It’s a problem that many remote workers can identify with and one Iyer (who works in Japan with colleagues half a world away) recently spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about in depth. In the lengthy interview he identifies the lack of stillness in the lives of many plugged-in professionals, saying:

Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. Some of my friends go for runs every day. Some do yoga. Some cook. Some meditate. All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.

It’s a problem that Iyer himself solves with pretty extreme means, living in Japan without a TV or a cell phone and sharply rationing his time online. But he’s also conscious that this solution wouldn’t be possible without the technology he so drastically limits. “I couldn’t live in rural Japan on a tourist visa while my family and my bosses are in New York without technology. It’s only e-mails and fax machines before that that allow me to live 6,000 miles from the office,” he says. But as much as he values the tech that gives him location independence, he also deeply values silence. Why?

In my experience, silence is where we come upon depth and spaciousness and intimacy. It’s also where we find things inside ourselves we didn’t know we had inside ourselves. When I’m talking superficially to a friend or answering an e-mail or going through my round of activities, I’m really talking from the surface of my personality. And there’s very little that comes out of me that surprises me. But when I’m in silence and I can collect myself, so to speak, and begin to think slowly down through the depths of myself, it’s an amazing journey into a kind of outer space, except it’s inner space, into these areas that I never would have imagined exist. . . .

I think silence is both the cradle of creativity and the one place where you can see what to do with your noisy, non-silent life. In some way, I’ve always felt that the paradox of any technological revolution is that you need to go offline in order to find wisdom and emotional clarity to make the best use of your online life. Online is an amazing wonder world, but you have to step back from it in order to see how to navigate it. I think that’s where silence helps.

If Iyer’s crisp explanation of the need for stillness jolts you into realizing that you have too little quiet time in your life, but living in the Asian countryside either isn’t possible for you or isn’t your cup of tea, how do you proceed? Iyer notes that there are many ways to bring stillness back to your days and speaks approvingly of some companies’ efforts to give their employees space to find solitude:

When I was visiting the campus at Google, for example, I was impressed to see the meditation rooms and the trampolines and the playpens and the way that the company makes sure its workers have a lot of time free from the office, because that’s where creativity takes place. When I wrote the piece in The New York Times about quiet, I was impressed to hear from one of the leading voices of Silicon Valley who wrote to me and said, many of us here observe an Internet Sabbath. We’re the ones who have helped to give the world the Internet and who’ve helped to expand possibilities with it. But we also know that it’s really important for us to spend a day every week or a couple of days offline to nourish ourselves and to be able to have the vision to see how best to guide the Internet revolution.

I was struck that it was Intel that was the one that experimented with enforcing quiet time, four hours of uninterrupted time every Tuesday for 300 of its workers. It realized that only by turning off the machines could people come up with the ideas that would make Intel a visionary company.

If you’re intrigued, check out the long but interesting interview for more on meditation, multitasking and what, if anything, is wrong with kids these days.

Do you have enough stillness in your life and, if not, how could you get some more?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pierre -M-

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If you have colleagues spread from New Delhi, India to New Haven, Conn., how can you hope to bring everyone together to celebrate the season and build a bit of camaraderie? Beers in the break room are probably out due to logistical constraints, but that doesn’t mean you have to forgo holiday fun entirely, according to a recent post by Wayne Turmel for Management Issues.

For the piece, Turmel talks to Jeff Diana, the chief people officer for HR software firm SuccessFactors, who offers some tips for encouraging celebratory feelings among remote workers.

“If you can’t afford to fly in or buy hotel rooms for remote workers, whether that’s for a holiday party or planning session for the year ahead,” Diana says, “consider including remote workers in team celebrations via social media, video, or other group (or individual) acknowledgement of their contributions.”

