Web Worker Daily

Pundits have been chattering about enterprise social media for a while, but previous research showed that despite the hype these technologies had a long way to go before they were fully embraced by business. Now a new report indicates that adoption of social tools and the realization of their much discussed benefits may be firmly underway, in Europe at least.

The report by branding agency Millward Brown, and sponsored by Google, is based on a poll of 2,700 professionals in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and comes to conclusions that will get enterprise social advocates excited. “The results… clearly show that not only are social tools being used widely within business today, but that those who are using them are already reaping the benefits,” declares the report’s forward written by Sebastien Marotte, VP of Google Enterprise, EMEA.

First off, it should be noted that the report includes both consumer social products like LinkedIn and Facebook used for business purposes and social tools geared specifically for organizations under the banner ‘enterprise social’. So what are the details?

Some of the most encouraging findings about enterprise social concern exactly who is using the tools. The report found that high-growth companies (defined as those with more than 10 percent growth in 2011) are making the greatest use of social tools, with 81 percent of these dynamic companies that employ enterprise social reporting these tools have significantly impacted growth and 80 percent telling pollster they saw benefits to teams’ collaboration and knowledge sharing. “Frequent users of in-house social tools are more than twice as likely to be working in high growth companies,” says the report, though professionals in Germany and Sweden seem to be less likely to utilize enterprise social.

“The better the performance of a company, the more likely they are to be using social-media tools,” Allan Hyde, senior account director at Millward Brown, told the Wall Street Journal, though the paper notes the report does not attempt to demonstrate the bottom line impact of these social tools but instead offers subjective opinions about them. Hyde concedes that, “it may well be that the sort of companies that adopt social media tools are the sort of companies that are successful anyway. We are not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea.”

Not only were those at high performing companies more likely to use social tools, but the highest performing individuals were also more likely to adopt enterprise social. Senior managers, somewhat surprisingly, were also more likely to be using social tools than more junior employees. The report finds:

• 86 percent of frequent users have recently been promoted, compared to 61 percent of non- users.
• Frequent users are happier in their jobs with 38 percent claiming to be highly satisfied compared to 18 percent of non-users.
• Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of senior managers are using social tools at least once a week, compared to 49 percent of those in more junior roles.
• Senior managers who report using social tools, claim they are already improving productivity (76 percent), knowledge sharing among dispersed teams (79 percent) and the ability to quickly find information (72 percent).
• 76 percent of senior managers believe businesses that embrace social tools will grow faster than those who ‘ignore’ the technology, and 53 percent believe that businesses will not survive unless they embrace social.

If you’re interested in the full report, you can download it for free here.

Do you think a similar survey in the U.S. would yield similar results?

Image courtesy of Flickr user andrewasmith.

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

With the London Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparation by organizers, the host city, the athletes and security forces. But this year there’s one other great wave of pre-Olympics news items breaking across Britain’s media—surprisingly controversial telecommuting stories.

Just this week interest turned to Britain’s civil servants who are being urged to work remotely to avoid adding to the expected congestion on the city’s already packed roads and trains. The announcement, which might seem ho-hum in some tech-savvy circles, raised a few eyebrows in Britain with the  Daily Mail declaring government workers get “a gold medal for skiving!” (the British English equivalent of slacking off) for being allowed to telecommute for seven weeks this summer. The article notes that “business leaders” are complaining about the probable reduction in useful government work that the policy will bring.

“Business groups criticized plan that has led to fears of a massive reduction in government work as the country tries to pull itself out of recession,” says the paper. “They said it sent out the dangerous message that Britain would close down for almost two months,” it continues, quoting Pierre Williams, from the Federation of Small Businesses, as saying: “A lot of private sector workers will feel rather surprised that the public sector have decided to work from home during the Olympic games.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister was forced to deny that staff would be “skiving” at home, reassuring the public that no less work would get done. Meanwhile, other stories are offering businesses looking to offer staff options, tips on how to make flexible working successful.

