Do their expectations line up with those of freelancers and entrepreneurs? Do they get as much out of the coworking experience? The Second Global Coworking Survey aimed to answer these questions, with the results published recently in DeskMag.

The findings confirm that the number of employees working out of coworking spaces is steadily increasingly, currently making up about a third of coworking membership in the U.S. And it turns out these corporate coworkers come to their spaces with different problems and experience group working differently. Though all groups agree about some fundamentals – freelancers, entrepreneurs and employees are all satisfied with coworking at the same high rates, the survey found.

“Social networks are expanded, isolation is reduced and productivity increased – if not quite as markedly as the other two groups,” writes Carsten Foertsch of employee members in DeskMag. Everyone is satisfied and more plugged in, but the three groups focus on slightly different benefits of this sociability with entrepreneurs understandably more excited about the potential for interdisciplinary work, while freelancers, again unsurprisingly, see the highest gains in productivity.

What’s most the most important benefit for employees? This answer might comes as more of a shock. Despite usually having years of experience sharing offices with colleagues behind them, employees actually enjoy the social benefits of coworking more than other types of members. “Somewhat surprisingly, employees most often appreciate being a member of a community,” Foertsch reports. This is so even though they’re the least participatory members, making the least use of coworking space events.

Is there anything corporate types don’t like about coworking? The noise, apparently. “Volume… is an issue – with almost one in three bothered by the noise levels of the new workplace,” according to Foertsch, though unlike other types of coworkers, employees are content with spaces only opening during regular business hours.

All in all the results indicate that coworking is beneficial to corporate remote workers (though implying less than flattering things about the social vibe at most offices in the process) and offer no reason these three groups can’t play well together going forward. Even if corporate types aren’t the most actively engaged coworkers and are looking for slightly quieter facilities, it seems they’re fundamentally after the same things as independents and entrepreneurs.

Coworking space members, do all three groups agree on what they want from your coworking space?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kheel Center, Cornell University.

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Onboarding any employee into a company can be tricky, and as we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, getting new virtual employees up to speed is even trickier. In fact, the process has so many potential pitfalls that some experts on remote work recommend you skip it entirely, opting instead to train your remote workers face-to-face.

Speaking to MoneyWatch’s Laura Vanderkam recently, Mom Corps CEO Allison O’Kelly suggested managers bring new hires that will be working at a distance into the office for the first week or two:

Train in person. If you’re hiring someone into a virtual position, awesome. You can find a great person without having to pay moving expenses! But “training is the most difficult part,” says O’Kelly. You have to explain exactly what it is the person needs to do, as well as your culture. “We have had some people who we have tried to train virtually and it really is difficult,” O’Kelly says. The solution? Spend time together. O’Kelly is in Pennsylvania, and recently hired a CFO in Atlanta who spent two different weeks with her. Spread out over several weeks, those two weeks have been “invaluable,” she says.

Donna Wells, CEO of online company Mindflash, concurred with this position last year on Mashable, suggesting managers should:

Plan to have new remote teammates spend their first days or weeks at HQ. As good as collaboration tools are, they are not effective in building the personal relationships and communication shortcuts that come very quickly face-to-face. For the employee, it’s a chance to feel a strong sense of belonging and to establish a positive bond with the boss and whole team. For managers, it’s an opportunity to convey the company culture, to set expectations and start building the trust you’ll need later on to hit mutual goals.

Even here on WebWorkerDaily where we’re usually focused on figuring out how to do nearly everything better at a distance, my colleague Darrell Etherington has conceded that when done virtually, “training is tricky. Orientation for new remote workers, especially if they’re new to the job or company and not just making the shift from being an in-office employee, can be very difficult.” Though there are plenty of tech tools to ease the stresses of training remote workers and keep them closely connected to the office during those crucial first weeks if a trip in to get to know the team is impossible.

In your experience is trying to train at a distance a hopeless undertaking or can it be done well?

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He said this new era is forcing employees, employers and the government to confront a new reality as solo workers become the norm.

