“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Yahoo says that its new edict banning remote working is necessary to build the right kind of culture. But how is making things less appealing for potential employees going to help Yahoo become more innovative? Read more »
Owning physical items — cars, apartments, office space — will be increasingly inefficient for a global market. This is driving a greater interest in the share economy. Companies like Zipcar and Airbnb have paved the way here, but a host of startups have surfaced recently, too. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Vacation season is in full swing, but small business owners continue to be besieged, as ever, with a tidal wave of responsibilities. The collision of these two realities could equal frustration, but according to a new survey, there’s actually a happier result– more remote work. Read more »
An article on women and work-life balance is stirring a predictable flurry of debate on the internet, but the piece is worth reading for those interested in remote collaboration as well as gender issues for what it says about “time macho” work culture and telecommuting. Read more »
A new study explodes conventional wisdom that telecommuters feel less close to their teams than co-located employees and also reveals that more communication often leads to greater stress for remote workers. Should managers of dispersed teams consider rethinking how often they communicate with distant employees? Read more »
A new report from the Conferences Board reveals that while professions traditionally associated with remote work like writing and sales continue to have the highest rates of telecommuting, other less expected job categories are making huge gains. What are they? Read more »
The case for telecommuting is solid and gets more so with each new study. But despite this mounting pile of evidence, the number of actual telecommuters hasn’t exactly skyrocketed. Why? Economist Bryan Caplan points to a paper that blames signaling. Read more »
Hertz’s CIO explains how the company moved from housing all its customer service agents in a call center to having nearly half of them based at home, puncturing any ideas of successful remote workers as elite, highly educated professionals in the process. Read more »
With the Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparations by organizers and athletes. But one other type of news item is surprisingly popular in Britain – stories equating telecommuting during the games with slacking at home. Read more »
Got a remote gig that allows you to work from home but a home that isn’t exactly palatial? Design pros channel James Bond to offer clever solutions to keep your business and personal life from blurring, even if you’re living in tight quarters. Read more »
Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But studies also reveal middle managers resist the idea. A recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation offers tips on converting them into flex work believers. Read more »
Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And the current management mania for collaboration may be making matters worse for quiet ruminators. Is remote working the solution to the problem, or does it bring its own issues? Read more »
Remote working is often about practicing what you preach. Got an outdoor adventure brand? No chaining your employees to their desks then. Built your company late at night? Forget the nine to five. But what if your company is all about tracking time? Harvest explains. Read more »
Remote work advocates have plenty of scientific ammunition to convince skeptics as study after study has shown telecommuters get more done. But what’s true on average doesn’t hold for every case, new research suggests. For stultifying tasks (and, unsurprisingly, slackers), the office may be best. Read more »
An exec at jobs marketplace Zaarly pens an uncompromising post admitting he’s been converted to remote work skepticism and arguing that for demanding, idea-hungry startups at least co-located teams are definitely the way to go. Is he on to something? Read more »
A new survey released by remote access company TeamViewer today shows that while both genders predict more online meetings in the future, women see more benefits to the practice than men do and are also more demanding of their meeting hosts. Why is this? Read more »
A quarterly report from Elance indicates that with the lengthy economic crisis in Europe showing no signs of coming to a happy conclusion, workers in troubled countries are increasingly turning to remote work as an alternative to finding jobs in their stressed home economies. Read more »
Microsoft Canada’s latest Flexible Working report shows that despite a steady drumbeat of studies validating the idea that telecommuting improves productivity, Canadian managers are still much more skeptical of the practice than their employees, holding back uptake of remote work. Read more »
The results are out on UK telecoms giant O2′s one-day telecommuting experiment and it’s good news for fans of remote work. Sending nearly 3,000 workers home improved productivity, saved money and CO2, and resulted in more sleep and family time for employees. Read more »
