As a manager or small business owner, you’ve seen the light and decided to expand your team by adding remote workers. Now all you need is a remote work policy that lays out everything your employees need to know. But why is this necessary? Read more »
Submissions to the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Innovation closed July 18. For two months, management practitioners, consultants and professors have been posting their work hacks and stories of experimenting with radical management practices to share with the community, gather feedback, and gain recognition. Read more »
Staples is releasing a survey Tuesday on web worker happiness, but rather than capture why remote workers are content with their lot, Staples aims to get at exactly how thrilled they are to not have to go into the office. Read more »
Many digital freelancers earning U.S. dollars are now receiving substantially less for the same work, as their own nations’ currencies gain strength against the U.S. dollar. The rates that U.S. companies offer to remote workers may no longer compete with their local firms. Read more »
The research is conclusive: compared to office-based colleagues, those who are free to work where they choose are happier with their jobs. But why is this? The answer isn’t as clear as it might first appear to web work boosters. Read more »
Jay Mulki, a professor at Northeastern University, has been studying the issue of web work and workaholism, 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. Read more »
Are “untemplaters” — contract web workers unfettering themselves from the conventional freelance model — a good skill resource for businesses? To many employers this breed of digital professional might seem flighty and unreliable. Where’s the accountability? Can a project as important as yours rest on their contribution? Read more »
The profile of Sheryl Sandberg in the New Yorker this week purports to be about women in technology, but it’s also a glimpses into the evolving state of the workplace in an entrepreneurial and highly connected world -– the future of work for the professional class. Read more »
Enterprise employees have shifted from the gray and controlled world of corporate IT to the colorful Oz of consumer technologies, but according to data from an IDC/Unisys survey, everyone is in need of some kind of wizard to sort things out. Read more »
Business is all about the bottom line and web work offers new ways to bolster that bottom line. But not everyone sees paying according to the prevailing local wages as without its moral complexities, especially when companies begin to look overseas for additional help. Read more »
I had a long chat with John Hagel, co-author of The Power of Pull and one of the most foremost thinkers on technology and its impact on the future of work, life and how we relate to each other. Here is a video conversation with him. Read more »
Web workers might be the pioneers on the virtual work trail, but it seems that the general working population believes that it’s not too far behind. A new study reveals that 58 percent of U.K. workers believe that offices of today will not exist in 2021. Read more »
You’re a web worker and you’re all kitted out. You’re ready to confront everything the world of remote collaboration throws at you, so why are you constantly so stressed? According to research, the challenges are often more often internal than is generally acknowledged. Read more »
Mobile payments have taken off in the last few years and are now poised to grow from $240 billion this year to $670 billion worldwide in 2015, aided by growing near field communication transactions for physical goods, according to Juniper Research. Read more »
In today’s world, an increasing number of negotiations are taking place remotely, and with digital signatures being as legitimate as those made by hand, the number of useful applications for revising, organizing and signing documents online is growing. Here’s a selection. Read more »
Not too long ago, work-from-home arrangements were often thought of as a benefit for mothers, allowing working moms more time with their kids. But a new study reveals that today’s dads are just as likely to need web-enabled flex work solutions. Read more »
Side projects can be businesses or just-for-fun efforts that we do in our nonworking hours. While there are some risks with taking side projects, I strongly believe that most of the time they benefit both the individual and the employer. Read more »
When Jana and Keith Harper returned to Seattle a few months ago, after spending a couple of years in New York City, they decided that they wanted to create a coworking space. The Mill, their new business, was up and running in less than two weeks. Read more »
Apple is gearing up to release Lion, the first OS X updated to leave some Intel-based Macs out of the party. Even with the minimum specs, you won’t be getting the full experience. Here’s how to make some key improvements without breaking the bank. Read more »
If you work on your own and get creatively blocked, you’re equally on your own to try and unstick yourself and get productive again. Programmer, designer, copywriter — whatever your field of work, it’s the same dilemma: How do you prod your unresponsive brain to deliver the goods? Read more »
At the WWDC keynote this week, Steve Jobs remarked that the file system is the trickiest part of adjusting to a new OS. Apple seems intent on a future where the file system is invisible to the user. Is that a good or a bad thing? Read more »
The upcoming OS X Lion will include a new way of sharing documents with friends and family who are on the same Wi-Fi network in a similar manner as other P2P wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi Direct or Qualcomm’s FlashLinq. The service is called AirDrop. Read more »