“These individuals — whether crowd-sourced or providing tactical solutions or finding their first project on a marketplace or providing strategic advice to client — these are the pioneers of the next era,” Zaino said at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference.

He said contrary to popular belief, most of the current independent workers (55 percent) choose this route instead of being forced into temporary work. And he said 80 percent of these workers claim they don’t want to go back. And 28 million traditionally employed workers said they want to go independent in the next two years. That might be because 50 percent of traditional workers say they are unhappy with their work situations.

Many independents are not average workers at least in their own eyes. Seven out of ten say they are experts in their field and have advanced skills and education. Zain said companies are turning to these workers not as a low-cost solution but as hired guns who can come in and fix specific problems.

There are still a lot of challenges ahead as this new era takes shape. Employers need to find ways to dole out more work to these independents. And they need to rethink how they look at work, as more of discrete projects to be assigned. And employees need to get used to habit of scrapping for new jobs and dealing without health care and other safety net provisions. Zaino said the government also has to figure out how to deal with a shift in independent workers when it comes to tax income and how to categorize these employees.

There’s still a lot that needs to happen, but this will be the new norm as technology unshackles workers and gives them the opportunity to work from anywhere and be open to jobs from all kinds of employers.

“We’re pretty confident this is new way of work; this independent way of work is here to stay,” Zaino said.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

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For many of us, social media helps to fill this gap. Not all of your colleagues are going to be on Twitter, Facebook or other social websites, but hopefully, you can at least keep up with a few of them. This can also be a sensitive topic for many people, so don’t be offended if some of your co-workers don’t accept your friend requests.

I know a few people who carefully separate their work and personal lives and aren’t interested in mingling them. One person I know has a “secret” blog where he talks about his family using only family member’s initials to respect their privacy, and he keeps this completely separate from his Twitter account and other professional blogs. Other people pick one social website, like Facebook, for personal activities and others, like Twitter or LinkedIn, for communicating about work. Many of us don’t make these distinctions, but it is important to respect your colleagues’ choices.

It can be difficult to keep up with everyone, so it can help to have ways to keep up with your co-workers to avoid losing their updates in the wave of updates from other friends. Here are a couple of tips:

Friend Lists in Facebook

Friend lists in Facebook perform two very useful functions. First, they can allow you to filter the information you see in your news feed based on how you’ve grouped your friends into lists. For example, you could have a work list that you can check separately to see what your colleagues have been doing. A quick check in the morning and another at lunch would help you keep up with people at work while minimizing the time you spend on it.

The other way to use lists is to control privacy, so for those of you who want to maintain privacy while also connecting with co-workers on Facebook, you can still limit how much information they see. If you spend a lot of time partying with friends or to respect the privacy of your children, you might consider hiding photos from your coworkers as one example.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are another good way to keep up with work friends, especially since many of the commonly used Twitter clients have built-in support for the feature, allowing you to use lists separately in columns or other views. I know some people who keep separate lists for professional and personal contacts, which is a good way to keep the streams distinct.

In my case, most of my friends work in the technology industry, so I don’t separate based on work vs. personal friends. However, I do keep a separate list of family and close friends where I want to read every tweet. I also have a short list of people that I like to follow more closely because what they say is almost always interesting and relevant for me, and I try to read as much as I can from them.

The best thing about this approach is that you can expand it to include leaders in your industry or people in similar jobs at other companies, broadening your virtual water cooler out beyond your immediate co-workers.

How do you keep up with your colleagues when you work remotely?

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I’m now back to working at home full-time for the rest of the summer, and I’m thinking back to some tips and tricks that I’ve used in past years to enjoy the summer weather while maintaining my productivity. There are plenty of ways that we can enjoy some of that nice weather while still working hard; here are a few of my favorites:

Open Those Curtains

I’ll admit it, I tend to get a little focused on the computer while forgetting that the outside world even exists, so I’ve been trying to get in the habit of opening the curtains when I first get up. Even if I’m not outside, I can at least enjoy some of what summer has to offer: Sunshine, flowers and other plants, and the occasional butterfly or hummingbird. You won’t want the sun shining right on your monitor, so rearrange the office a little if you need to, but make sure that you can at least see what summer has to offer!