He also notes that with many workforces becoming more and more international, holidays throughout the year provide a great opportunity for cultural sharing:

Take advantage of the international holidays throughout the year to educate local and remote employees about holiday customs in other regions. For example: Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, Kwanzaa, Day of the Dead, and many other holidays throughout the year provide excellent opportunities for employees worldwide to share personal anecdotes and professional insights about life in their “neighborhoods.”

It’s a far cheerier suggestion than Stacey Higginbotham’s recent worry that telecommuting across international boundaries will increasingly make work-free holidays a thing of the past, and the ambition to share across cultures to increase inter-team understanding is admirable. But at the same time, there’s something sad about the idea if donning your party hat to sit in front of Skype.

With remote “parties” unlikely to be actually enjoyable, is asking employees to attend simply burdening them with an unwanted and unpleasant additional responsibility during this busy time of year? Would it be better to just offer them extra time or money to show your appreciation and make their season genuinely cheerier?

Alternative suggestions to the tech-enabled virtual shindig are light on the ground, though everyone seems to agree it’s poor form not to make sure remote workers are always invited to activities (even if there is basically no chance they can attend) and everyone should receive the same holiday goodies should any be distributed.

So what about your remote team: Will you be using the holidays as an occasion for team-building festivities, and if so, how?

Image courtesy of Flickr use DeaPeaJay.

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At the GigaOm Net:Work conference on Thursday, Fabio Rosati, President and CEO, of Elance and Trevor Blackwell, the Founder and CEO of Anybots discussed how this future is now. Elance is a consultant-based freelance organization and its resources use Anybots to virtually be on-site for customers. “Our workers commute two to three thousand miles to work in seconds,” Rosati said.

These “white collar” robots, controlled by a freelancer, can handle front lobby greetings, business deliveries and more. Because the human workforce doesn’t work 24 hours a day — and robots generally can — Anybots can be used by multiple people at different times, allowing for economies of scale. Blackwell mentioned this as the “Zipcar approach” as idle robots could be tapped into as needed.

But using robots to crowdsource work isn’t just about saving money or spreading out the workload: Even a virtual presence may be more important than a caller in a conference.

Panel moderator, Thomas Vander Wal, Principal and Sr. Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions and, Analyst, GigaOM Pro, recalled a recent encounter with an Anybot in the office. “I was on the phone,” he said, “and an Anybot was in the room, as were other people. I was so focused on the robot and people that I forgot we had someone on the phone.”

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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We’ve blogged about concerns that hyperconnected remote workers are more prone to workaholism and burnout before, discussing whether the tendency of plugged-in pros to struggle to define work-life boundaries is an artifact of the type of people who choose this lifestyle or an issue that’s actually caused by all of our gadgets. But whatever the cause of the problem, it’s apparently widespread.

A survey of 1,599 IT pros for the seventh edition of the Australian Computer Society’s Employment Survey found that techies from down under are working increasingly long hours.

• The number of IT pros working more than 40 hours a week rose from 65 percent in 2009 to nearly three-quarters this year (74.9 percent today).
• Of those surveyed, 21.3 percent reported working 50 or more hours per week compared with just over 10 percent in 2009.

Of course, some of this increase in working hours could be in response to fears about job insecurity brought on by the global financial crisis (though Australia has weathered the economic storm better than most). But speakers from the industry at Ne(x)twork, an Australian conference organized by Fuji Xerox to explore the future of work, blamed our increasing addiction to connectivity.

Scott Mason, the director of products, marketing and strategy for Optus Business, hoped for “a bit of a backlash. We are so ‘on’ all the time,” according to Beverley Head on ITWire. “Stressing this was a personal rather than Optus viewpoint Mr Mason said that in the future people might come to question some of the health impacts of expecting employees to be available for work around the clock,” she writes.

“There may be a time when we all have to have some specific downtime,” Head reports Mason remarking. And Beth Winchester, the executive general manager of human resources at Fuji Xerox, apparently agreed, saying, “I have more requests about how to help stop people working than to start working.”