With study after study confirming that remote work actually boosts productivity for most people and most tasks, the most surprising fact about the boom in remote work this summer in London may be the fact that’s it’s controversial at all, revealing to converted virtual work fans the deep well of skepticism that still exists in substantial pockets of the business community.

In four years when the Olympics are held again, will remote work have become so mainstream that a bit of an uptick during the games will be far less remarked upon?

Image courtesy of Flickr user surreynews.

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

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Future of Workplaces
• Personal tools lead to practical business

In his new book, The Digital Workplace, author Paul Miller doesn’t hail the death of the traditional office, vanquished by a rise in Web workers. Rather, he sees a more symbiotic relationship between the physical and digital work spaces.

The traditional office has reached an evolutionary plateau, according to Miller, but the digital tools we use to communicate both inside and outside of the cubicle will continue to improve to create more visceral experiences for the workforce. At the same time, Miller believes that the physical office remains important to provide social glue for the organization and head off total isolation of its employees.

Miller sat down with us for a brief video interview to talk about some of the key concepts in his book as well as the evolution of the digital workspace.

Watch this video for free on Collaboration

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

Remote work may be going increasingly mainstream with more and more companies letting staff work flexibly, but as with any major shift in how we work, there are bound to be holdouts. And the start-up scene is home to its fair share. Early-stage companies, particularly in the tech sector, have a long-standing mythology of (usually young and personally unencumbered) teams sleeping under their desks to get products to launch, with many wearing the hothouse atmosphere and extreme hours as a badge of honor. Remote working still raises eyebrows among some.

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.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
• Personal tools lead to practical business

Constant connection and the blurring of the lines between rest and work that it sometimes causes is one of the clearest downsides to the otherwise pretty awesome phenomenon of remote and flexible working. Tech tools that block distractions can help keep the spheres separate and give your brain a chance to recharge, as can shifting company culture to encourage rejuvenating off-time. But can space design also play a role?

If you have a huge pad then keeping your spaces for work and for chilling physically separate is a non-issue – just locate them in different parts of your home and simply close the door on your home office when you’re done for the day. But what if you’re an urban dweller or otherwise living in tight quarters for budgetary, environmental or lifestyle reasons? How can you keep your work life from invading spaces that should be used for chilling?

Design site Apartment Therapy tackled this issue recently, citing a clever strategy an Australian design firm used to solve this issue in a Melbourne apartment. Nexus Designs created what the blog dubs, “a top secret slide-open home office,” using a moveable door that’s artfully camouflaged to appear like just another wall when closed (pictured — check out Apartment Therapy for a full slide show of images). The result is a secret space both James Bond and design aficionados would be proud of. The flexible space solves the issue of being “forced to work in the place where you normally relax and kick back to watch zombie flicks,” as well as doubling as a guest bedroom.

Of course, professionally designed secret walls don’t come cheap, so Apartment Therapy notes that the general principals that make this solution successful can be applied to come up with cheaper alternatives. The blog boils it down to three essential considerations:

• Keep it subtle
• Create fine lines between spaces
• Never underestimate the power of lighting

The post suggests curtains might replace fancy sliding doors for those on more modest budgets and goes on to double underline the lighting issue, stressing that you should “be judicious with lighting. Make sure when the walls are down that both rooms can flow into each other, but when separated, they can function independently as well.”

How have you used design to keep work and relaxation separate?

Images courtesy of Earl Carter for Nexus Designs.

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

• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Personal tools lead to practical business

Australian Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, has been racking up the frequent flyer miles lately, traveling to pick up a second Webby award for his company and speak at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam among other appearances. GigaOM caught up with him in London to chat about his company and his views on the future of the sector. In a word, he’s optimistic.

Why? Barrie explained that as hard as it is for perpetually plugged-in Europeans and Americans to imagine, only about 30 percent of the world’s seven billion inhabitants are online, leaving billions of potential Freelancer.com customers out there yet to get online. In Asia, for instance, internet penetration is still at a modest 21 percent, leaving some 825 million people yet to get connected.