Hack Your Hours

I’m a big fan of being creative about when I work as long as I get my work done. Making a small adjustment to your hours can make a big difference in how much time you can spend enjoying the summer! I usually start my day early, around 6AM. This lets me get quite a bit of work done before other people start working, but it also lets me take a slightly early and longer lunch break. By the time 11AM rolls around, I’m usually ready for a little break, and there is nothing quite like going for a run in the sunshine to get those creative juices flowing again. OK, not everyone enjoys running, but a nice little walk through your neighborhood or having lunch outside would work just as well. This doesn’t mean that you have to get up early to enjoy the summer, but think about the hours you normally work and see if it makes sense to tweak them a little over the summer.

Deck or Porch Offices

I am lucky to have a nice deck outside with morning sun and afternoon shade where I can work while enjoying the weather. There are a few tricks to making a deck or porch office work for you, even if you only use it for an hour a day. I have pretty good battery life on my laptop, but I do have an outlet and an outdoor extension cord just in case I want to spend a little more time outside or charge my phone while I work. As much as I love working outside, the laptop glare can make working in the sunshine an unpleasant experience, so last year I invested in a table with an umbrella to give me a little additional shade for when I want to work outside in the morning. A comfortable chair can also make a big difference, and I admit that I haven’t quite got that part right. A few cushions or better deck chairs would probably let me work outside for longer periods of time. There are some more tips for using a laptop outside here.

Coffee Shops With Patios

Not everyone lives in a place with a deck or porch, but anyone can scope out the neighborhood patios at places with free WiFi. Save those dark coffee shops for the winter, and find a few cafes with better access to the sun for your summer work. There are a couple of local coffee shops and restaurants in my neighborhood with nice patios where you can work outside while also getting a change of scenery. Some of them even have outdoor power outlets, so bringing a compact extension cord can be helpful if you want to work for an afternoon. Working on a patio can be even more fun if you get a few people together for some coworking sessions or schedule some of your meetings for outdoor locations.

What are your favorite tips for staying productive while finding ways to enjoy the summer?

Photo by Flickr user Martino Franchi used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

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Despite (or maybe because of) these adjustments to my work day, I manage to meet or exceed the expectations for my job. My employer is flexible about when I work as long as I get the job done, and I occasionally pull some late nights, early mornings or do work on the weekend to make sure that I’m taking care of the community that I manage.

All of this flexibility works for me, and it looks like I’m not alone. According to a recent study by a group of researchers at Brigham Young University, people who telecommute balance work and family life better than those who work in an office, but only when flextime is also part of the plan. These researchers analyzed data from more than 24,000 IBM employees from 75 countries to find that telecommuters using flextime could work 57 hours per week before work starts to interfere with their personal lives, while the number was a paltry 38 hours per week for traditional office workers.

This isn’t just an IBM phenomenon, either. About a year ago, I looked at a Cisco study of its telecommuting employees that found:

69 percent of the telecommuting employees see increased productivity.

67 percent said that their work quality improved.

80 percent had an improved quality of life.

One of the biggest surprises for Cisco was that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. This isn’t really surprising to me as I spend more time working when I telecommute. For one thing, I shave over 1.5 hours of driving time out of my daily schedule. I also tend to start work as soon as I get up around 6am and then take a little break later in the day to go for a quick run, take a shower and put on something other than my pajamas. This lets me get a jump on the work day and take a break when I need it, thus increasing my productivity while allowing me to be flexible with my time.

Smart companies should be taking a serious look at web working as a way to improve employee productivity while saving money that they would spending on extra office space. By being creative and flexible about working arrangements, both companies and employees can benefit.

How do you benefit from telecommuting and flextime without sacrificing productivity?

