Potential problems are, obviously, numerous, as a first person narration of a dual remote worker marriage in Marie Claire illustrates. With sections written by both members of a telecommuting couple, the piece enumerates the many challenges of a spouse joining his or her hubby in home working. Chris Norris, the first member of the couple to go remote, describes what it was like to suddenly have his wife, Ellen Carpenter, around the house after she was laid off and started working freelance. He chooses a frankly homicidal reference:

For six months now, my wife and I, both writers, have been working at home together in our one-bedroom apartment. If the precariousness of this situation isn’t obvious, I refer you to the best film ever about shared domestic work space: The Shining. There’s Jack Nicholson’s would-be author, self-exiled in an empty hotel. Typewriter clacking, he squints into the page—limning, seeking, probing, his mind finally edging up against that drifting, vaporous thought, when … “Hi, Hon!” chirps googly-eyed Shelley Duvall. “Get a lot written today?” The ax murders that follow are excessive, I grant you, but incomprehensible? I don’t judge.

True, our two-desk living room is no Overlook Hotel — even if it is a feng-shui horror show — and Ellen respects its sanctity. But I do feel like a crucial curtain has been pulled back. In our courtship phase, when she worked at an office, she would often swing by my place after work and find me lounging on the couch in a rumpled Agnès B. shirt (just put on), an open book on the table (unread), and another finished project on the screen. “Yep,” I’d say. “This is where the magic happens.” Now she knows what the magic actually looks like.

For her part, Carpenter didn’t suffer from a loss of privacy or murderous hallucinations but from the imposition of domestic expectations on her professional time. The couple set ground rules about interrupting each other when she started working from home, she writes, agreeing that,

From 10 to 6, Monday through Friday, we’d be colleagues. But very quickly, I took on other roles as well. Because Chris was used to my only being home in the evenings (making dinner) or on the weekends (making lunch, Swiffering the floor), certain primal, gender-specific assumptions were activated. Coworker? Try personal chef, maid, cheerleader, dog walker, masseuse, and make-out partner — on call, 24/7. In my attempt to adapt to his routine, I unconsciously stepped into some kind of ’50s, June Cleaver stereotype. The first week, I offered to make lunch. The next, I volunteered to read an article he had just finished and to give him feedback prior to its submission — that is, to tell him it’s great. The week after that, I assumed laundry duties.

Slowly but surely, all this wrought a learned helplessness I still can’t quite believe. My husband was once a strong, independent man who’d return from a six-mile run with a bouquet of my beloved dahlias. Now he can’t crack open a can of Progresso.

By the end of the Marie Claire article, you’re really, really rooting for Carpenter to get another office-based job. Are things always so grim for couples that work from home together? A recent two-part interview of another remote working couple on blog How to Work From Home offers more grounds for hope. Again, the wife, coach Maria Varallo, struggles more to separate the domestic and the professional. “There are times I find it too much being mom and wife whilst being a professional all at once,” she says. But in this case, having a partner working at home seems to have affected the husband in the opposite way it did Norris. Rather than reverting to 1950s-era stereotypes, Varallo’s husband Kris, a database administrator, has actually become more aware of all the effort that goes into running a family.

“The great thing about working from home is Kris is far more sensitive to what needs doing. I especially have noticed over the years as my work has grown and become more established how the house becomes very relaxed,” Varallo says. “If I put on the washing in the morning he’ll put it out if I’m out, he is aware and I think that’s because he also works from home.”

So how do you get a situation more like Varallo’s and less like Carpenter’s? Steve Cooper, co-founder of Hitched, an online magazine for married couples, recently offered some tips to Forbes. Citing a recent letter his magazine received from a woman with a problem (e.g. husband) much like Carpenter’s as inspiration, Cooper offers these suggestions:

Define Your Workspace. Having a space of your own is extremely important, even if one of you has to work from the kitchen table. If possible, set up shop in two separate rooms on opposite sides of your home.

Create Office Hours. If you only have one room that can work comfortably as a home office, [owner of The Protocol School of Texas Diane] Gottsman says you might trade use of that room by creating work hours.

Communication. Dialogue with each other is paramount. “You have to be able to talk to each other and really be honest without becoming defensive,” says Gottsman. Have a conversation where you explain what you need, when you need it and how these ground rules need to be followed going forward.

Dealing with the Family. Your boundaries should be very, very clear. “We want to feel like what we’re doing is of value and that our spouse also values us,” says Gottsman. “It may not seem as important, but if we’re doing it, it is important.” Your family needs to know they cannot walk in to your office and interrupt.

