Workstreaming: The New Face Time
March 3rd, 2007 (8:49am) Anne Zelenka 46 CommentsTweet This (2)
Face time: “Unproductive time spent at the office meant to project the image that you’re a hardworking employee.”
My favorite story of a face time trick is the attorney who would come to his office each Saturday, drape his jacket over his chair, put a half-eaten sandwich on the desk… and leave to have some weekend fun. If coworkers happened to drop by the office to pick up a file, they’d figure he had just stepped out for a moment.
What a relief to leave the demands of face time behind when you ditch the office life to become a virtual worker. However, you still need to show that you’re working—and you need to keep yourself focused even though you could theoretically watch YouTube videos all day. If you’ve convinced a reluctant boss to allow you to telecommute, it’s all the more important to demonstrate productivity and dedication.
There is a web worker replacement for face time: workstreaming, the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.
Workstreaming is the next generation of the 11 pm email you send to your team to show them that you’ve been working all evening. Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.
The benefits of workstreaming include satisfying your boss (or client) that you’re making regular progress towards shared goals, notifying team members of your status in case it affects their work, and even giving yourself a sense of accomplishment and progress. Because it’s oriented to what you’re producing and doing and not just about how much time you’re spending on it, workstreaming isn’t so burdensome and misguided as face time requirements. However, workstreaming could certainly be manipulated to give the illusion you’re working when you’re not.
There are a wide variety of tools that might be used for workstreaming, and which ones suit you and your team depend both on what kind of work you do and what tools your coworkers are using. It’s not effective to use an IRC channel if you’re the only one on the team who knows what IRC stands for, but it can be great for a techie crowd. Twitter creates a virtual shared office space that can reproduce the chatter and intimacy of a physical office while allowing team members to share what they’re working on and what they’ve completed. RSS feeds from blogs, message boards, photo sites, and project management apps could all provide useful workstreams—especially if these are aggregated for a whole team. Source code control systems like Subversion can output RSS feeds too so you can make team members aware of new features and bug fixes as they’re checked in.
Of course there’s always email, which has been used as a “look, I’m working!” and “look what I’ve done!” tool for years. Ambient video awareness, on the other hand, seems just a bit too much like face time to qualify as a workstreaming tool.
How do you communicate your productivity and work status to your colleagues?
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Good article, this is an important subject.
I don’t have a boss that I’ve convinced to let me telecommute, but I do have clients that like to see their work getting done.
I find that project management platform like Basecamp, and actually entering stuff into it, also gives clients the ability to see that you’re working, and keeps you organized at the same time.
Also, I usually send an email when I complete a major or exciting step, that way the important events in my workstream is delivered to the client’s inbox instead of him or her having to go and find it.
Very funny story about the attorney. I used to work as a paralegal and my boss would have me go into his office, turn on the light, and pour half a diet coke so people thought he was in.
Must be something in the air — I posted a similar thought this morning. Maybe the powers that be are trying to nudge the facades off of a workplace fakers.
I use a small, jerryrigged app to hold my timesheets and email invoices. Ostensibly, it also manages my to-do list, though I tend to use a slip of paper or spiral bound notebook for that. As I do work, I try to write one or two words into the timesheet. At the end of day, I paste that info into an email as a daily report of work done that day, augmenting it with any relevant notes to clarify any issues. (You can get the app on my website link.)
Whomever is hiring you (if you’re a temp) or your manager (or project manager) won’t want more than a little info per day. They want to control your work, but only in 2-4 hour chunks. Most work is routine, anyway. So, I don’t bother with finer granularity.
I currently work for a big corporation in a department that is located in another state. For the first 2 years I lives there and worked in the office. Due to family reasons we were forced to move back to our home state. This company lives and dies by an internal instant messanging platform. We use it for EVERYTHING. However, it is very disruptive, especially in times of server problems, stalled production applications. I at times was barraged by these windows popping up and it was not unusual to have multiple group chats going on at one time AND be on a phone conference call at the same time ( gotta love big corp-IT ).