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In my case, I work for a large corporation with some days in the office and other days working at home, but I’ve also done this job while working full-time as a remote employee. As a matter of fact, I’m about to shift back to working from home full-time for three months while our office building is remodeled. While I’ll be discussing full-time community management work in this post, it’s also a great gig for freelancers or consultants.

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about being a community manager here on WebWorkerDaily, but it’s been a while since I wrote about community manager careers, so I thought that it was time for a refresh. I did a whole series of posts over a year ago with details about the job, what it takes to be successful, what we do and the dark side of community management. Most or all of that content is still relevant, so I recommend going back and reading that series if you are new to the blog or if you just want a refresher.

Each online community uses slightly different tools, including established environments based in IRC and mailing lists, forums, wikis, complete social networks and more. Because the community that I manage is fairly large with several different audiences, we use a wide variety of tools. Software developer interactions take place mostly on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and code repositories; users of the software interact mostly in the forums; we have a wiki for documentation; and we use a few other miscellaneous tools. Regardless of the tools used, I can access and manage the community whether I am in the office, at home or in a coffee shop. This gives me the flexibility to manage the community regardless of where I am physically located.

Community management is a hot career right now, and quite a few companies are looking for community managers or related positions (social media managers, moderators, etc.) Companies like Zappos, Samsung and Wieden + Kennedy have recently hired community managers while other companies like Wikia, EMC and Google are actively looking for people to fill online community positions. I’ve even had several people email me in the past couple of weeks asking me if I knew any experienced community managers who might be interested in their positions.

The best community managers are the ones with several years of experience under their belt and the scars to prove that they’ve been around for long enough to have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, but we all have to start somewhere. Community management isn’t one of those traditional careers where you get a degree and start work in your chosen field. Most good community managers have a diverse background with good communication skills, organization or project management background, and some specialized experience and a passion for the type of community being managed (hardcore gamers managing gaming communities; people with technical backgrounds managing developer communities, etc.) In fact, many of us transitioned into online community roles out of other related careers.

I occasionally speak to groups of university students about community management careers. If you want more information about the job requirements, salaries, job satisfaction and more, you might also be interested in this presentation about community manager careers that I delivered about a month ago at two local universities.

What are some other interesting careers for remote web workers?

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Over the last few years I’ve hired dozens of freelancers and remote workers to help complete all sorts of projects for BigCommerce. In this article, I’ll share seven tips for managing a remote workforce for maximum productivity, efficiency and results.

1. Communicate what you expect in writing. Once you’ve hired someone, make sure they understand the scope of the project they’ll be working on — and put as much detail as possible in writing. For example, if you want them to create a professional voice over, make sure you write the script for them, document how the voice-over will be used and the tone you’re looking for, and even provide a link to an exmple video online so they understand exactly what you’re looking for.
2. Provide a bonus when work is completed on time or early. This can work well for designers and other creative roles. A simple example is offering an extra 10 percent if the project is completed one day early, an extra 20 percent if it’s completed two days early, etc. This simple idea can lead to a quicker turn-around time while maintaining quality.
3. Have a five-minute call/video chat at the beginning of the day. If your project will take weeks or months to complete, then you need to make sure your remote team stays on track and is heading in the right direction. Similar to a daily stand-up meeting in an teams using Agile methodologies, a quick five-minute call or video chat on Skype every morning is a great way to hear progress updates from your team, as well as identify roadblocks that might get in the way of completing your project.
4. Address problems immediately. It’s easy for a problem to bring remote workers to a halt, so make sure you do whatever it takes to help them work around or solve the problem. In addition to having a quick daily meeting, encourage your workers to contact you immediately if they need help or have questions. You can even give them ways to get input from other members of your remote team so they can solve problems together.
5. Set a predictable working schedule. If it’s applicable to your project, set a predictable working schedule to help your remote workers feel as though they’re “at work” during a specific time, such as from 9am to 5pm on weekdays even though they’re working from home — this can lead to better productivity and also lets you know when you can reach your workers.  Some people work more effectively between certain hours, so you might want to ask each member of your remote team when they feel they do the best work, and set the schedule accordingly.
6. Break larger projects up into date-based milestones. Breaking a large project down into smaller, date-based milestones will help keep everyone on track and alert you to any issues before they become insurmountable. For example, break down a three-month web development project into two-week milestones, with a team check-in at each juncture.  This will enable you to easily track and measure for success, and will help your remote team work more efficiently as well.
7. Provide and track key performance indicators. If you manage your in-office team using key performance indicators (KPIs), why not do the same for your remote team? Before you assign the project, come up with a few (say, three to five) KPIs you can use to track their success on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  For example, if you’re remotely managing a web designer, and their job is to create a 20-page website, a couple of your KPIs might be number of milestones met on time and number of web pages created per week.