Check out the full article for more detailed advice. Author Jenna McCarthy has also offered tips to TheMogulMom, including, “if you have the occasional need to check in with your spouse throughout the day, you can save a ton of time by setting up an IM account.” As well as, “be mysterious…. wives tend to way overshare when it comes to the minutia of their lives. Your dude doesn’t need (or want) to hear a play-by-play of your day.” Though one wonders if husbands are really immune from long-winded explanations of their professional trials and tribulations (personal experiences says no), this last tip makes sense if applied to both genders.

Has working at home with your partner changed the gender dynamics between you, i.e. is one person taking on a more or less traditional role around the house?

Image courtesy of Flickr user S. Diddy. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Since its launch last September women’s career advice site The Daily Muse has been run  by a largely remote team. However, the company recently opted for a change, moving together into San Francisco coworking space StartupHQ. Rather than growing out of coworking, this is one startups that’s growing into one, and in a recent post for Forbes, the Daily Muse teams explain why, for them, coworking beats a remote arrangement. Besides a swankier kitchen and more opportunities for bonding, they explain that their new home base provides significant advantages:

You Cut Down on Email (a Lot). I love email as much as the next woman does, but sometimes it can get a little out of hand. I never realized how much email traffic was being generated just keeping people in the loop, until I could look up and share a thought or idea with the team instead of busting out my laptop. It’s also been easier to keep the whole team involved in projects (or at least aware of them) when we’re all in the same space.

Instant Sales Leads. We work in a space with dozens of other companies. By meeting them and learning about their products, we’ve started to do business with many of them. In some cases, we’ve become their clients (we now use Xero, a cloud accounting solution), and in others, our deskmates have wanted to work with us. If you offer services to other companies, co-working can be a great source of sales leads, and you really can’t beat in-person customer service over coffee.

New Ideas. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to brainstorm. But that’s a lot harder to do alone. Being around my team means that we can riff of each other’s ideas and generate new, and often better, ones. Co-working has allowed us to have more serendipitous moments, and to better integrate sales, marketing, and editorial initiatives.

The debate around whether remote set-ups and coworking spaces work well for startups at different stages in their growth will likely rage on (here’s more from the pro remote camp, and here’s more from the anti if you want to catch up), as it seems that different companies have strong and opposed positions on the matter.

Do you think the ideal set up for a startup is simply down to the preferences and locations of the team, or can you say categorically that remote, co-located or coworking is best? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user {Guerrilla Future | Jason Tester}. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the VC Industry Upheaval Means For Startups
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches

Forget preconceptions of triple copy service tickets and greasy parts rolling around the back of disorganized vans, the Madison, Ohio-based appliance repair company is setting an example in a relatively old-fashioned industry, modeling how more sectors than you might imagine can take advantage of fast connections, cloud computing and a little ingenuity to streamline their businesses.

Talent

Back in 2008, Fred’s Appliance was in trouble. “By January of 2009, we experienced our first layoffs ever,” Adam Butcher, the owner of Fred’s explained in an interview. “The first quarter of that year, we really got ourselves in gear to get paperless.”

The company made some big changes. Rather than have technicians report into the office once a day to pick up their assignments, Fred’s instituted a totally virtual system that has techs skipping the office and heading straight out to customers. “It saves a ton of time, offers better customer service and, of course, it’s a huge cost savings to the company not having the technicians report to a base location each day,” says Butcher, who also notes that the switch saves in fuel costs and wear and tear on vehicles.

Not only did the technicians work more efficiently but so did the small remaining back office staff. “I don’t necessarily want to promote technology to axe jobs, but it kind of worked that way for us. We’re running just about the same amount of service calls that we were prior to 2008 and we have about three less office people,” says Butcher. “We have ten technicians and not including me there are three office people. You’ll find across our industry, it’s usually about a one-to-two ratio. I think we could add two more techs without adding more office staff.”

Tools 

So how does Butcher’s team pull this off? A handful of tech tools are key. “We use Google Apps for email, chat and calendar. We also use Vocalocity, which is our phone system. It’s cloud-hosted, which allows us to take our handsets anywhere. OfficeDrop was one of our last legs in becoming truly paperless. Anybody that we’re doing business with, we’re paperless with them if possible, but not all companies are at that level yet, so they are mailing us items that are important. Instead of sticking them in a file cabinet, we scan them and upload them right to OfficeDrop’s cloud,” Butcher says.

