GigaOM » distributed work

Needle weaves fans, customers and companies together

Terri Griffith — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:39:17 +0000

Companies and employees are finding unique ways to work in a world supported by mobile Internet access. We’re seeing growth in coworking, and telecommuting in general, and Needle is a great example just how far you can push these ideas. Needle provides client companies with the tools and people to link product experts, or fans of the brand, with current and prospective customers in online chats. I met Needle’s founder and CEO Morgan Lynch recently at his office, an Airstream megabus worthy of the rockstar team he’s invited on the road. Lynch says the bus is a good way to demonstrate the power of “the work anywhere model.” He continues,

Today we’re all plugged in. The best performance you’ll get is when people work from where and when they want. If you shove somebody in a cube and force some training, telling them to do things they wouldn’t normally do, they won’t be as creative … and giving recommendations is a creative process.

This isn’t your grandparents Airstream. And this isn’t a 20th century form of telecommuting. Needle provides a platform that brings fans, brands and customers together. Needlers, as the fan/experts are known, can be selected by the client company if it has existing connections with its fan experts, or by Needle through the client company’s social networks. The key is that Needlers are passionate fans who love to talk about the brands they cover.

Map of Needlers and realtime chats – shown on screen inside the bus

The platform is built to access these experts wherever they are and help them engage with their brands in a manner that works for all the parties. The company works with clients to find the times they need to staff their customer response chat lines. It also customizes the incentive packages for each company based on the focus the they’d like the chats to have.

I had the chance to talk with the following Needlers:

Doug Fleming
Needle Client: Astro Gaming
Location: Oceanside, Calif.
Age: 25
Details:

Began gaming when he was 6 years old, began competitive gaming when he was 16
Started Needling in February 2012
Needles about 20 hours per week
Has already done 1,200 chats

Nick Joy
Needle Client: Skullcandy
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Age: 26
Details:

A die-hard skier, moved from Seattle to Utah for the snow
One of the first Needlers — began in April 2010
Needles about four hours per week
Quickest response time on the Skullcandy Needle team

Michelle Graham
Needle Client: Under Armour
Location: Snohomish, Wash.
Age: 41
Details:

Married, mom of two boys
Started Needling October 2011
Needles about five hours per week
Lifetime customer satisfaction score: 9.7

They each had a story to tell about their client company and how the control and flexibility of the work style is something they greatly value. Lynch says that Needle leverages the idea that work is an activity, not necessarily a place. I heard several versions of, “Earn some money, earn some points and work for my favorite brand.” Nothing about going to the office.

Noelle Bates, vice president of community for Needle, and Lynch both talked about the quality of the people they are bringing to the table. They don’t think these experts would go to work in a call center, even if the call center were local to them, and the odds that the experts live near their favorite brands’ offices is small.

I mentioned Zappos, another company with fanatical fans and employees, and JetBlue with their work-at-home customer service representatives. Lynch pointed out that Zappos employees still have to commute to get to work, whereas the Needlers can work their way across Europe (as Nick Joy did), work from airplanes, work wherever they have a reasonable Internet connection. JetBlue’s approach requires a telephone and high speed Internet, more than the mobile-friendly requirements to Needle via chat. He concludes, “Your workforce shouldn’t be constrained by where they live.”

My colleague, Jessica Stillman recently summarized research showing that remote work can boost productivity for creative work. The founders and employees at Needle seem to agree. Do you?

Images courtesy of Needle.

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UK telecommuting study bolsters case for remote work

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:09:58 +0000

As we reported a few months ago, on February 8th UK telecoms giant O2 sent nearly 3,000 staff based at its Slough office home to telecommute for the day. Now the analysis of how the experiment went is out and, unsurprisingly considering a slew of earlier studies on telecommuting, O2 discovered a day at home was an all-around good thing for its workforce.

The exercise was partly designed to test how the company might respond to disruption caused by the arrival of the Olympics in nearby London this summer, but the results of the experiment again illustrate the benefits of flexible working even if thousands of world-class athletes aren’t about to invade your city. O2 found:

Telecommuting staff saved a £9,000 (currently $14,000 and change) in reduced commuting costs
1,000 hours that was usually spent commuting was instead spent working, while staff also got an additional 1,000 hours of sleep
14 percent said they saw more of their families
More than one in three (36 percent) said they were more productive than when at work
12.2t of CO2 was saved in one day — that’s equal to CO2 emissions from driving 42,000 miles in a medium-sized diesel car

IT World offers some explanation of the technical details, which apparently produced no major issues: “In preparation, O2 upgraded its virtual private network (VPN) as well as its network infrastructure, which saw a 155 percent increase in users on the day, and a 110 percent increase in VPN data sent across the network. The company automatically redirected traffic between servers in the north and south of its offices to ensure that the load was spread efficiently and that there were no local bottlenecks.”

“The success of O2′s experiment extends much further than just allowing some of the workforce to stay at home and work. It proves that with the right thinking and planning, even the largest organizations can protect themselves from the most severe disruptions to their business,” Ben Dowd, business director at O2, is reported as saying in IT Wor. He also stressed the importance of proper preparation.

“Four weeks of intense preparation across the business – everywhere from HR and internal comms to IT and property services – laid the ground for an almost completely empty building and a widely distributed workforce,” he said.

Might a one-day trial of telecommuting be a good step towards remote work for your business?

Image courtesy of Flickr user team|b.

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Is Microtask the Future of Work?

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:31:49 +0000

A Microtask visualization from an animated promo video on the company

Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. I met with Microtask CEO Wili Miettinen and CTO Otto Chrons earlier this week while they were in town for CrowdConf, the first major gathering for the crowdsourcing industry.

Miettinen calls Microtask “the extreme approach to digital labor.” The company’s software divides work into highly standardized tasks — on the level of validating the data in a single form field — that can be completed in 1 to 2 seconds. Unlike something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, workers don’t get to choose their next project; Microtask queues up new tasks for as long as the person works. Because Microtask can create “strictly defined inputs and outputs” and use redundancy, it can offer customers service level agreements to guarantee its results. You don’t usually see SLAs in crowdsourcing.

Microtask sells its product in two ways. Companies who want to use their own workforce pay for seat licenses. So for example, an existing insurance company customer outsources the process of entering information from paper forms into a database to a division of its own company in the Baltics, Miettinen said, where labor is one-fifth as expensive as at its home office. Or, Microtask will use its own worker pool and extract 10-15 percent of the cost of labor as its cut based on the number of transactions completed.

Miettinen thinks he thinks the next big thing could be outsourcing labor to social games. “Game designers are the experts in motivating people and getting them to do repetitive stuff,” he said. So for example, Zynga could contract Microtask to have its FarmVille players complete menial tasks, rather than pay money or credits, to buy virtual goods to help tend their farms within the game. That might increase the number of players Zynga can monetize; right now only a small portion of players ever pay for virtual goods in social games – less than 5 percent. Finding ways around paying real money for virtual goods is a known opportunity, though offers from companies like Offerpal have been tainted by scamming, and surveys from companies like Peanut Labs are hard to scale in part because the self-selecting userbase of survey takers may not be a great representative sample.

Microtask employs 12 people and has raised €1.2 million ($1.7 million USD) in two rounds from investors including Sunstone Capital. Miettinen previously sold his real-time 3-D graphics company Hybrid Graphics to NVIDIA in 2006.

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