That’s shaping not only the career trajectories of individual knowledge workers, but also the practice of HR and management as teams incorporate more and more contingent workers employed on a project-basis. If you’re running a team made up of a mix of traditional employees and independent contractors, how can you ensure that the independent pros under your supervision feel as engaged and appreciated as long-term employees?

It’s a question author Alexandra Levit tackled recently on the American Express OPEN Forum blog, offering several tips to ensure your freelancers and independent pros feel like family. Her ideas include:

Recognize their value. Contract workers want to make a contribution quickly–they know their livelihood depends on it. So read their status reports and results summaries and illustrate the big picture so they can see how their work is fueling a greater mission.

Treat them like employees. When a contingent worker needs training to complete a new type of responsibility or keep current in her field, facilitate it. Give regular performance evaluations and gather survey feedback just as you would for any full-time employee. If you’re happy with his work, reward him by providing access to other people and opportunities within the organization. Don’t make your contract workers feel like a vendor who should be lucky to be working with your company and can replaced at any minute.

Engage in team building. Remote workers are more effective when they have solid relationships with their co-workers. If it’s feasible, introduce your virtual contract workers to each other and to their full-time team members in person, as this will build rapport and engender greater trust and cooperation. You should also invite remote contingent workers to visit your office, or pop into their locations from time to time. This shows that you actually care enough about the relationship to behave like a manager.

Don’t create a subculture. In their text Essentials of Organizational Behavior, Timothy Judge and Stephen Robbins suggest that subcultures often develop in organizations to reflect common problems, situations or experiences. What you don’t want is for a negative contingent worker culture to develop in the absence of guidance from management. If your contingent workforce is to be effective, your company’s leadership must go out of its way to ensure that members feel welcome and are effectively integrated into the larger organizational culture.

For more info on these tips, as well as statistics on the rise of independent workers, check out the complete post.

What tips would you add to Levit’s list?

Image courtesy of Flickr user SuziJane. 

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The “Occupy 99Designs” design contest, which launched Wednesday and will run until February 8, has garnered nearly 400 entries in its first few hours online. The winner will get $1,000 and, most importantly, a ton of exposure. According to the contest page: “This logo will live on occupy.com and @occupy on twitter. It will go on billboards, on TV, in magazines, on sidewalks, street walls, T-shirts, hats, postcards, on everything you can imagine — all over the world.”

Here’s more about what Occupy is looking for:

“We are challenging designers to think beyond the iconic Clenched Fist and create a new iconic symbol for resistance, solidarity and empowerment in the 21st century. It should appeal to a broad base and reflect the diversity of the 99%, while encompassing the values of the Occupy Movement – among them, integrity, justice, freedom, equality, compassion, community and true democracy.”

The Occupy.com logo contest on 99Designs (click to enlarge)

It may seem a bit funny that a movement that seems to be against all things corporate is looking for branding of its own. But in a way, it actually makes a lot of sense: There’s something to be said for fighting fire with fire, and having a more polished image would be a big step toward legitimacy for a movement that has been criticized for not having a unified message. And turning to a crowdsourced design site like 99Designs is more in keeping with Occupy’s message of being by and for the people than, say, commissioning a fancy custom design firm.

It makes me think of how in the Autobiography of Malcolm X published in 1968, the iconic activist wrote about why he dressed in tailored suits and ties: “In order to get something, you had to look like you already had something.” It looks like nearly 50 years later, the Occupy movement is trying to do the same thing in a modern way — on the web.

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But who has time for that? This is a social media world. We’re live in 140-character sound bites. So I decided to ping my favorite CEOs via Twitter to see what kind of wisdom they could drop on me. Here’s the great advice they shared.

Daniel Ek, CEO, Spotify

Figure out what the top five most important stuff is, focus relentlessly on that and keep iterating. Less is more.

Dennis Crowley, CEO, FourSquare

Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work. If you have a hunch that something will work, go build it. Ignore the haters.

Sarah Prevette, Founder, Sprouter

Just do it. Get it out there, absorb the feedback, adjust accordingly, hustle like hell, persevere and never lose your swagger.

Sarah Lacy, CEO, PandoDaily

Follow your gut. it may be wrong, but you won’t regret it if you fail. You’ll regret it if you ignore your gut and fail.

Craig Newmark, Founder, Craigslist

Treat people like you want to be treated. Apply to customer service.