Getting those folks onto the internet will be great for them (we’ve already seen scattered cases of “million dollar freelancers” who have built seven-figure incomes off platforms like Freelancer.com in the developing world) but it will be pretty awesome for Barrie’s business as well, he believes. The flood of newly wired workers will provide a huge and growing customer base of hungry and driven potential freelancers for his site, which already has about 3.5 million users around the world. Barrie’s company charges them and job posters a hefty but variable commission to connect on the site.

Dismissing fears that the trends his site is banking on will mean fewer jobs in the West, Barrie is even optimistic that this explosion in online outsourcing will be good for those of us in developed countries –provided we develop an entrepreneurial mindset and start putting the huge pool of cheap talent across the world to work realizing our ideas and supporting our businesses for, essentially, peanuts. While this inexpensive labor pool may be good news for someone hoping to get a business off the ground on a shoestring, the ability to get stuff done at low cost may be cold comfort for those who are less entrepreneurial by education or character and would like to remain employed. But Barrie seems less than moved by these worries.

Is there anything Barrie isn’t bullish on? In short, online labor platforms that look to compete by serving a specialized sector or targeted geographic location. The likes of Zaarly and ExpertBids “are all going to fail,” according to Barrie because of their inability to scale sufficiently to make enough to be attractive business opportunities. Want to take in a million dollars? Then ten million in business needs to go through the site – the equivalent of something like $100 million in U.S. labor costs if you’re dealing in lower wages overseas – and Barrie just doesn’t see the market being there for niche sites. Those that aim for geographic specificity in the style of TaskRabbit will struggle to reproduce their success in one city in another a bit down the highway, making expanding the business a gigantic money sink, in Barrie’s opinion.

Do you think Barrie’s optimism is well founded?

Image courtesy of Freelancer.com.

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

Coworking, originally a movement dominated by freelancers and entrepreneurs, is increasingly attracting the attention of larger companies. And as these firms and their employees take notice, more and more remote corporate employees are joining the mix at coworking spaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kheel Center, Cornell University.

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

• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Technology might be collapsing distances and allowing folks spread across continents to work together, but no matter how good collaboration tools get, none of them can alter the course of the earth around the sun and eliminate the hassles of time zone differences.

And anyone who has ever worked with a colleague half-a-world away knows of the occasional necessity of late night calls to bridge time differences, but besides knowing how to brew yourself a strong cup of coffee and operate your alarm clock, is there anything you can do to make working across many time zones less painful and more productive?

Erran Carmel, a management professor at the American University Kogod School of Business, has actually written a whole book on the issue entitled I’m Working While They’re Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions. He also recently authored a guest post on blog Workshifting boiling down his advice for those he calls “timeshifters.” These folks are “globalized workers who are comfortable timeshifting and traveling across time zones,” according to Carmel who has a few suggestions for those looking to join their ranks, including:

Breaking the email chain. The email chain begins when, in asynchronous communication, the sender initiates a message, and the receiver on the other side of the globe asks for clarification. The original sender attempts to explain, but the receiver, still confused, sends another request for clarification. Meanwhile, an entire week has passed. Zoners stop this chain early by picking up the phone to clarify the message and move the task along.

Carmel also points those confused about syncing up their schedules with distant coworkers to a handful of useful apps. Timeanddate.com, for example, offers everything from clocks giving you the current time just about anywhere to a time zone map and a list of world holidays – it’s cluttered but useful. World Time Buddy creates a dashboard that shows the time in multiple locations to help you plan meetings, while Every Time Zone does basically the same thing with a prettier but slightly harder to read slider mechanism.

Another new, simple app along these lines is SameTimeAs, a dead simple solution dreamed up by Will Rodenbusch, one half of a globe trotting couple of location independents. As you might guess from the name, the gizmo simply tells you what time it is in location X when it is a given time in location Y.

Amidst all this talk of the hassles of timeshifting though, it’s important to note that many professionals who work across time zones report benefits as well as drawbacks. Jason Johnson, who co-founded BlueSprig with a technical team in China, has said that the massive time zone difference provides a great mix of collaborative overlap and uninterrupted periods of concentration.