And it’s not just Aussies who are apparently suffering from connectivity-induced workaholism. Together flexible-office company Regus and Mindmetre recently asked 12,000 businesspeople from around the world about their work hours and health, concluding in the process that stress from overwork is “the twenty-first century Black Death,” particularly for remote workers. And they have the numbers to back it up:

• Fifty-nine percent of remote workers take work home with them over three times a week, compared with only 26 percent of fixed-office workers.
• Forty-one percent of remote workers work a 50-hour week, compared with 41 percent of fixed-office workers.
• Fourteen percent of remote workers say their average working day is eleven hours or longer.

Do you think a similar survey focused on American workers would find plugged-in pros working equally long hours in this part of the world?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Orin Zebest

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The report highlights the shifting values of young workers who grew up surrounded by social media and connected devices. Now, wanting these perks and getting them are two different things but the report shows the growing expectations of this generation and what employers should think about providing if they want to recruit top workers coming out of college. They’re not really perks to this generation but increasingly what they expect when they go to work.

For its second report, Cisco surveyed 2,800 workers under 30 and college students about to enter the work force in 14 countries. Here are some of the interesting findings:

• One in three respondents (33 percent) said that they would prioritize social media freedom, device flexibility, and work mobility over salary in accepting a job offer.
• 40 percent of college students and 45 percent of young employees said they would accept lower pay if they get more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility as opposed to a higher pay with less flexibility.
• 56 percent of college students said that if they encountered a company that banned access to social media, they would either not accept a job offer or would join and find a way  to circumvent corporate policy. One in four overall (24 percent) said social media access would be a key factor in accepting a job.
• 81 percent of college students want to choose the device for their job. They want to either receive budgeted funds to buy their own work device or bring in a personal device in addition to a standard company-issued machine. And 68 percent of employees believe their companies should allow them to access social media and personal sites with their work-issued devices.
• 77 percent of employees have multiple devices, such as a laptop and a smartphone or multiple phones and computers and one in three employees globally (33 percent) uses at least three devices for work. Half of all respondents (49 percent) said they would rather lose their wallet or purse than their smartphone or mobile device.
• 29 percent of college students surveyed feel that once they begin working, it will be their right, not just a privilege, to be able to work remotely with a flexible schedule. In fact 70 percent of college students and 69 percent of employees believe it is unnecessary to be in the office regularly, with the exception of important meetings. One in four students feel their productivity would increase if they could work from home or remotely.
•  Currently, 57 percent of employees can connect to their corporate network from some  remote locations, but only 28 percent can do so at anytime, from any location. Two in five (43 percent) consider it a critical function of their job to be able to connect to the network from any location at any time.

Now, again this is a long list of expectations for employees who, of course, will want whatever they can get. But savvy IT and HR professionals may want to take note of what this next generation expects in the office. Sheila Jordan, Cisco’s VP of Communication and
Collaboration IT, said these young workers and college students prize their devices and social networks and increasingly don’t distinguish between their personal and work worlds.

Those expectations will force IT officials to look at their infrastructure and device policies and require some companies to rethink the metrics of how they measure employee productivity and effectiveness, Jordan said. Companies don’t have to offer everything to all employees but they should think about offering more choice in a way that minimizes risk, said Jordan.  This is just a reflection of the consumerization of IT and how consumer trends are affecting the expectations of workers.

“What happens in the consumer space is happening in the enterprise. We’re seeing this way of communicating and collaborating and that expectation is coming to work. I think those expectations already exist, it’s a matter of how fast IT can accommodate them while meeting needs and minimizing risk,” Jordan said.

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The good news is that many companies are now offering in-office avatars or embodied social proxies (ESPs). Basically robots that can be remotely controlled, the ESPs are a substitute for a remote worker being in the same building as the rest of the team. The ESP usually has a speaker, video screen, microphone, and camera, which allows real-time audio and video to be sent and received by both the satellite and the hub. It’s like having your own robotic avatar roaming around the office building.