How exactly did the recession affect remote work – were employers spoiled for choice and reluctant to allow flexibility? Did lean economic times increase the number of workers looking for remote gigs? WebWorkerDaily spoke to Sara Sutton Fell, the founder and CEO of FlexJobs, to find out: Read more »
Most of us have social networking profiles these days, and though survey results differ on the exact percentage, a whole lot of hiring managers and recruiters can’t resist taking a peek at them. But do people get an accurate picture of others’ personalities from their profiles? Read more »
Knoodle offers a training solution that provides a presentation with a split screen; you can have text or PowerPoint slides on one side of the screen and video on the other, then sync the video with the slides so they automatically advance at the right time. Read more »
Remote working may be on the rise, but there are still assumptions made about a distributed workplace that prevent some employers from adopting it. Here’s a list of five big reasons companies won’t pull the trigger on remote working, and why those fears are mostly unfounded. Read more »
Over the years, there have been numerous articles musing on what the office of the future would look like, but how have those predictions matched up to reality today? Let’s look at a BusinessWeek article from 1975 and an Apple video made in 1987. Read more »
Technological advancements have minimized the need for employees to be as physically present in a traditional office setting, and employee relationships now extend across different time zones and geographies. This paper discusses the future of work and the workplace in that context. We examine the shifting nature of actual workspaces, from four office walls to the online world; the emergence of new flexible hours that no longer require a nine-to-five mindset; the role of consumer-grade technologies such as iPads, smartphones and notebooks in the workplace; and what role cloud-based services such as Box.net, Huddle and Dropbox play. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Google and Skype. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Despite a fairly weak jobs market overall, freelancers should be optimistic. Online labor marketplaces oDesk and Elance have both released data showing strong growth in demand for freelance workers over the past year, with both sites reporting a large increase in the number of jobs posted. Read more »
Many businesses are embracing the virtual model, with employees working from their homes rather than a corporate headquarters. Saving money on office rental, pricey IT infrastructure and travel costs are compelling arguments for an office-free life. But can any organization be virtual? Read more »
You can’t innovate without collaboration, and without innovation, companies fail. There is now a whole new world of collaboration tools available to enable what can best be termed “high-impact collaboration.” These break-through tools — workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Central Desktop or customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction — are made possible through the convergence of cloud computing, social software and the ubiquity of mobile technology. With these new technologies, employees can channel their passions and work together more effectively — regardless of where people are located — to accomplish their mission. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Twitter, LiveOps and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
On Dec. 9, 2010, we’re hosting our newest conference, Net:Work, which explores the Future of Work. Just like mobilization of the society and cloud computing, I believe work is the next big killer app of the Internet. Here is why. Read more »
Rebecca Jacoby, chief information officer at Cisco, says if it wasn’t for new collaboration tools such as video telepresence, blogs and wikis, the networking-equipment maker would never have been able to grow as large or move quickly into as many new markets as it has. Read more »
As most of the world is aware, Facebook launched its Social Inbox feature last week. The unified messaging system pipes online and mobile communication functions people use — SMS, instant messaging, Facebook chat messages — into a single inbox. On the face of it, having just ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Gartner research analysts recently convened to discuss the changing nature of work and table some predictions for the coming decade. Their consensus view was that distributed and ad-hoc teams of people, along with blurred organizational boundaries, would become the norm for most modes of work. Read more »
Last Summer, I outlined the philosophy of “Noded” working (a system of forming distributed teams for particular types of projects). A few months later, Jaan Orvet, one of the authors of the Noded principles, spoke at the inaugural HDLive conference in the UK. Read more »
What if I told you that it was possible to use a magic machine at home that could make anything…and that maybe you could use it to conjure up “things” to sell as part of your job? Read more »
Careercast recently ran a pair of interesting articles, exploring the best and worst professions for the upcoming year. Satisfyingly for readers of this blog, almost a quarter of the best jobs consisted of roles suited to web workers and untethered employees, including software engineers, systems analysts, accountants, […] Read more »
The digital world is changing rapidly. The explosion of social networking and the emergence of the real-time web are bringing many new challenges for businesses. With those challenges come new opportunities. The shifting landscape means that companies will need people with unique skills — whole new […] Read more »