“I wake up about 6:00am. It’s around 10:00pm in China and generally they’re still working. I have a couple of hours overlap with them and then they go offline for eight hours. But then they come back online just about the time that my two-and-a-half-year old goes to bed and we can review things together. The really neat thing is, I will go to bed, say, 10 or 11:00pm. I will have shot over some requests or some feedback and they then have seven hours to work on those deliverables, so that when I get up at 6:00am I have an inbox full of messages,” he told GigaOM earlier this year.

“The beauty of this is we operate 24 hours a day, and we have periods of being online at the same time to collaborate but we also have the benefit of these blocks of time where they can do what they do best without any interruption. During my workday I’m not getting all these emails. I can focus. Likewise, when they’re cranking away, I’m asleep and not bugging them. It works really well,” he said, putting a positive spin on timeshifting.

Have you found ways to make timeshifting work for you or is it pretty much a nightmare in your experience?

Image courtesy of Flickr user leoplus.

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

Of the dozens of meeting requests I received in conjunction with this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas — and Google is, well, Google.  Whatever it is, it’s not enterprise IT. Or is it?

It’s not IBM or Cisco, but in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. According to Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for collaboration apps (with whom I spoke on Tuesday), you can see the evidence of Google’s maturity in recent product launches such as Google Drive and BigQuery. They’re not half-baked computer science projects in the guise of applications, but fully baked products that have undergone lots of internal scrutiny.

Today, Google isn’t just thinking about the technology when it releases products, but also about things such as pricing and ensuring applications stick around. It’s also naturally limiting the products it rolls out, Rochelle said, always asking, even of cool technology, “Where does it live?” Someone has to sponsor it, and it has to have a purpose.

That’s probably a good starting point considering the heat Google has taken over the past year for some significant product changes. CEO Larry Page’s “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy, for example, might help boost the company’s bottom line, but users of some experimental services that got the axe weren’t too happy. And then there was Google Wave.

Users of App Engine, Google’s cloud computing application platform, were downright furious when the service lost its “alpha” label last September after about three years. Along with the status came new pricing model that threatened to raise the monthly bills for their apps — many of which weren’t generating much money in the first place — through the roof. For developers, it was re-architect your application for efficiency, pay a much larger bill or rebuild your application — built especially to run on App Engine — and take it elsewhere.

Rochelle acknowledged that some of Google’s past actions have resulted in “a valid concern when things are first introduced” that they won’t stick around.

However, with Drive, Rochelle said, the seven or so years it was in development actually resulted in a product that users can rest assured isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to suddenly double in price. The technology is right and the team didn’t take lightly the task of developing a sustainable pricing model. Google is getting better at this kind of stuff, he said. “It matters to people.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that a market built up around Drive while it stayed tucked away inside the Googleplex instead of being rushed out the door. Box.net and Dropbox, “gave credibility to every layer of the concept,” Rochelle said.

Much of what makes Drive such a robust product off the bat also applies to BigQuery, Google’s recently released big data tool querying huge data sets via a spreadsheet interface. Although many users might never need to move beyond the free 100GB the service allows them to store and analyze, users paying for BigQuery can analyze up to 70TB of data.

BigQuery is targeting “big, hairy, audacious problems that you otherwise couldn’t solve,” said Rochelle, who spent years on Wall Street and knows the types of demands serious users can put on spreadsheets. And because it’s targeting users like those on Wall Street, or in pharmaceutical firms or genomics labs, BigQuery came with a service level agreement from day one.

Google’s minimalist booth at Interop.

Actually, it’s Google’s quest to move beyond consumers and attract enterprise users that might be most responsible for its newfound maturity. Although Apps and everything else non-advertising is just a sliver of Google’s overall business, Rochelle said it’s a “significantly big business compared to its peers [in the collaboration and productivity software space].” In some ways, he said, “It’s shocking that we’re at that point.”