We’ve previously covered these ESPs or in-office avatars here at WWD, specifically mentioning Anybots – which costs $15,000 per unit. Similar products include VGo ($5,995 for the unit and a $1,195 annual service fee) and the Texai Remote Presence System (no pricing information yet).

The costs of these in-office proxies tends to make one skeptical about whether the value they provide is worth it. Will companies get a return on their investment? And what benefits can we expect from using these things?

What ESPs can do for remote workers and hub teams

According to researchers from Microsoft Research and the University of California, Irvine, the continuous presence of the proxies in each team improved their social connections as well as their mutual support in work activities. The lone remote workers were easily available to participate more fully in meetings and impromptu discussions. This lowered uncertainty among colleagues and gave them a closer sense of proximity.

Other studies support this, including this recent study published by ACM Press. Researchers Min Kyung Lee and Leila Takayama noted that even though teams previously used phone and video conferencing, these proved to be too limiting because the remote workers were often left out of meetings and decision-making. With the ESP, “[...] remotely controlled mobility enabled remote workers to live and work with local coworkers almost as if they were physically there.”

The informal and spontaneous interactions probably contributed a lot to this sense of proximity. Based on the interviews with the participants, impromptu work meetings, worker availability, and planned social interactions were the top three activities that showed the most improvement. Impromptu meetings, which were usually for getting answers or sharing ideas, mostly took place in hallways and other shared spaces. This kind of spontaneity would be almost impossible with web-based conferencing, email, or chat, since workers would have to return to their workstations to conduct these types of meetings.

The researchers note that these spur-of-the-moment meetings could show commitment and build stronger social connections among geographically distributed workers.

Apart from more nuanced real-time interactions, ESPs also provided the most value during creative design tasks. According to the Microsoft Research and Univeristy of California paper, “Teams involved in creative design activities perceived a greater use value of ESPs, as they allowed the satellite members to more fully participate in the design process, inside and outside meetings.” Remote workers and on-location teams could easily participate in fast-paced design discussions. It was also much easier for both parties to communicate ideas visually via gestures, diagrams, and whiteboards.

The challenges of using ESPs

Apart from cost, there are a few disadvantages or inconveniences to using ESPs.

The first of these is the remote worker’s difficulty simply driving the ESP. Though this is learned over time, driving was usually done simultaneously with other tasks such as conversation or presentation. In the study conducted by Lee and Takayama, sometimes it was more inconvenient to use the proxies for meetings because they had to drive it to the meeting room. Though driving in itself wasn’t difficult, it consumed a lot of time. Remote workers then had a tendency to be late for meetings.

Experiencing network delays also proved to be challenging. When the internet connection is slow or unreliable, the delays made it hard to achieve the impromptu and nuanced discussions that the ESPs were supposed to provide.

There were also cases when the quality of the machine had an impact on the perceived quality of the worker. When, unbeknownst to the remote worker, the machine was too loud, colleagues perceived the worker himself as loud and disruptive to the workplace.

New etiquette rules were also needed to foster smoother interactions between remote workers and hub teams. For example, it was sometimes seen as a violation of personal space when colleagues changed the volume, orientation, or location of an ESP without asking the remote worker’s permission. Co-located teams, on the other hand, found it rude whenever remote workers did not drive their ESP away at the end of a conversation — even if they were no longer paying attention to whatever went on around their ESPs.

Who benefits the most?

Based on the studies and tests done on ESPs so far, it seems that these devices are best used when the company setup includes a hub office where most workers are co-located, while having only very few remote workers. Fast and reliable Internet connections should also be available to both the hub office and the remote workers — without it, your team won’t experience the benefit of richer real-time interactions.

It’s clear that ESPs have their benefits, but whether these benefits are worth it would depend on how your team works and the kind of work that you do.

Do you think ESPs would be useful in your company? Why or why not?

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Anybots.

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