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, VaynerMedia

Do work for your customers, not for press or VCs. The end user is what matters long term.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO, Automattic

Only reinvent the wheels you need to get rolling.

Jason Goldberg, CEO, Fab.com

Pick one thing and do that one thing — and only that one thing — better than anyone else ever could.

 Alexis Ohanian, CEO, Reddit

Make something people want. Then give more damns than anyone else about it and you’ll make something they love.

Chris Brogan, President, Human Business Works

Buy @ericries’s book. Beyond that? Build a platform. This is the big year.

Matt Howard, CEO, ZoomSafer

Startup wisdom: The number one job of a CEO is to not run out of money.

Brian Wong, CEO, Kiip

Always be learning from others. Whenever you meet someone, you don’t want something from them, you want to learn from them.

Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja, SCVNGR and LevelUp

Something my dad taught me: Ask forgiveness, not permission!

Hooman Radfar, Founder, Clearspring

Give away the wins, own the loses. Your job is to curate greatness.

Alexa Hirschfeld, CEO, Paperless Post

Users and employees are key predictive indicators of a company’s success; press and investors generally months behind.

Got some other great wisdom for your fellow CEOs? Leave me a comment!

Peter Corbett (@corbett3000) is the CEO of the creative agency iStrategyLabs, and is the founding organizer of DC Tech Meetup.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Search Engine People Blog.

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According to Bloomberg, despite Apple’s hiring in August of executive talent search firm Egon Zehnder International, it may instead end up hiring someone internally if an outside search isn’t coming up with any results. An earlier report from Cult of Mac had pegged Apple’s current VP of Retail, Steve Cano, as Johnson’s replacement, but Apple refuted those claims.

Apple said via a spokesperson that its “search is under way with lots of interest,” and noted that the company is “carefully selecting Ron’s successor,” in a statement to Bloomberg. But in the meantime, it’s hardly business as usual for Apple Retail stores.

Just last week, Apple launched its revamped iOS Apple Store application, which provides ship-to-store ordering and EasyPay self-payment options to U.S. Apple retail locations. I argued that this represents another potential revolution sparked by Apple in brick-and-mortar sales, and now there’s a new report circulating that more changes are still to come.

On Saturday, 9t05Mac reported Apple will be making iPads the new wonder tool of the Apple Store Genius Bar, replacing MacBook Pros that have long been in service. Geniuses toting iPads would employ special software to determine if a user’s device was eligible for repair, diagnose problems and even order replacement parts. For Apple, this represents cost-savings; an iPad is much cheaper than a MacBook Pro, after all. But the real benefit will be for customers seeking Genius help, since it’ll make Genius work spaces less cluttered and more comfortable, and keep Geniuses much more mobile.

So despite Apple’s lack of a formal helmsman in place for its retail operations, the ship is sailing quite nicely, and even venturing outside its established routes. Good to see that even with a hugely successful retail model already in place, and in the midst of a highly transitional period, Apple still strives to bring its A-game to an area where it continues to have a steady, albeit les- publicized impact on a global scale.

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Yet earlier this year, when Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of these extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary. Instead, employees cited access to “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Tangibles like salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Indeed, a recent landmark study by Arnold Worldwide of 3,000 employees and 500 executive leaders across a range of communication and advertising firms found that 30 percent of the advertising workforce say they’ll be gone from their job within 12 months.

Take Jill, an outstanding, experienced copy editor whom Agency X recently recruited at considerable expense from one of its chief rivals. Despite her outward success, she’s unsure how she’s performing, where she stands in the company, and how she fits into the overall goals of the agency. Her pay is great, she loves the Friday office happy hour, but over time, she finds herself feeling demotivated by the lack of communication, and checks out.

The loss of star performers like Jill doesn’t just leave a talent vacuum to fill; it also leaves a gaping hole in the bottom line. Indeed, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal calculated that it typically costs a company about half a position’s annual salary to recruit for that job ¾ and several times that if the position requires rare skills.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

1. Create a culture of education

The average Starbucks barista gets more training in a year than the average employee in a communications company, according to the Arnold Worldwide study.

For employees, the single most important motivational factor was the ability to learn. Yet the study found a huge disconnect when it comes to perceptions about company training. While 90 percent of employees say they learn by figuring things out on their own, only 25 percent of executives think that employees learn independently.