But competing against the likes of Microsoft and other large vendors comes at a cost. For one thing, there’s the constant litigation, customer poaching and public potshots all in an attempt to gain every possible edge over competitors. On the product side, although large customers will actually pay for products that work, they’re dead serious about those products working as advertised. For Google, that means no more (or at least a lot less) messing around.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Michael Drager.

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

• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Every year at our Structure conference, we host a Launchpad for startups. It’s fun for the startups, it’s good for the investors who want to see what’s new, and it’s also a chance for the audience to see what’s coming on the horizon. But this year, we decided to give the final 10 startups that are chosen to present a bit more: We teamed up with venture firm Sequoia to give them a pre-launch hands-on training session at Sequoia HQ.

During that time, the participating finalists will learn how to pitch properly and learn the basics of good interpersonal skills at Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road headquarters. Once that’s all done, they’ll hop up onstage on June 20 to present their ideas to our audience of about 900 investors, executives, media and fellow entrepreneurs and more than 20,000 online video viewers. Check out last year’s finalists here, and read about DotCloud, the eventual winner.

If you are a startup in stealth mode, with a product, or just think you are all that and bag of chips, and you want in on the stage time and Sequoia session, then get busy and apply today! The deadline to apply for the Launchpad is May 16, although we’d love to see your application sooner. We’ll disclose the finalists on May 29 and you will present on June 20 at the Mission Bay Conference center in San Francisco.

At the show you’ll have the chance to meet some of our awesome speakers such as Werner Vogels of Amazon, Steve Herrod of VMware, and executives from Microsoft, Rackspace, and more. Plus, we’ll have cookies. And who doesn’t like cookies? Entrepreneurs, you still have a week, so check out the application and get busy.

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

• How to navigate the new world of digital advertising
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

As a manager you may be willing to hire the best talent for your team no matter where they’re located, but how do you go about determining if a potential hire is, in fact, excellent? This is especially tough if you consider that being a great remote worker means not only being excellent at a particular job but also excellent at managing communicating at a distance and juggling priorities outside of the office.

Personal recommendations are great and, as with any job, past performance is a nice indication of a potential employees’ abilities, but the interview, as ever, is key. You’ll need to ask the usual questions to get at the candidate’s suitability for the work but you’ll also need to probe how the candidate will handle the remote team set-up. Handily, there are questions that can help.

The easiest way to gauge if a potential employee will thrive on a distributed team is to find out if they’ve worked this way before and how they handled being remote. Wayne Turmel, who writes the Connected Manager column for Management Issues suggests wording your question on this topic, this way:

What has been your experience working as part of a remote team? Shut up at that point and let them answer. Keep the question open. They may tell you about technology challenges, they may tell you about working relationships, let them start where they are most comfortable then you can drill down.

Finding out a little bit about their work setup (Do they work at a coworking space? A home office? What’s it like?) is also valuable. “Describe your remote office and virtual workday?” CIO Insight suggests asking in a recent slideshow on interviewing for remote posts. But even more important, according to Turmel, is understanding their approach to technology and communication. He advises asking:

What technology have you used in the past as part of working remotely? This is a good question for several reasons. You’ll get a sense of their comfort level (listen carefully to tone of voice. Does their tongue drip with venom when discussion firewalls and connection speeds?)

You may also learn about other tools they’ve used that can be of value to your existing team. New hires are often thought of as blank slates, but people bring valuable experience to your group.

Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO and Founder of FlexJobs concurs, suggesting in an article covering the whole process of remote hiring, that interviewers ask: “What methods of communication do you prefer?” She also recommends asking candidates how they prioritize tasks and stay focused. CIO Insights also suggests asking directly about a potential hire’s ability to prioritize but also offers more specific questions to get at this sort of information, including:

• What did you do when a manager was absent and you had to make a decision? To get at an employee’s ability to be independent in a virtual work environment.
• How do you manage working for more than one supervisor? To get at their ability to juggle assignments for multiple parties.
• How do you stay current? To get a sense of whether they’re proactive and keep up to date with your industry.

What other questions have you found to be effective when interviewing for a virtual team?