When I first started telecommuting I wasn’t used to it. I was afraid to be away from my desk for 5 minutes for the fear of someone pinging me on IM or calling my desk and me not answering – “oh he is off playing around!” I was always afraid of them thinking even though I have an exellent performance rating and have far from ever took advantage from the situation. If nothing else ive worked more!.
I would like to use something like SlimTimer or Remember The Milk/HiveMinder to create the content so you would only have to enter the tasks in one place. You could easily allow your managers access to the rss feeds but usually there is only one feed available and you would need several based on visibilty or manager filtering for ‘who would see what’ tasks.
For now IM, email and occasionally the telephone are used for collaboration. Funny how annoyed many people get now days when you actually want to TALK on the phone. “You want me to pick up the phone??!?!?!?!?!? gasp!”
Ryan
I love the flexibility of being a webworker. I can do laundry and work on a project. I like the idea of RSS, but I find to do web based work projects, it takes making sure you and your boss have agreed on a deadline or projected finish date, and then make sure you meet or exceed it- if it seems like it’s going to take longer, keep them informed of why and what issues you’re running into.
The other thing that can work well is Google Docs. It time stamps who is working on a document, and who viewed it last. I guess some people might think of it as a little big brother, but if your work involves documents or spreadsheets, this is an easy way to keep track of who has done what when.
Another low-tech workstreaming idea: Create a bunch of different IM status settings to clearly indicate where and what you might be doing. “In a meeting”,”On the Phone” are a good start. I use a few more that suit my personality and workstyle — thus approximating what it’s like to have me in the Real Office.
Nicely said. I think there will always be value in some face to face time, particularly if you are in a leadership role. But an interupt driven office environment can be very unproductive. The reality is different people have different work styles, but the essence of this is very true and 10 years from now will likely be a trend. Here are a couple of related discussions:
http://communitygrouptherapy.com/2007/03/03/communities-smart-mobs-and-a-followup-to-the-hr-discussion/
http://communitygrouptherapy.com/2007/02/28/exploring-communities-and-corporate-hr/
And lastly, I think there is a generational driver here were preferred workstyles from gen x to gen y are simply different:
http://communitygrouptherapy.com/2007/02/26/a-little-discussion-on-corporate-transparency/
Sean
Even though im a heads-down coder/admin/dba in various scenarios, I am much of a ‘people-person’. Being that i work remote (read that home-office) most of the time I miss the group ‘buzz’ or energy I felt when working with several developers. I in fact would love to have a constant webcam going with other developers just for the sake of the energy or collaboration with technical issues. I’ve long since burned out on music, talk-radio (yes I listened to talk-radio for a while). Anything beats a isolated room ( at least I have a window ). This really isn’t directed at the specific topic of face2face time with colleagues or managers, but more generally hooking up with other web workers just to help get motivated.
thanks
Ryan
I agree with Ryan. Solving problems, or at least defining problems, together, is more fun than doing it alone.
My team of 5 people has been working virtual for almost 10 years now.
We use IRC for conversations, as we’re all comfortable with that.
We track our time with a little vi editor application my partner wrote, and he recently added publishing of current open items to a web page so we can check status. I’m not sure that that’s the right interface, as it’s another thing to check. It probably would work better if it it was integrated with IRC.
Managing someone who works remotely requires a very clear view of them as a person in your head. It’s so easy to forget when someone is quiet that is more likely to mean their concentrating rather than just ignoring you. It also requires a lot of trust to let go of the face time=productivity theory, which is just plain false.
One thing I don’t do enough of is schedule social activities face to face. It’s critical for building the strong social ties that makes working remotely possible.
Thanks!
Evelyn
There is now a Knol on workstreaming:
http://knol.google.com/k/henri-bergius/workstreaming/205l6w1dyeyf0/2
Yammer is a great place for workstreaming.
very interesting concept and one of the best use of wordpress =)