GigaOM » telework

Needle weaves fans, customers and companies together

Terri Griffith — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:39:17 +0000

Companies and employees are finding unique ways to work in a world supported by mobile Internet access. We’re seeing growth in coworking, and telecommuting in general, and Needle is a great example just how far you can push these ideas. Needle provides client companies with the tools and people to link product experts, or fans of the brand, with current and prospective customers in online chats. I met Needle’s founder and CEO Morgan Lynch recently at his office, an Airstream megabus worthy of the rockstar team he’s invited on the road. Lynch says the bus is a good way to demonstrate the power of “the work anywhere model.” He continues,

Today we’re all plugged in. The best performance you’ll get is when people work from where and when they want. If you shove somebody in a cube and force some training, telling them to do things they wouldn’t normally do, they won’t be as creative … and giving recommendations is a creative process.

This isn’t your grandparents Airstream. And this isn’t a 20th century form of telecommuting. Needle provides a platform that brings fans, brands and customers together. Needlers, as the fan/experts are known, can be selected by the client company if it has existing connections with its fan experts, or by Needle through the client company’s social networks. The key is that Needlers are passionate fans who love to talk about the brands they cover.

Map of Needlers and realtime chats – shown on screen inside the bus

The platform is built to access these experts wherever they are and help them engage with their brands in a manner that works for all the parties. The company works with clients to find the times they need to staff their customer response chat lines. It also customizes the incentive packages for each company based on the focus the they’d like the chats to have.

I had the chance to talk with the following Needlers:

Doug Fleming
Needle Client: Astro Gaming
Location: Oceanside, Calif.
Age: 25
Details:

Began gaming when he was 6 years old, began competitive gaming when he was 16
Started Needling in February 2012
Needles about 20 hours per week
Has already done 1,200 chats

Nick Joy
Needle Client: Skullcandy
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Age: 26
Details:

A die-hard skier, moved from Seattle to Utah for the snow
One of the first Needlers — began in April 2010
Needles about four hours per week
Quickest response time on the Skullcandy Needle team

Michelle Graham
Needle Client: Under Armour
Location: Snohomish, Wash.
Age: 41
Details:

Married, mom of two boys
Started Needling October 2011
Needles about five hours per week
Lifetime customer satisfaction score: 9.7

They each had a story to tell about their client company and how the control and flexibility of the work style is something they greatly value. Lynch says that Needle leverages the idea that work is an activity, not necessarily a place. I heard several versions of, “Earn some money, earn some points and work for my favorite brand.” Nothing about going to the office.

Noelle Bates, vice president of community for Needle, and Lynch both talked about the quality of the people they are bringing to the table. They don’t think these experts would go to work in a call center, even if the call center were local to them, and the odds that the experts live near their favorite brands’ offices is small.

I mentioned Zappos, another company with fanatical fans and employees, and JetBlue with their work-at-home customer service representatives. Lynch pointed out that Zappos employees still have to commute to get to work, whereas the Needlers can work their way across Europe (as Nick Joy did), work from airplanes, work wherever they have a reasonable Internet connection. JetBlue’s approach requires a telephone and high speed Internet, more than the mobile-friendly requirements to Needle via chat. He concludes, “Your workforce shouldn’t be constrained by where they live.”

My colleague, Jessica Stillman recently summarized research showing that remote work can boost productivity for creative work. The founders and employees at Needle seem to agree. Do you?

Images courtesy of Needle.

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Coworking: the pivot in today’s transformation of work?

Stowe Boyd — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:00:52 +0000

There are a a set of work-related trends that seem to sketch a scenario that could mean the end of of the office.

A recent Gallup study found that 71 percent of US workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work. This suggests that only a third of American workers are deeply engaged in their jobs, which is at least a serious challenge for businesses, and perhaps a serious threat. And the proportion of disengaged seems to be rising.

New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework (or telecommuting), supporting anecdotal knowledge about workers’ desire to work outside of the office. (We’ll be digging more into these kinds of topics at Net:Work on Dec. 8.) Stanford University partnered with a Chinese travel agency to find out if teleworkers were more productive, as reported by Ray Fisman at Slate:

Within a few weeks, the performance of the telecommuting group started to pull away from their cubicle-bound counterparts. Over the duration of the experiment, home workers answered 15 percent more calls, partly because each hour was 4 percent more productive, and partly because home office employees spent 11 percent more time answering phone calls. (Home workers took fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arrived late to their desks, and had fewer distractions.) While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)

And the same sort of business thinking that is interested in productivity of telework also starts to extrapolate about the impacts. If 40 percent of workers — in general — are working out of the office, that means 40 percent of office space — and associated expenses, like furniture, energy, and cleaning — might be productively invested elsewhere. In a 2007 Businessweek report, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of offices space is “a dead zone of darkened doorways and wasting cubes,” and some have estimated that $600B is wasted in direct costs, leaving aside the externalities like impact to the environment, and the costs that employees incur commuting.

Sara Horowitz recently made the case that we really don’t know the makeup of the US workforce any longer, since the US government stopped counting independent workers in any systematic way. However, her research at the Freelancers Union — she’s the founder — indicate that as much as one third of our workforce participates in the rapidly growing freelance economy.

Connecting The Dots

These seemingly independent trends are tied together by the changing mindset of the people doing the work. Young people in particular are increasingly disinclined to commute to a distant office for the sake of ‘face time’, but many people of all ages have personal reasons for wanting to work in a ‘results-only work environment’, where getting the job done becomes the core principle surrounding work.

Giving workers more control of their lives — giving them back many hours of time per week not spent in commuting and pointless meetings, letting them decide when to do what, and putting money in their pockets by cutting commuting costs — has a very serious impact on morale. As the Chinese travel agency example shows, many of the workers reported less ‘work exhaustion’ and were less likely to quit. That seems like a direct antidote to the unengagement risks that Gallup reports US companies are running.

And people moving into telework and results-only work models will need new tools — like the stream-based work media tools I discussed in a recent post here on GigaOM. But with ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, and the proliferation of work media, the technological infrastructure to support telework is very low-cost, and requires basically zero training.

What’s Missing? The Second Place.

But there is a factor that is a potential hiccup. Many folks that adopt a telework or freelance work model and opt to work from home quickly come to miss the social aspect of their old work place.

In the US and Western countries, there has been a growing adoption of coworking spaces, where freelancers, employees of small businesses, or teleworkers can get the best of both worlds: they can work from a work space close to their home — thereby avoiding a long distance commute — but at the same time they can have the support and stimulation that comes from social interaction with well-known people other than your family.

Ray Oldenburg, the urban sociologist, is best known for his notion of the Third Place, like the corner bar, the cafe, or the barber shop, where we can interact with people that we don’t know well, and perhaps with whom we have little in common. He argued that such places are critically import to the health of cities and out societies. He took almost as a given that people would continue their relationship with First and Second Places, the home and the workplace, respectively. But the trends of telework and freelancing means that an increasing means the more people are spending less time in official Second Places, and more at home and Starbucks. But as wonderful as working in a café is, there is definitely a great deal missing.

So it’s no real surprise that the coworking movement is growing at a pace that seems closely linked to the number of people jumping into telework or out of the traditional workplace. Deskmag states there are now more than 1,100 coworking spaces worldwide, more than double the number in 2006. Loosecubes, a service set up to help people find coworking spaces, is tracking over 1,400 locations in over 500 cities, globally.

According to Carsten Foetrsch of deskmag, 72 percent of all coworking spaces become profitable after 2 years of operation, and for privately-run spaces, the number is even higher: 87 percent . So the economics for those interested in setting up and running coworking spaces is compelling.

A Virtuous Cycle?

Looking from a economics viewpoint, all the players have economic motivations to support coworking:

The office worker saves significant expense and time by decreasing commute time, and those with the longest commutes should have the strongest motivation to shift to telework. Therefore, there is a steady migration to telework as businesses adopt policies to support it.
Businesses have a strong incentive to increase employee morale and productivity, and to decrease expenses related to the increasingly large percentage of their office space that is underutilized. Even if businesses have to subsidize coworking space use by teleworkers, the net savings are significant.
As the number of freelancers and teleworkers increase, the demand for coworking space grows, since people need the strong social connections historically offered in the workplace, not just the chance connections afforded by sharing a table in Starbucks.
Entrepreneurs have strong incentives to create coworking spaces: partly to serve as their own base of operations, but also as a business proposition of its own. Note that the desire of businesses to shed unneeded office space in our down economy also provides lower cost space in which to set up shop.