Techs in the field all carry stripped down netbooks with touch screen capabilities. Industry specific proprietary software sends their assignments straight to these laptops. “It’s a little piece of software. It’s got a custom drawn map and a job roster list, and we literally drag and drop the service calls. Once the day of the route comes, the technician turns on his laptop and he’s running a little utility that automatically pulls those service calls right in,” Butcher explains. “Through that utility they can capture all the information they need – what they did, model, serial number and they also can bring up a ticket image on the screen. The customer can sign right on the screen. It’s very nifty.”

Dropbox is the final piece of the puzzle. “The technician in the field can document certain things using pictures — a portrait of the unit to show its condition and maybe any pre-existing damage in the house. It also helps with field support. Say you have a newer guy out on the road and he’s looking at a unit he’s not familiar with. He’s able to snap a picture of that and then any supervisor can look at that picture and assist him,” Butcher says.

Tips

The tech know-how needed to patch this system of tools together isn’t vast, but it’s more than many family-owned service companies have on hand, according to Butcher, who is passionate about getting more firms in his industry to work virtually. “When it comes to the technology, for the actual employees themselves, it’s really not that difficult,” Butcher says. “But when it comes to getting a business to this level, you need to have one person that’s tech savvy enough to get the company moving in that direction.”

“I attend a trade show called United Servicers Association each year and put on a class. I push servicers all across the country to get themselves geared up to work in this fashion. There’s a lot of mom and pop. It’s passed down from grandpa and they’re stuck in a lot of the old ways, but they’re realizing that they need to go this direction,” Butcher says, adding, “it’s been a gradual process, but I’d say over the past two to three years, it’s really starting to gain momentum.”

So what tips does Butcher have for small businesses in more traditional industries who are looking to go paperless and virtual like Fred’s? In short, minimize hardware. “Initially we made a very large investment in server space. We actually purchased a rack and servers – very costly. Now we lease cloud space, so we work 100 percent off the cloud-based server and that is one of the best moves that we have ever made,” Butcher says. “Granted the drawback is if you’re having internet interruptions then you’re going to be down, but I feel we have less exposure because all we have to do is drive home and we can work from home.”

And Butcher’s aversion to investing in expensive hardware extends to appliance parts as well. “We have what you could basically call a virtual warehouse. We used to have a ton of parts and it was overtaking our building. That’s another thing we got rid of. We do not have any inventory at our base location at all. The technicians have a small inventory on their trucks for fast-moving parts and then as technicians need parts, they place a parts request with us through the software. We key the order and we ship it directly to the customer’s home.” Usually the part arrives the following day and the repair is completed in two days. The system is quick and also saves in floor space, costly inventory and time spent organizing stock.

“We’re not experts at inventory. We’re experts at service, so why not outsource that expertise to a parts distributor? That’s what they sleep and breathe,” concludes Butcher.

Do you think virtual work is ready to conquer more mom and pop businesses in traditional sectors? 

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Zaarly exec Shane Mac, for example, recently published a piece in VentureBeat, which we highlighted here on GigaOM, arguing that a remote set-up stinks for startups who need their staff in close proximity to form a company culture and generate the maximum number of ideas by sparking their thinking off each other. Mac makes a compelling case for the usefulness of physically close teams, but not everyone in startups is buying it.

ProofHQ, a British company that sells tools to help review design work, for example, has been remote from day one. “The company has literally never had an office with employees in it,” founder and CEO Mat Atkinson told GigaOM, explaining that having had an earlier experience starting a company with VC backing, he opted to bootstrap ProofHQ and avoid venture money, necessitating he skip the office as a budget-saving measure. Plus, he found a development team in distant Poland and wanted to be able to serve customers globally right from the outset. The result is a team spread from the west coast of America to the Middle Eastern country of Qatar.

So did he experience the squeeze on ideas and the less binding company culture that Mac predicts? “From our experience it just simply wasn’t the case,” says Atkinson, who uses constant Skype chats, regular video calls and daily scrums for each area of the business to keep his team collaborating and innovating. He also insists on regular face-to-face meet-ups for the team.

“I do understand when people say face to face matters and I agree with that. We make an effort to do things face to face both virtually by video conferencing, as well getting together in person, but I disagree when people say it’s the only way to make it happen,” he says, though he concedes that working at a distance is tougher on managers. “Remote working works really well for the team, but if you’re managing people, you have to put more effort into it. I would say it takes probably 20 percent more effort.”