Image courtesy of Flickr user bpsusf.

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

Forwards and CCs are the mechanisms that make email suitable for many-party conversations. They are also very inefficient, which is why services such as Yammer do so well, but email’s extreme standardization makes it ubiquitous, so those are the tools we use.

Enter Squadmail, which has one of those ideas that seems quite obvious in retrospect: shared, cross-client email folders for collaboration. Or, as the company is fond of putting it, Dropbox for email.

The Berlin startup is bringing the service into public beta on Tuesday, following a successful private testing period. This is a service that can prove useful in both personal and business contexts, and the company says it’s been surprised at the level of early corporate takeup.

Just two months after sending out the first invite to a corporate user and with $0 marketing spending, we recently acquired the 500th company (with many more on the beta wait list right now),” Squadmail co-founder Philipp Mayer told me.

The idea is simple: Squadmail creates and syncs folders that are shared between IMAP mail servers, making the choice of client irrelevant. Each folder gets its own email address, and users can also drag emails from their personal folders into the shared folder, removing the need for CCs and forwards.

And the uses are also easily apparent. Businesses with heterogeneously-equipped staff? Friends trying to organise a shared flat rental? People who want easily-dumpable pseudo-accounts for newsletter signups? Check, check and check.

According to Mayer, the private testing period has already drawn in active users in more than 70 countries. Squadmail is obviously a readily international service, but the bulk of the takeup has come from the U.S., and that’s already the core market for the small German firm.

“Right now, Germans make up less than 10 percent of our user base with a steadily declining share and U.S. users are rapidly approaching 50 percent,” he said. “When we first launched an early alpha in January we focused almost all our marketing efforts on Germans, thinking our chances were better with local users. But it turned out to be incredibly hard to gain momentum in Germany with beta conversion rates 50 percent below average and low activity rates for German users.”

As you can tell, Mayer is unusually confident about sharing stats on his product’s usage. Fair enough: there’s a lot to chew on there, particularly when it comes to that keen corporate takeup (half of which comprises small IT companies, with the remainder a mix of Fortune 500s, universities and NGOs).

Corporate users, who are not charged yet but will soon be targeted with additional paid-for features, are around 50 percent more active than users with private accounts, he says. It also seems that two-thirds of business users’ folders are shared with email contacts, with on average three people sharing each folder.

And the remaining third? Just one user — there, it appears the customers are using the folders for ‘Bacn’ mail.

There are a couple of downsides, such as the fact that the folder’s email address must currently end in ‘@box.squadmail.com’ (although the team says it will allow customers to use their own domains soon). The biggest limitation that immediately strikes me is that you can’t send emails from that shared folder/email address to someone outside the sharing group, but that will only be a barrier for some.

For the rest of us, Squadmail may be pushing it with its “Enjoy email again” tagline, but it’s certainly a tool that makes email that bit more relevant in this collaborative age.

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

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Personal tools lead to practical business

With the collaboration market already crowded with everything from task-focused tools like Asana to social products such as Yammer, plus offerings pitched to specific groups (Atlassian for software teams, Wiggio for college students), it’s hard to imagine an unoccupied niche for yet another tool, but Santa Monica, CA based startup Sparqlight thinks they’ve found one — scaling down business process management to provide a flexible, cloud-based option for the average knowledge worker.

“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

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
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But at the same time study after study reveals middle managers resist the idea as undermining their control and burdening them with additional responsibilities. While your initial impulse to this reality may be to throw up your hands in frustration and declare them dinosaurs, a recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation took a more constructive approach.

Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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

• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Personal tools lead to practical business

Software, Marc Andreessen declared last summer, is eating the world. In the pages of the WSJ, the Netscape co-founder reeled off a list of industries that were once about something else and are now are dominated by software, from Amazon in the bookselling space to Skype in telecoms and Netflix in video. That’s good news for the American economy, he argued, but it also seems to be really good news for Atlassian.

The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

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
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And as Susan Cain argued fairly recently in The New York Times, the current management mania for collaboration, is making matters worse for the quiet ruminators among us. Is remote working the solution to the problem?