When you look at it as a system, coworking is a complex societal dance, where the various players are each seeking to maximize their personal economic situation, and it leads to a new social reintegration. And the result of this migration of workers from the office to the coworking space is a net benefit for the world, too: the decrease in energy use for the unused office space and the decrease in commuting translates into decreased carbon footprints for all involved.

Coworking may turn out to be the pivot in today’s post-industrial transformation of work: a shining example, perhaps, of how large-scale positive change at the societal level can emerge peacefully from the independent pursuit of personal ends.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine. Stowe will be speaking about co-working at Net:Work.

Image courtesy of Flickr userRob Pearce.

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Tales from the trenches: Cisco

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:05:44 +0000

14 years ago when Chuck Robbins started at Cisco, “you had a desk and you put your name outside the desk.” Now after more than a decade, the workstyle at the company has changed nearly beyond recognition, becoming incredibly accommodating to remote teams. And Robbins has thrived in this innovate environment, rising to the position of senior VP and running the organization’s sales team for the Americas.

What lessons has Robbins learned from leading through this transition at company that was not only an early adopter of flexible working, but which also builds a number of remote work solutions? He shared his wisdom with WebWorkerDaily.

Talent

Do experienced managers of co-located teams just magically make a smooth transition to a virtual workstyle? Not according to Robbins, who is a big believer in training, and not just on the technical challenges of web work.

“The technology actually tends to be the easiest part of this whole thing,” he told us, adding that the success of web work is often inhibited by “cultural acceptance by the leadership team that this is how we operate and it’s OK. Some companies equate productivity with being in the office, so I think, first of all, we have to make sure that we provide our leadership with education on things around, how do you manage a remote workforce effectively? What are the things you need to do differently when you can’t walk down the hall and grab them? We give that kind of training.”

Tools

Robbins’s pro-training philosophy extends to tech tools as well. He explains that team members are also trained in how to make the best use the of video conferencing solutions Cisco offers, answering questions like, “What sort of things should you be thinking about when you’re presenting to a customer over video and you’re not in the room and everybody else is? Or if you’re in the room and somebody else is remote, how do you make sure you continue to engage them?”

Video may play a big role for Robbins’s team, but email doesn’t. “Email is becoming the least favorite mode of communication with our team,” he said. Instead of sending individual messages, Robbins’s employees have “a new platform that we actually designed called Quad. It’s named after the college campus quad where everybody gathers. Think of it as Facebook for enterprise. People can build communities around different topics and they have their profile and their status and then we have integrated instant messaging.”

“New technology that enables single number reach for our sales organization,” is the final piece of the puzzle for Robbins’s team. “No matter where you are somebody doesn’t have to keep up with what phone numbers to dial. They dial your office and it rings whatever device you need it to ring,” he said.

Tips

In addition to tech and training, Robbins relies on an outcome-based management style to keep his team running smoothly. To succeed as the manager of a virtual team, “you have move to outcome-based performance, and to the extent that you can, outcome based compensation,” he advises. “That cultural thinking that, if you’re at your desk from eight to five, than you’ve been productive is no longer valid, so you’ve got to figure out how you create outcomes and metrics where you can determine success.”

All of these pieces have come together to create a deep change in attitudes towards flexible working at Cisco, Robbins concludes. “When we first started working from home, for some reason we didn’t want people to know we were working from home. You didn’t want the dog to bark or the kids to come and say something. You were always trying to mute if the dog was coming around. Today, if you’re working from home and your kid walks in, you tell them to say hello to whoever you’re talking to on the other end because it’s such an accepted thing.”

Think something similar won’t be coming to your company anytime soon? Think again, insists Robbins. “Any companies that don’t think they’re going to have to buy in to this approach, I think they’re going to be in trouble. For the first time ever we have conversations with companies about how to build their remote worker infrastructure and their collaboration capability in a way that will enable them to recruit the next generation workforce, because they believe that will be a retention issue. It’s become a strategic recruiting tool for many companies.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be.

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What’s restricting the expansion of telework?

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:12:17 +0000

With technology improving each year and some 30 million or so American workers expressing a desire to work from outside the office, there’s good reason for optimism about the future of web work. But not everyone thinks the sky’s the limit when it comes to offering more and more workers the opportunity to work virtually.