Besides admitting that a distributed setup is tougher on managers, Atkinson also acknowledges that those looking for venture money might have a reason to shy away from a remote set-up. “If you’re looking to go down the venture capital route then your VCs will probably want you to be co-located and co-located close to them,” he says. “I know that’s breaking down more and more but I think VCs are still skeptical of companies that work remotely.”

But it’s not just VCs who Atkinson sees changing their minds about remote work. According to him, skeptics like Shane Mac are slowly going to the way of the dinosaurs. “There has been a real transition in the perception that people have of working remotely. In the early days it was seen as kind of odd — it’s never going to work. Now customers that we talk to about it are very interested. I have quite a lot of other early-stage technology companies wanting to talk about how we’ve managed the business, and it’s just not seen as weird. When we recruit now, people see it as a positive rather than a negative or a neutral, so I think there’s a massive change in people’s perceptions at all levels.”

Within five years, Atkinson feels, remote work will be as unremarkable as cubicles and laptops seem now – even for startups — and its posts like this, discussing the issue as contentious, rather than the practice itself, that will seem odd.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy of Flickr user dierken.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the VC Industry Upheaval Means For Startups
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches

iSimplyConnect, which officially launches on Tuesday, is a service that lets workers access their company’s network remotely via an iPad (or iPhone). The service is a monthly subscription, which means you only pay for the months you choose to use it. Asavie, the company behind the service, charges $15 a month for up to three users, $40/month for up to 10 users, $95/month for 11 to 25 users and $180/month for 26 to 50 users. It’s different than something like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC in that it provides a secure network connection behind your company’s firewall and your personal work computer doesn’t have to be turned on for iSimplyConnect to work.

Though this new service is its first direct-to-business-customers venture, the company behind iSimplyConnect is not new to telecom or networking. Asavie, based in Dublin, Ireland has been providing secure networking services to partners like Vodafone, Telefonica and AT&T for almost a decade. But with seven years of working on the core, proprietary technology, CEO Ralph Shaw said it was time to figure out a way to also offer a new service directly to end users.

iSimplyConnect targets businesses of about 50 employees or fewer. It can work fine for companies with thousands of employees, Shaw said, but those are the kind of companies who already have huge contracts with systems integrators who handle this kind of service themselves via technology from Juniper or Cisco, he figures. Shaw and company are looking to be a cheaper, cloud-based alternative for small companies that don’t have a ton to spend on VPN services but want just-as-good security and ease of use.

It’s pretty good timing, too, as Apple looks to have another hit on its hands with the new iPad. And while consumers are snapping them up, these iPads are likely getting used at work: an NPD survey at the end of 2011 found that 73 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses planned to buy tablets in 2012, and “most” indicated those tablets would be iPads, according to NPD. And tablets are not just tools for checking corporate e-mail — they’re for creating presentations, charts, reports, documents, data visualizations, filling out forms and much more more. So it’s natural that workers would want access to secure files and documents even when away from the office.

Risk factors and the iPad

The iPad, besides growing in popularity among business customers, Shaw says, is attractive to companies weighing enterprise IT security concerns, “because it’s effectively a closed environment from an enterprise perspective. It’s much safer to use, and from security and risk perspective you’re minimizing your risks round losing data and so forth. It’s a much better design for controlling risks that enterprises worry about all the time.”

iSimplyConnect’s core technology enables Asavie to provide a virtual VPN, and it all takes place in the company’s data centers in Dublin, Denver and at another location in the U.K. Here’s the technical explanation of what goes on once you’ve hooked your iPad up to the service, according to Asavie:

Once connected our service securely routes the device’s traffic to the customer’s Office Network. The iSimplyConnect Server, during installation, enrolls in our public key infrastructure (PKI) and gets issued with an X.509 Certificate for all future authentication to our cloud. The iSimplyConnect Server maintains an always-on connection to our cloud by connecting (outbound) via TLS on TCP port 443. This means that you don’t need a static IP address or open and/or port-forward on interface firewall. When your iPad communicates over their iSimplyConnect VPN, their connections “magically” appear from behind the iSimplyConnect Server.

But one thing iSimplyConnect is basing its appeal on is its ability to hide all that complicated technology —  to make it seamless and not frustrating for the end user. “We’ve tried to boil it down as simple as possible,” said Shaw. “We’re taking pain away  … the complexity, we’ve brought it up to the [data] center and hidden it from the customer.”