We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pascal Maramis.

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

• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Today’s businesses require highly virtualized and services-on-demand environments. And that’s causing the network as we have known it to undergo a dramatic change. Brocade is leading this transformation with cloud-optimized networks that simplify infrastructure, increase efficiency and provide scalability so you can deliver applications, services and virtualized desktops anywhere on the network, securely and without interruption. Soon we’ll even be able to do the same with your entire data center. The future is built in. Brocade has over 25 combined years in building data center networking and Ethernet fabric technology. Learn why 90 percent of the Global 1000 and two-thirds of the world’s Internet exchanges rely on Brocade at brocade.com/everywhere

Women make up the majority of online freelancers, consultancy Zinnov recently revealed when it surveyed 30 of the top online hiring platforms. But how about the world of offline independent work –do women dominate there as well? Independent work consultancy MBO Partners released its own findings today (complete with the requisite infographic) indicating they do.

Zinnov reported that 55 percent of online freelancers are women. MBO Partners says a similar percentage (53 percent) of all American independent workers are also women, which amounts to 8.5 million women across the country working on their own. Compare that to women’s 47.6 percent participation rate in the traditional workforce and you may start to wonder if the gig-focused future of work isn’t a better match for the needs of women.

Several experts and female independent work veterans have speculated that the greater flexibility of independent work might be more suited to the desires of women and take advantage of their ability to weave together communities of collaborators and their generally lower attraction to high-status, long-hours,  battle-up-the-ladder-type career paths.

Drawing on their Independence Workforce Index, MBO Partners’ numbers supports this idea that independent work tends to suit women and that flexibility plays a central role in this. 77 percent of women independents are satisfied or highly satisfied with their mode of working, according to the consultancy, and 74 percent plan to remain independent. When asked why they plan to remain independent, 65 percent cited flexibility, 64 percent said control over their own schedule and 59 percent noted the enjoyment they get from being their own boss.

Not every woman is independent by choice, however. And MBO admits that the recent recession and spotty recovery are forcing some women to get creative about their career trajectories. “As the country continues to struggle with economic recovery, women have forged a viable third path that empowers them with even greater control and freedom over their lives and careers. It also gives them a new definition of work-life success,” Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, said, putting a positive spin on the less happy face of women forced into independent work for a statement accompanying the data.

The relative gains of women over men in the workplace have been much discussed in the last few years (exhibit A: the term “mancession”) – is the rise of independent work one more factor making work more female friendly?

Image courtesy of Flickr user tibchris.

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 rise of tablets in the enterprise

I have often wondered why we have not seen a newer, more mobile and more touch-centric descendant of Adobe’s portable document format, popularly known by its acronym – PDF. And while we wait,  four guys from MIT have come up with a super easy way to see PDF (and Microsoft Office) files on the mobile browsers without needing any kind of plugins and special add-ons.

Crocodoc, a San Francisco-based startup that has been in business for nearly five years and has gone through some pivots, is today launching a new HTML5-based enterprise service that essentially takes a PDF, strips out the text, photos and all the formatting from it and renders it on your mobile browser within three seconds. (Of course, it doesn’t work with password protected PDFs.) The best way to experience this technology is to click here and see this PDF document.

Crocodoc is going to offer this technology as a service, mostly for large companies. It already has signed up the likes of SAP, Dropbox and LinkedIn. While Crocodoc will handle processing for smaller companies, it allows large customers such as Dropbox to run the service off their services. Dropbox has been testing the technology for a while and is using it for its recently launched web viewer and easy link-sharing service.

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

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Remote working is often about practicing what you preach. Sell an online meeting product? Of course your workers should put it to the test by working while traveling. Have a brand that’s all about breaking the mold and getting outdoors? Then you can’t expect your employees to be chained to a desk. Built your company during 3am coding binges? It’s hard to tie your tech team to a nine to five schedule. But what if you’re company is all about tracking time? What sort of effect does that have on how you run your distributed team?

For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview