematical modeler told Ashford.

‘I don’t want to set up my life to be working out of my home exactly the way I would be in an office. I don’t want to make myself get there at eight and stay until six and take ten-minute breaks. The beauty of working in this way is you get to have a different kind of life.’ What is interesting is you don’t really want to take the easy way out of the problem of what does it mean by putting yourself in a rigid structure, which would help you stay motivated. You’re giving up all the benefit of working this way, so you want to go with the more flowing structure. But that puts you in the problem of keeping yourself going and motivating yourself and that’s where these internal dialogues, this meaning making makes a real difference.

How do you manage the ego challenges of the web worker lifestyle?

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A recent round-up of research on telecommuting in Knowledge@Wharton brings this point home. The in-depth article notes that “as the economy flirts with a double-dip recession… the workplace for many Americans has shifted away from crowded offices to a new world of solitary work,” and then proceeds to discuss the challenges of working alone.

Some of these issues like time management and work-life balance challenges have been covered extensively on WebWorkerDaily before, but one difficult aspect of solo work studied by Susan J. Ashford, professor of management at the University of Michigan, is less often discussed: the challenges to ego and self-worth that solo work presents. According to Knowledge@Wharton, her research has led her to conclude:

… [Q]uestions about purpose and meaning come up more easily to workers who have no organization behind them. “Our argument is that your ego is very invested in the work because it’s just you,” she notes. “There’s nobody there to tell you that what you’re doing is great even though profits are going down.”

In a study recently presented at the Academy of Management, Ashford conducted in-depth interviews with solitary workers about how they stay motivated, and discovered that many needed to create a larger narrative of meaning behind their work. For some, such as a rug maker who likened her basement workshop to Picasso’s studio, the stories were imaginary projections. Others created ego-boosting surroundings, like the financial analyst who set up his office to feel like the cockpit of a jet plane. The narratives helped sustain motivation when money got tight or stress levels rose. “When you are on your own, meaning-making feels much more necessary to your work life than when you’re in an organization,” Ashford says. “The more freedom you have in your work, the more you have to do this.”

Ashford’s conclusions seem sensible. If you’re required to show up at an office from nine to five every day and are paid bi-weekly for doing so, this arrangement is, in effect, a constant drip of validation. You’ve accomplished the primary goal set out for you –- attendance –- and been rewarded with a paycheck. A flash lobby and plush office functions the same way, assuring everyone who works there of the meaningfulness of their work. Plus, in an office, you’re surrounded by others who you can measure yourself against. If Stew in the next cube over is a bit of a slacker, every day you can spy him playing solitaire or bungling presentations and know where you stand in the office accomplishment stakes. Web work removes that supportive scaffolding.

Do you think web work demands inner confidence as much as organizational and motivational skills?

Photo courtesy Flickr user anna gutermuth

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UPDATE: GoDropBox has been renamed GoFileDrop.

GoDropBox is a nifty third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files that are too big to email and don’t want to have to use additional file transfer tools.

Once installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is fairly basic, as shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and can show upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account.

The installed version of GoDropBox is only a trial, offering up to 100 users on a domain just 50 MB of data allowance each. Additional data is priced at $5 for 2 GB per month, $9 for 5 GB per month, or $15 for 10 GB per month (subscriptions can be canceled at any time).

Note: Confusingly, despite the name, this has absolutely nothing to do with file-sync-and-sharing service Dropbox. Also, in order to use it, you’ll have to be a Google Apps user and an admin will have to install it on your domain.

(via Digital Inspiration)

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The Seattle area already has a number of coworking spaces, including Office Nomads, just a few blocks away, and various other members of Coworking Seattle. So I asked Keith and Jana how they differentiate their offerings from the other spaces in the area. The Harpers are creative professionals themselves — Keith is a graphic designer and Jana is a web application developer — so their primary goal for the new space was to attract a group of like-minded and compatible creative people. While there is one “drop-in” desk available, The Mill’s major focus is on “dedicated desks.” They told me that they are looking to create something more than just a space where workers come and go; they hope to create a compatible group of creative professionals who can generate ideas, help each other and enjoy shared lunches and events. They even envision that the group could conduct design reviews and debug code.

One thing that The Mill is not: corporate. The Harpers made a conscious decision to create a low-key space, so just about everything is recycled, including surplus furniture from the University of Washington and rugs and knickknacks from the local thrift store. About the only new item in the space is the whiteboard wall, which was so new that the paint was still drying when I visited. The artwork that covers the walls is borrowed from artist friends, and the coffee beans will come from another friend. The vibe is so informal, in fact, that Keith and Jana kidded about needing to start “corporate Mondays,” when everyone would dress up.

However, the Broadway Building, where the coworking space is located, is new, and The Mill has access to a shared conference room and kitchen (although the building and the neighborhood have many restaurants). It is centrally located in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, across the street from Seattle Central Community College and next door to the landmark sculpture of Jimi Hendrix. The Harpers point out that while parking is available, there are several bus lines serving the location, and a new streetcar and light-rail line are under construction, meaning that their colleagues might well walk or take transit to The Mill.

The Harpers’ vision seems to be gaining momentum, as they have already filled half of the eight desks available, and they have been talking to other startups and creative people that they think will be a good match.

More information about the space is available at The Mill’s website, and you can also find out more at an open house that will be held on Friday evening in the space.

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The benefits of the blurring of these boundaries are obvious, but less discussed are the downsides, and several experts feel that there is at least one serious one: increased workaholism and the potential for burnout. Does being on the cutting edge of connectivity and evolving workstyles make web workers more vulnerable to becoming workaholics? Paul Miller, the founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, definitely believes so. He told WebWorkerDaily:

One of the downsides of the digital workplace is addiction to work. Companies are actually facing the opposite problem of the one they thought they’d have, which is that people would essentially not work hard enough. They actually overwork. You’ve seen it all around — people are working on holiday, working in the evening, working at the weekends. People are working much longer hours and seeing this blurring of work-life as being a positive thing, where I actually don’t think it is. I think it’s really important to know when you’re working and to know when you’re not working. If you’re using the same device for work as for talking to your mom, you start to forget which bits are work and which bits are the rest of your life. And actually I think people are becoming addicted to being connected.

Miller isn’t the only one with this worry. Contacts organizer Gist has been promoting the concept of a new workstyle that blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional, but it’s not a change that comes without pitfalls, according to Gist’s VP of Marketing, Robert Pease. Technology and the workstyle it enables provide great benefits, but they also put significant demands on our maturity and self-control. He told us:

Web workers are very innovative people and they’re very into new stuff. You can get an activity stream of your friends, your favorite brands and your customers, and everything becomes almost overwhelming. It’ll be interesting how the web worker on the front edge of this is going to evolve to have a true on/off switch — to know that it’s OK not to be watching everything every second of every minute of every day.

You can very easily sit online 24 hours a day. As much as you’re willing to consume can be delivered. You can always pick up your phone and you can always see your messages. But you also have the ability to not pick up your phone. What that requires is a level of self-awareness and a level of maturity, for lack of a better word, to know that work is always going to be available to you, but you need to balance fulfilling things in your life than are not related to being online — running or hiking or time with your children or throwing a ball with your dog.

Of course, correlation is not causation. So perhaps rather than web work turning people into workaholics, it’s simply that ambitious, workaholic types are more drawn to web-work-style jobs in the first place.

What do you you think: Are web workers more likely to struggle with work addiction? Is this because of their basic character or the nature of their workstyle?

Image courtesy Flickr user Joye~

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If you’re living with a bit of anxiety that your tax naughtiness might be uncovered and cost you, now is a good time to do something about it. The IRS is offering an amnesty. Inform them of your assets before Aug. 31 and you’ll pay a lower penalty fee of 12.5 percent for up to $75,000 or 25 percent if you’ve got more than that (on the odd chance you inherited a foreign account and never withdrew anything, the penalty will be only five percent).

If you’re discovered outside the amnesty program, the penalties “are draconian,” warns Harry Miller, a partner at Burns & Levinson, and expert on international tax issues. “If the failure to disclose is determined to be willful, then the civil penalty for each violation is up to the greater of $100,000 or 50 percent of the value of the undisclosed account. Accounts can be decimated.”

Who should consider taking advantage of the program? Miller recommends that “any U.S. citizen or U.S. resident with investments or accounts outside of the U.S. who has failed to disclose these accounts on annual information returns required by the U.S. government, or who has failed to include the income from such accounts on their personal U.S. income tax return, should consider taking advantage” of the amnesty program. But he notes it’s not for everybody:

There are significant tax costs involved with coming clean. In most cases the cost to be paid will be very low in comparison with the potential costs of being discovered without having participated in the program.  But anybody interested in this program needs to know what the potential tax cost and reduced penalties will be before getting into it.

For those who have so far avoided detection and are considering risking it for a while longer, Miller warns that a combination of terrorism-related scrutiny of international accounts and a recession-related drive to increase revenue without increasing tax rates will make the government more likely to discover you going forward. The IRS “has hired hundreds of new agents in Europe and Asia specifically in order to beef up their compliance enforcement efforts,” says Miller, who warns the risk is greatest in those countries with tax treaties with the U.S.

And while this amnesty is a repeat of a successful 2009 program, which convinced 15,000 tax dodgers to turn themselves in, “it is unlikely that there will be another similar program, and certainly nobody should count on such a program,” says Miller.

So what do you do if you’re thinking of taking advantage of the amnesty? Your regular accountant may not be able to handle the matter, as this is a highly specialized area of tax law, so find someone experienced with the 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative. And do it quickly. Paperwork must be filed and penalties paid by the end of August.

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