I can vouch that this took very little time to set up and I didn’t have to have experience as a sys admin to understand the process. To use iSimplyConnect you need an always-on Windows machine or server, and once you install the software (which is free for the first 15 days) on it, you then download the free app from the iOS App Store to each user’s iPad. Once you input your email address and PIN to let you join your company’s network, you’re in business. A little “VPN” icon on the top left corner of the iPad will tell you when it’s on. You’ll never have to even open the app again on your iPad, unless you want to mess with the settings.

It’s a smart move to target mobile workers with iPads as it’s a growing segment. But being cheap and easy to use doesn’t mean that far bigger companies couldn’t push iSimplyConnect out of the way some day. As for whether iSimplyConnect might expand its appeal and work on competing mobile platforms some day, Shaw basically said that the company will wait to see if a decent tablet competitor emerges.

“At the moment our belief is it’s Apple’s market. Our conentration is to be No. 1 with No. 1. That’s where we’re at and our focus,” he said. “We don’t see others ready for prime time at the moment. Our focus is very much on trying to do as good as we can with the iPad.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• How scribbling on an iPad makes your work life easier
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Information and communication technology company 2e2 asked nearly 2,000 workers how they experience the nine-to-five grind. The responses confirmed the results of earlier polls and studies showing workers are actually more productive away from the office: 55 percent of those 2e2 asked said they got more done working from home.

Slightly more surprising was the respondents’ choice of the location where they’re at their most creative. Where do they feel they get their most innovative ideas?

• 47 percent said the best discussions about business ideas come when people get together in a pub or restaurant.
• 24 percent said the office boardroom.
• Online discussions were chosen by 19 percent.

This will be great news for knowledge workers looking to convince the boss to splurge on working lunches and a few rounds of drinks (though, it’s assumed, creativity falls off pretty sharply if you overdo the libations). It’s also food for thought for the laptop addicts among us, suggesting making time to get away from our screens and talk to actual humans is valuable and often overlooked.

But even if these less-than-rigorously scientific findings confirm the enduring affection of Brits for the pub more than any hard and fast intelligence for business leaders, the idea that place influences creativity and that our choice of locale is often knee-jerk and uninspired is worth considering.

Where do you get your best business ideas?

Image courtesy of Flickr user @rgs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

And that, according to a recent post by former Harvard Business School professor and partner in FutureWork Forum Jim Ware on the WorkSnug blog, isn’t just bad interior decorating, but may also be bad psychology. He writes:

I, like most “knowledge workers” spend almost all my work time in a fairly traditional office environment – four walls, a desk, some filing cabinets, and shelves full of books. Sure, there might be a family photo or two on the wall, and maybe a picture drawn by a child, but the fact is that no matter what I am trying to accomplish on a given day, the place where I am is almost always the same (yes, I usually hold team meetings in a conference room, and sometimes I even have a meaningful “meeting” in a cafeteria or a coffee shop, but let’s face it, most of the time I use the same place to read, write, analyze, list, sort, file, talk on the phone, and even meet with colleagues – at least when I’m not on airplane or in some drab hotel room far from home).

What if I had lots of places to choose among, and could move from one to another as I moved from one task to another? My instinct tells me I’d be a lot more creative in some kinds of places (rooms filled with art work, or with outdoor photos or large windows – or literally outdoor places), more analytic in others (a library, or a bare-bones office?), and thoughtful and reflective in yet another place (a church? a mountain retreat? a sailboat? a café?).

The interesting post, which is well worth a read, detours into office design before concluding with a question for reflection for all of us knowledge workers with the technical capacity to roam far and wide but work habits that hold us back from taking full advantage of that freedom: “When there are so many different kinds of knowledge work, why do we so often try to do it all in one kind of place?” As 2011 draws to a close, it’s an interesting New Year’s thought to ponder and perhaps spur improvements in our work style in the coming year.

Are you stuck in a rut when it comes to where you do your work? Could shaking things up and getting out of your usual spaces improve your productivity?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Now, halfway around the world in New Zealand, a ZDNet Australia writer is asking whether the ongoing shifts in the way many of us work are going to encourage denser city cores or more spread out population patterns. Writer Darren Greenwood notes that though environmental activists and design enthusiasts often call for denser city cores that demand fewer resource-gobbling cars and encourage us to live in smaller spaces, the connected future of work might actually lead to more people moving further out from these urban cores.