For example, Stephen Ruth, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, recently wrote a draft book chapter entitled The Dark Side of Telecommuting – Is a Tipping Point Approaching? In it he argues that telecommuting cannot keep expanding without creating significant issues. We called him up and asked him why he is less optimistic than some about the expansion of telecommuting.

“Everybody loves it,” he said, including himself among fans of web work. “I’ve actually looked over thousands of articles and hardly any of them are critical, but the theme I’m bringing up here is that we’re probably at a tipping point. There are about five or six different areas that people don’t seem to be talking about that are probably going to cause the return on investment from telecommuting to start going down if it isn’t already.” So what are some of the things he thinks will be a drag on web work expansion?

Demographics. “The basic demographic of people who telework is basically wealthy, relatively educated, also relatively satisfied with their jobs, and the new people who come on, they have to come from a different demographic,” explains Ruth. Will new telecommuters be as suitable for virtual work as those already at it? “There may be some factors—temperament, life-style, discipline, work focus ability, eating habits, tolerance for ambiguity, and others—that limit the effectiveness of additional entrants,” Ruth has written.
The frustrated remainder. If more and more employees flee their cubicles for web work, what happens to those workers who are inevitably left behind? “They are frustrated,” says Ruth, who thinks that managers who remain behind to man the ship are going to face increasing challenges as more and more workers go virtual. As the demands on them grow do the productivity gains of telecommuting shrink?

Ruth concludes: “There is a possibility that once the most qualified persons are working from their homes, cars, restaurants and customer sites at high levels of morale and productivity, there may be some major problems in welcoming the next large group into the fold.”

Do you agree?

Image courtesy of Flickr user kowitz

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Study: Yup, managers do need web work boot camp

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:02:19 +0000

Telecommuting has been a buzzword in the business world for years, but despite the media and the federal government loudly singing the praises of remote work, uptake of the practice has stalled. Why? At WebWorkerDaily we’ve suggested before that the problem may be resistant middle managers and proposed sending them off to web work boot camp. Now there’s new evidence that we may have been on to something.

A study entitled Virtual Work Environments in the Post-Recession Era from Brandman University and Forrester Consulting doesn’t paint a rosy picture of managers’ preparedness for supporting virtual work, at least at the large Fortune 500 companies the survey looked at.

While the survey did find that managers at these companies expect the use of virtual teams and remote working to grow (56 percent said that the practice would steadily or greatly increase at their company), skepticism among managers and ignorance of collaboration tools remain high. For example:

Less than 20 percent of respondents considered social media a viable business tool for connecting with global markets.
More than 65 percent reported that employees never use wikis, Twitter or Facebook.
55 percent said their employers never used blogs or LinkedIn.

The study summarizes the findings by saying: “The prevailing attitude of hiring managers surveyed could be described as viewing virtual teams as a ‘necessary evil,’ a method of doing business that their company must adopt to survive and thrive in today’s changing global economy.”

Charles Bullock, vice chancellor of academic affairs at Brandman, said in an interview that the results were somewhat surprising and suggested that, “it may just be that industry is lagging the technology at this point and they’re relying on some of the older tools such as email and video conferencing.”

“It’s just the way managers were trained traditionally,” he added. “You’ve got to be able to see them. Trust is an issue and I think that will change over time.” Off to boot camp with the laggards then.

And what should they learn there? Susan Gerke, a professor at Brandman who often speaks with reluctant managers, notes, “They’re used to being able to see what people are doing, so one of the key worries they bring up is: ‘How do I know what they’re doing? How do I know they’re working on the right things?’”

To allay these fears, Gerke tries to make sure managers “realize you can’t see what everybody’s doing all the time no matter where they are, and if you do a really good job of setting expectations about what you need and setting up regular times to check in, there are vehicles for staying current.”

The bottom line when it comes to leading remote teams, according to Gerke, “is you have to be proactive and deliberate about things that, maybe, you didn’t used to think about. We’d run into people in the hall and give them positive feedback casually. Now you’ve got to think that through and figure out how you’re going to build that into your regular schedule or you miss giving people feedback; you miss giving people visibility; you miss clarifying expectations; you miss relationship building and then it all falls apart.”

Have the old-fashioned views of middle managers held back remote working anywhere you’ve worked?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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Web work: Only for the elite?

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:04:18 +0000

Not everyone can work via the web, that’s obvious. If you’re a cardiologist or corrections officer, or if your job requires sophisticated machinery, then simply booting up your laptop in the local coffee shop isn’t going to be an option. But are there other more subtle limitations to who can work at a distance?

A recent study from The Telework Research Network sheds some light on this question. The study focuses specifically on employees who work from home rather than the self-employed and sifts through data from government sources like the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as industry information from the likes of WorldatWork, to determine who is working remotely and who isn’t.

Besides finding a huge pool of 30.4 million potential telecommuters who could work flexibly and desire to do so but are not offered the chance, the study also revealed that a large number of web workers have a very specific profile. They’re older, well paid, educated professionals. The study found:

The typical telecommuter is a 49-year-old, college-educated, salaried, non-union employee in a management or professional role, earning $58,000 a year at a company with more than 100 employees.
Over 75 percent of employees who work from home earn over $65,000 per year, putting them in the upper 80 percentile relative to all employees.
More than 70 percent of the WAH [work at home] population holds management, professional, sales, and office jobs (compared with 61 percent of the total workforce).

Why is web work so skewed towards this particular demographic? The authors suggest thee possibilities. First, older workers may require more flexibility due to greater family obligations. Having worked longer, they may also have had more opportunity to build the trust necessary to convince their employer to permit flexible arrangements. Finally, it may be that they are at a comfortable enough stage in theirs career that they no longer fear remote work having a negative effect on their advancement.

The first possibility is down to individuals’ particular situations and, whether it turns out to be true or not that older workers benefit most from web work, the principle of allowing employees to work remotely based on need makes sense. But the other two explanations suggest that many managers only hand out web work privileges to senior people with the clout to demand flexibility and ignore any potential stigma attached to telecommuting.

Is this a sensible way to ensure only those who can handle the responsibility of web work receive it, or an unfortunate prejudice that keeps junior staff from enjoying the productivity and loyalty gains web work can provide?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Larry Johnson

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The two kinds of stuck (and what to do about each)

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:04:53 +0000

If you work on your own and you get creatively blocked, you’re equally on your own to try and unstick yourself and get productive again. Programmer, designer, copywriter — whatever your field of work, it’s the same dilemma: How do you prod your unresponsive brain to deliver the goods?

Video game design expert and author J.C. Herz has some ideas for creative professionals. She recently gave the commencement speech at Ringling College of Art and Design, in Florida, and rather than offering bland encouragements to reach for the stars or be of service, Herz got down to business, addressing the nuts-and-bolts issues of arranging your life as a creative professional.

It’s a wide-ranging and thoughtful speech that’s well worth a read if you’re a web worker who regularly has to come up with ideas for a living. Among the many tidbits of advice (make your habits intentional, procrastinate productively, join CrossFit gyms), she offered a taxonomy of different types of creative block and how to handle each:

Getting stuck is a big part of creative work, and it’s really important to be good at getting unstuck. There are two main reasons why creative people get stuck on a piece of work: The first is, you don’t actually have an idea. You may have requirements, and you may have tools. But you don’t actually have an idea that’s going to carry the day, and you’re going to be stuck until you get a solid idea.

The second reason creative people get stuck is that, while they have the idea, executing the idea takes a lot of work, and not all of that work is fun, and basically you don’t want to do the work, because having the idea in the first place was the fun part. The problem is, you don’t get to say “check mate in four.” You actually have to finish the project. So you get mystically “stuck” after the brilliant sketch is done.

It is very, very important to accurately understand which of these problems you’re having when you get stuck. If you don’t have an idea, you need to play around a little, take a walk, have a good conversation, open the aperture. As they say in drawing class, explore the negative space. If you’re balking at the work, you need to stop playing around, sit down, shut up, go offline, and focus single-mindedly on executing the work, and make it real. In either case, if you try to solve one problem when you’re really having the other, you’re going to waste a lot of time.

How do you go about getting unstuck when you feel completely unable to get down to work?

Image courtesy Flickr user Vince Custers

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Do middle managers need web work boot camp?

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:02:23 +0000

With technology advancing, there are fewer practical restrictions to act as a barrier to increased uptake of virtual working. So what is holding organizations back from broader adoption of the practice? Perhaps, in part, middle managers and their lack of training. That’s what Paul Miller, CEO of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, suggested when we spoke with him about a book he’s writing on the digital workplace:

In the book I talk about one of the major oil companies. They equipped people with new, more portable devices and new smartphones and then the next day, 25 percent of people disappeared. So you’re a middle manager. You’re used to seeing people coming into the office and all of a sudden they vanish, and I think one of the key issues is middle managers learning how to manage when you see people far less than you ever used to. How often should you meet them? How do you keep an eye on them? Obviously, it brings up this whole issue of judging people on results and outputs rather than inputs.

Companies are starting to realize people are unused to this way of managing people. What they’re finding is that the biggest block to digital working is that middle managers aren’t skilled to do it. Organizations have learned that you actually do need to train managers in how to manage people in a virtual environment.

Miller went on to cite companies such as BT and Microsoft in the Netherlands, which have had improved success with virtual working after training their middle managers, so he’s certainly correct in his basic point that the training makes a difference, but is this news?

Five years ago, articles were already noting that when it comes to any sort of telecommuting, “the real impediment is the resistance of middle managers” and arguing that “more managers should be trained.” Back then Chuck Wilsker, president of the Telework Coalition, estimated that no more than 15 percent of firms were training managers for remote work. Based on Miller’s account, more companies have jumped on board, but certainly not as many as would be expected to have gotten with the program over half a decade. Perhaps the real story is how little progress has been made.

Why aren’t more companies training middle managers for the realities of the digital workplace despite repeated calls to send them to web work boot camp?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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What The Feds Can Teach Businesses About Telework

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 24 May 2011 19:02:43 +0000

Last year President Obama signed the Telework Enhancement Act into law, requiring all government agencies to determine which employees are eligible to telecommute and to develop policies and processes to allow them to do so. Now the June 9 deadline set by the Act is fast approaching, and agencies are winding up the process of complying with its requirements. What lessons do their efforts hold for businesses interested in starting, expanding or improving their own web work programs?

To find out, we spoke with cloud computing expert and CEO of InfoStreet Siamak Farah, who explained that the experiences of the government will definitely — if not immediately — change the environment and expectations faced by the private sector, offering four takeaways for businesses:

Determining eligibility is tougher than it seems. It’s a rare occasion when the government blazes a trail for the business community, but this might be one such case, with agencies figuring out how to best implement distance working. The first step, according to Farah, is to overcome fears of appearing discriminatory and take a long, hard look at who really can telecommute. “You really need to look at the job function,” says Farah. “Not all people are created equal when it comes to teleworking. If you’re a heart surgeon, you’re not doing it,” he says. While Farah’s example may make determining eligibility sound simple, the government’s experience shows this is actually one of the tougher aspects of implementing web work and an important foundation for a successful telework program.
The security advantages of the cloud are under-appreciated. While fear of hackers and online security abounds (often for good reason), many times the greater threat is simple human fallibility – just look at the U.K. government’s struggles to get employees to stop leaving secret info on trains. “When everything is in the centralized cloud … there are no files on a physical laptop which could get lost or hacked into,” points out Farah, who notes that storing data in the cloud will allow for innovations like fingerprint log-ons and offers often-undervalued security benefits. The cloud might not be up to CIA-level security, but for most functions, current data protection measures in the cloud should suffice, says Farah.
Worker expectations are changing. Companies have long held back on telecommuting because they worry about not being able to monitor employees’ productivity. But that objection is eroding, according to Farah, due to the amalgamation of work and life. “It used to be that you punched in at nine and you went home at five and left every single worry at work. But now with iPhones, BlackBerry [devices], iPads and email accessible everywhere, many times personal time is being interrupted for work because that’s what the work requires. The natural progression of that is that employees come back and say, ‘Hey listen, if my time at home belongs to you than how come my time at work doesn’t belong to my house?’” Businesses will need to respond to this demand for quid pro quo.
Government demand is changing cloud offerings … for the better. This process “is going to increase the number and quality of cloud solutions so businesses have more choices,” concludes Farah.

Image courtesy Flickr user deryckh

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Haydn Shaughnessy — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:35:14 +0000

The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.