While a host of studies have found that telecommuters are more productive and happier with their work, new research paints a less rosy picture of managing virtually, finding that bosses who don’t share a space with their reports perform slightly worsel than co-located supervisors. Read more »
An appeals court confirms that a Maryland-based software company with a single telecommuter in New Jersey is liable for taxes in the state, illustrating yet again that it’s past time for congress to sort out the rules on taxing telecommuters. Read more »
If miscommunication or fuzzy delegation of responsibility can hurt co-located teams, these mistakes can torpedo virtual ones. That’s why experts on managing virtual teams stress talking not just about what you’re working on, but how you’re going to work on it as well. Read more »
Findings from a new survey that confirm earlier polls showing workers are willing to sacrifice money or vacation time to work remotely may not be shocking, but other revelations about how soon employees expect their offices to go fully virtual may surprise skeptics. Read more »
Rising prices at the pump inevitably prompt a flurry of interest in telecommuting as a short-term solution for commuters’ pain. Should we be thinking longer term, using remote work as a way to restructure our lives to take the sting out of gas prices for good? Read more »
As more and more of working life becomes virtual, there’s one bastion of face-to-face interaction that seems least likely to go remote – the leadership off-site — but at least one high profile pundit thinks it’s time to rethink the annual executive get-together. Read more »
In 2012, the next big thing will be what we do with iPads in the office. Here are a few interesting iPad apps that give us new ways to gather, absorb and manipulate data necessary to get our jobs done. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The argument that work is increasingly untethered from the office and will take place more and more in coffee shop–type environments is pretty common, but one futurist is taking “coffeeshopification” a step further, claiming that universities and retail stores will resemble coffee shops as well. Read more »
Gloomy February is generally in need of more celebrations, and it has gotten one: Anywhere Working Week is on now. But this initiative from UK business, government and nonprofits to promote remote work is hardly getting pulses racing. Flexible work deserves a higher profile. Read more »
A new survey from TeamViewer confirms earlier reports that Americans would be willing to make sacrifices for the privilege of working remotely, as well as offering a timely but shocking revelation of what some desperate souls would give up to telecommute. Read more »
The rise of remote work may mean teams can spread out far and wide from corporate headquarters, but ironically, the increasing prevalence of telecommuting could actually lead to denser communities rather than atomized workers as work and life are integrated in one space. Read more »
A round-up of advice from veteran remote workers to those who work from home turns up a rarely cited truth: Your productivity problems may have more to do with what you do than how you do it. Now you just have to admit it. Read more »
Among cutting-edge companies the realities of virtual teams may be fairly old news, but according to several recent articles, the same isn’t true for many mainstream HR departments who are badly behind when it comes to grappling with the implications of widespread remote work. Read more »
A handful of freelancer parties suggest the future of the work-related holiday get-together in a world of remote collaboration may not be so grim after all. It just may require a switch in mindset away from an exclusive focus on employers as the organizing principle. Read more »
A handful of new surveys reveal many Americans are planning to work through the holidays, increasing both their vacation starvation and the risk of burnout. The dreary economy can’t help, but are new ways of working, including remote teams and constant connectivity, partly to blame? Read more »
The idea of physically manipulating digital data through gestures, as shown in the movie Minority Report, may seem like sci-fi, but there’s much that applies to the desktop of tomorrow. Oblong’s John Underkoffler envisioned the future at the GigaOM Net:Work event on Thursday. Read more »
Gary Swart, CEO of freelancer sourcing site oDesk took the stage at Net:Work 2011 to talk about how work is changing in the face of remote work trends. He started by pointing to a key competitive determinator all companies seek and must compete for: talent. Read more »
Mobility usually means both more hours and more flexibility for workers, but does it also equal more stress? About a third of connected workers say absolutely yes, while another third say absolutely not. What are the differences between these two groups? Read more »
Next week at Net:Work in San Francisco, tech geeks and forward-thinking business folks will gather to discuss the untethered, agile future of work. But apparently it’s not just these private actors that are cheerleading these changes; several governments are getting behind the idea too. Read more »