If you’ve managed a remote team with success in the past, I’d love to hear your tips as well.

Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.

Photo courtesy Flickr user cogdogblog, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

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Here are a few tips for meeting organizers to help make sure that they have a great meeting over the phone (with “phone” being loosely defined here to include Skype and other online real-time audio):

1. Give people plenty of notice for the meeting, if possible. Ideally, try to schedule your phone meetings with plenty of advance notice to make sure that people have time to prepare. I know this isn’t always possible, but a little planning ahead of time can really help. Keep in mind that what seems like two days’ notice to you might be considerably less for international participants who won’t see your request until their morning, which could mean they have considerably less time to prepare.
2. Keep time zones in mind. In cases where people are spread out across time zones, taking the time to find out where people are physically located so that you can pick a time that is most convenient will help your attendees be alert and prepared for the meeting. With phone numbers becoming less tied to your location, don’t assume that you know where people are based on a phone number. Take the time to ask where they are and find out if they have a preferred meeting time. For example, I work with one person in Finland who prefers 10pm calls to 5pm calls, so he can have meetings after his kids are in bed.
3. Send a written agenda and materials out via email (or post them online) when you schedule the meeting, or no later than 24-48 hours before the meeting, when possible. This gives people plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, especially for people who primarily speak other languages. Giving people who are less fluent in your language a little extra time to assimilate the information can make a big difference in their level of participation. Don’t forget to include the phone number or other logistics for the meeting with local dial-in numbers in other countries, if they’re available.
4. Send a reminder about an hour before the meeting with any last minute updates. This reminder gives people one last chance to prepare for the meeting and can help forgetful participants, especially those for whom the meeting is at a non-traditional time.
5. As people join the meeting, make sure that they announce themselves so that you know who is attending the call. A quick prompt like, “welcome, who just joined us?” can help people know that they should announce themselves. I do this even for Skype calls where you can see who joined because it gives you time to make audio adjustments for anyone who can’t be heard clearly.
6. Double-check that everyone has all of the materials for the meeting. Start the meeting with some introductions (if needed) and a quick review of the agenda and what you plan to cover. This gives you a final check that people know how the meeting will be conducted, and you can make sure that they have all of their materials before the meeting.
7. Consider using online meeting tools. There are many tools that can be used in real-time to manage the content during the meeting and make sure that people are all looking at the same pages of the materials (GoToMeeting, for example). You should make sure that the solution you pick will work for most people given their bandwidth rates and system configuration. For example, if you have some people running on Macs, don’t pick a tool that only works on Windows. I always consider this an optional step for international meetings, especially if you have people located in countries where maintaining a stable Internet connect can be a challenge for people calling in from home outside of the work day. Using these tools doesn’t replace the need to send materials out in advance, since you want to give people time to assimilate the information and have a copy as a backup in case they can’t get connected during the meeting.

Meetings held over the phone where you can’t see the other people are challenging enough, but add international participants, time zones and language challenges into the mix, and you can end up with a seriously unproductive meeting. Taking the time to prepare and keeping a few of these tips in mind can help your meeting go much more smoothly.

What are your tips for making sure that your international phone meetings are successful and productive?

Photo by Flickr user StephenMitchell used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.