To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.

2. Provide regular, consistent feedback

Employee feedback is a critical part of the education process, and shouldn’t just be relegated to the annual review. To be effective, feedback needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always how it works.

In a study by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that when their boss praises excellent performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful information to help them repeat it. And 65 percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor performance, it doesn’t provide enough useful information to help them correct the issue.

Feedback, both positive and constructive, is most effective when given right away. Negative feedback given a month after the fact can lead to a passive-aggressive environment in which an employee feels powerless to act on the advice.

Think of it this way: no one wants to go a full day knowing their price tag was hanging from the back of their shirt, or the remnants of the salad they had for lunch were still stuck in their teeth. If an employee does something well, that activity should be encouraged. And if there’s room for improvement, they should be given the opportunity to learn for their next task.

3. Set time aside for weekly 1:1 meetings

At first, most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of yet another meeting. But instituting weekly 1:1 meetings can be the most important step you take to retaining your top performers.

In its quest to build a better boss, Google discovered that its worst managers weren’t consistent in their 1:1 meetings; some focused on meeting with people who were underperforming, while others met primarily with the top performers.

Consequently, Google implemented the best practice of 1:1 meetings with all team members.

These meetings can cover anything and everything from upcoming projects to the latest client news. With each week, discussions about goals, feedback, and concerns become a lot more natural unlike the awkward, starchy conversations during annual reviews. Over time, it becomes easier for both sides to raise potential problems and deal with them early on, before they fester into something destructive.

4. Manage the grunt work properly

Not every project is going to be awesome. That’s just the way business works. And chances are your employees understand this.

However, managers need to handle such projects responsibly and that means a few things. Boring projects should always be balanced with more stimulating work. Employees should always be told how any grunt works fits into the overall needs of the company (“If we do a good job on x, we’re hoping the client will give us their cool launch next year”). And specific parameters should always be set for the boring stuff ¾ meaning employees should always see light at the end of the tunnel.

5. Publicly acknowledge good work

All too often, managers see motivation in terms of financial compensation, but money is far from the only way to effectively reward talented employees. A 2009 survey by McKinsey Quarterly asked which incentives were the most effective in motivating employees. The top two responses were: “Praise and commendation from immediate manager” (67 percent), and “Attention from leaders” (62 percent).

Praise and commendation go a long way in making employees feel noticed and valued. And the impact of a pat on the back is multiplied when it’s done publicly. Through public commendations, employees not only feel the support and respect of their manager, but the entire organization as well (including top-level executives). Creating a framework for “social recognition” will encourage a culture of appreciation throughout your firm.

Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people and great talent; make sure an opaque work environment doesn’t drive them into the arms of your competition.

Learn more about how to keep remote workers happy and your team collaborating at GigaOM’s Net:Work event on December 8, 2011.

Daniel Debow is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta. 

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I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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Kadambi returns to the day-to-day CEO role after three years serving as president and board member, while mostly leading product development. While Mathieu is stepping down from the chief executive role, he will remain on the company’s board. The announcement was made at an all-hands meeting earlier this week.

According to a company spokesperson, the management change comes as YuMe plans to double down on its technology, which includes its ACE for Advertisers and ACE for Publishers ad optimization products. It is also working on adding more features for mobile advertisers, after bringing on members of the old Transpera team, and expanding into Europe, after acquiring U.K.-based ad startup Appealing Media.

This isn’t the only management change YuMe has made in recent months: The startup also recently hired Tim Laehy as its Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining YuMe, Laehy had served as CFO of companies like CloudShield Technologies, which was acquired by SAIC; Collation, which was acquired by IBM; and Covad Communications, which he helped take public. Earlier this year, YuMe also hired Bryan Everett as its EVP of Business Development and Ed Haslam as SVP of Marketing.

Last February, YuMe announced a $25 million round of funding led by Menlo Ventures, with existing investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital and DAG Ventures also participating. YuMe was also reportedly profitable at that time, but it’s not clear if that’s still true. Altogether, YuMe has raised more than $40 million since being founded in 2004.

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Hacking work is both the title of a book and descriptive of a growing movement. Transparency and greater control are growing organizational norms so it should not be surprising that people are taking advantage of their increased insight and opportunity to make work better, both for themselves and their colleagues.