In recent decades, New Zealand has seen a drift from the provinces to large cities like Auckland, mainly due to better job prospects. However, this has made Auckland extremely crowded and expensive, just like many a large Australian metro area.

People just might find that the costs of living in Auckland are no longer worth it, especially if the extra pay is not enough to compensate for loss of quality of life, never mind if you want that garden that the planners are so keen to use on housing.

Employers, too, will soon realize that if you can get people working from home in the exurbs for a bit less, or they can have branch offices in cheaper, neighboring towns and cities, then why be in the city centre?

Thus, one of the main impacts of UFB [Ultra-Fast Broadband] could well be on the shape of our towns and cities.

Commentators have had plenty to say about the possible advantages of greater uptake of remote work for rural areas, as well as how coworking spaces might benefit out-of-the-way communities, but the idea that remote work might be a boon for the exurbs – bane of green campaigners – isn’t one you hear too often.

Of course, there are lots of factors at play when it comes to how our cities and town evolve, including energy prices, climate change and how our collective interest in greener living develops, or fails to. But nonetheless, Greenwood’s insight is an interesting thought to add to the pot.

If you could work from anywhere, where would you live?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Worker101.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

For those moments of doubt, there is no better cure than a conversation with Barry Frangipane, the co-author of The Venice Experiment: A Year of Trial and Error Living Abroad. A middle-of-the-road computer programmer living in Florida with a full-time job, Frangipane decided to see if he could make all the advances in remote collaboration and increased acceptance of telecommuting work for him — by moving to Venice for a year with his wife and keeping his day job.

Sneaking up on the boss

Frangipane knew better than to spring a transatlantic move on his boss all at once, opting instead to inch his way toward greater freedom by slowly proving that, for him, the office was only a hindrance.

“The first thing I did was I started working a day a week at home,” he explains, “and then that gradually grew until I was spending the entire week working from home. Home being five miles away from the office.” From that point it was a surprisingly simple leap from Florida to Italy.

“Once you iron out the technical details and your employer can see that your productivity is actually increasing working from home, then at that point approaching the boss and saying, ‘look, I’m thinking of moving my home. Oh, and by the way, that home is Venice,’ well certainly it’s a little startling, but when the discussion turns to just the facts,” the boss has no reason to disagree.

All upside

Did Frangipane’s customers revolt? Did he miss the office banter or feel like his career was suffering because he was 4,000 miles away? Quite the contrary. “I would say it was all upside,” he says. Leaving aside the benefits of spending a year in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Frangipane actually felt he got more done living abroad.

“In an office environment, there are so many interruptions. One of my partners once said that 32 15-minute interruptions is the entire day. And it makes you think a little bit,” he says. “When I’m working at home people don’t just stop by and stand in my doorway to talk about the ball game. I find myself substantially more productive because I can focus for longer periods of time.”

Dare to dream

Frangipane is adamant that there’s nothing special about him that allowed him to succeed at extreme telecommuting and insists that while living abroad for a year isn’t for everyone, it is for way more people than you’d think. “There was a time when this was just for computer people — web designers and programmers and things — but not so much anymore,” he says, citing the case of a neighbor who works as a customer service rep for a big-box store and has never set foot in the company’s offices.

“It wouldn’t even be noticed if she moved to another country and just continued answering the phone,” he says.

And if you think that Frangipane is simply braver than the average joe, he replies that simply setting a date to leave, informing yourself about your destination and carefully planning your move does wonders to embolden the timid. “Before you go, check the blogs online, check websites and talk to people who have already done it and ask them questions. You’ll see that many of your fears will be allayed,” he insists.

Once he and his wife started learning more about life in Venice, “you start realizing that they’re really just not that much different. Everybody puts on their pants one leg at a time.”

Learning to think Italian

International similarities in dressing aside, there were differences between the Italian way of life and the American, according to Frangipane, and these made a deep impression on him. “I find that things that used to be considered big issues for me, office politics and things, just slide off my back now,” he says. And Italy also changed him in other ways.

“Venice is a town of only 60,000 people and functions as one big family. Everyone knows everyone. They’re happy to shut their stores for a half an hour and just take you to the local coffee shop. They value the relationships so much more than the money that that has certainly changed my focus,” says Frangipane. “I’ve learned that earning that last $1,000 or $10,000 a year is not as important as the relationships.”

How much so? He and his wife already have their eye on Paris for another jaunt abroad.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melename

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are Broken
• A Town Hall Talk on the Future of Work