There are close to 130 M-Prize stories/case studies and hacks on offer as I write this. That’s more than 130 people (as some have been submitted by author teams) spending many hours thinking and writing about how to make work better. The Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) community that supports the prize practices what many of us preach: For organizational projects to succeed, human motivations, technology support, and organizational practices must all be brought to bear. Just creating a website to share ideas would never have been enough to create this kind of interest and effort.

I had the chance to see the process firsthand when I was invited to join the pilot “hackathon” focused on enabling communities of passion. The idea of the hackathon grew out of feedback to the MIX leadership that working individually wasn’t enough — that the results would be better if there were a way to make a collective contribution. Across the weeks of the hackathon we worked through focusing questions, challenges, mini-hacks, and discussion, guided by Chris Grams, our “MIX Guide.” We then took the big step and transformed many of these mini-hacks into M-Prize submissions. I know that without this process and support I would not have submitted my hack (on the topic of leading by negotiation).

Programming / coding hackathons are popular:

• Facebook’s Hackamonth
• Google’s Summer of Code
• EBay/PayPal iPadDevCamp

Here’s to using that same hackathon energy and hacking techniques to improve our work process. For more, see the hacks and stories submitted for the M-Prize, check out this Hacking Work Manifesto, or better yet, create and share your own hack.

If you’ve created a hack, or find one in the M-Prize submissions that you think is especially valuable, please share it with us here.

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To find out, we spoke with Yosh Beier, the co-founder of Collaborative Coaching, which specializes in encouraging productive collaboration among teams. He has extensive international experience assisting both local teams and teams of web workers, so we asked him what makes a great manager of a dispersed team. He offered six practices that are particularly important for those leading distributed teams:

• How vs. what. You’re busy – everyone is – so you skimp on talking about how you’ll work together in favor of focusing on what you need to deliver. An understandable decision, but a mistake, particularly for remote teams, says Beier.  “When the rubber hits the road, which invariably it will at some stage, this really impedes the effectiveness of a team. The fact that teams are dispersed adds complexity because it is even harder to build trust and give people feedback.” So find the time to speak with your team about those all-important “how” questions: How are we making decisions? How do we give each other feedback? How do we want to deal with conflict and how do we want to bring it up?
• Bring out your inner Dirt Devil. If there’s dirt being swept under the rug, you have to get it out in the open. “If teams are dispersed it’s so much easier to avoid the kind of constructive conflict that should happen,” Beier noted. “It’s really the job of a team leader to be super finely attuned to the possibility that there is conflict that’s swept under the rug and then really make sure that it is being unearthed.”
• Build an operating manual for cultural difference.  Remote teams, by their nature, are more likely to be cross-cultural. Don’t stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. Instead Beier suggests “cultural introductions” where you explicitly bring your team together to talk about questions like, “where did you grow up?” and “what do I need to work well in a team?” Beier explains: “We say, if you could give co-workers an operating instruction manual about you, what would you say? Then people have a chance to say, ‘I like it this way. I like it that way. I like feedback clearly or not publicly,’ depending on what kind of cultural preferences people have. There is a chance up front to be clear about the different expectations that people have if they have different backgrounds. People have a chance to see the person and not just the role. It tends to give people the trust, when the going gets tougher, to say, hey wait a second, something is really not working for me.”
• Be ambidextrous. No, you don’t need to write with both hands, but you do need the flexibility to balance tasks and team building. “Realize what markers tell you to be more task oriented, for instance if you already have performance measurements and you’re falling behind. But also what indicators tell you to be a little more relationship focused, for instance, if there’s a reluctance to give critical feedback. The trick is team leaders who are flexible enough to do both.”
• Fend off the “kumbaya” charge. Does this all sound a little touchy-feely to you? Some team members are likely to agree, so Beier recommends framing all this sharing in hard-nosed business language. “Make clear what the purpose is. It is really important for people to understand we’re not just there to say kumbaya at the end of the day. We’re there to get our job done in a way that is more effective and possibly also more creative.”
• The virtual open door. You don’t have a traditional office so you don’t have a door, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a virtual open door policy. “Being very approachable as a team leader is hugely important,” says Beier. “Reiterate that message over and over again, particularly at the beginning: I am approachable by phone, by email, by whatever way people prefer.”

What were the toughest challenges for you when you first started managing web workers?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ChrisDag

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