It’s hard work to set up and supervise a teleworking team for some projects. In the web content service I run, I need to gather work-from-home writers together and help them work as a team. This is especially important for projects that require group cooperation and interaction, such as an ebook or a multi-authored blog.
One of the advantages of teleworking is that there’s less opportunities for workplace gossip and personality clashes. Most teams approach their communications very matter-of-factly. But I find that this isn’t always the case, especially when members each have very different working styles.
When managing a team of very different people all over the globe, what can you do to keep the team, and the work, from imploding?
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When our grandparents said that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, they were referring to the fruit, not the computer. But it’s not far-fetched that the same thing could be said about teleworking. By opting to telework, employees and freelancers have a better chance of keeping themselves physically healthy.
How does this happen and to what extent is it valid?
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When the benefits of teleworking are discussed, one of the major points raised is that teleworking is better for the environment. One of the more obvious causes of this is that if more people work from home, lesser people drive to work, reducing petrol consumption and the emissions that result from it.
A recent survey by the US Consumer Electronics Association found that although the carbon emissions from home offices increased because of telecommuting, the saved petrol consumption more than makes up for it:
The report states that there are 3.9 million people in the U.S. who work from home at least one day a week. By avoiding an average 22-mile commute to the place of work, and taking into account the increased power use in the home, this practice saves about 840 million (U.S.) gallons of petrol, equivalent to taking two million cars off the road for a year.
Source: PC World, Telecommuting Saves Carbon Emissions
Despite these claims, there are still some skeptics.
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In today’s turbulent economic times, it’s important to have lower expenses and increased income - especially for teleworkers. While many independent contractors are getting more business, it’s still wise to make deliberate efforts to thrive. Here are some ways we will be able to do that:
Hold on to your clients. There will be the occasional client who will be slower in paying out invoices, or even clients who give up and stop requesting your services altogether. Take the time to identify which of your clients might do these things.
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Our colleagues at jkOnTheRun thought we’d like this article from Digital Nomad, and they were right.
It’s now been 3 years and 3 months since I accepted a fulltime, salaried position working out of a home office, and I’d have to agree with just about all of Jay White’s rules and lessons for working from home. You start out thinking, “that won’t happen to me” and before you know it, it’s 3 pm and you’re still doing “just one thing” before you stop and have breakfast.
Of his list, I’m only not on board for one:
Dress the part.
In line with the showering bit, you should be keen to the notion that someone may invite you to a last minute web meeting with video. If you are able to work effectively in your shorts, fine, but have a business shirt handy. Some people need to dress up in order to get into the business mood. If you are one of them, dress as if you were really heading into the office.
I’ve read that one before, and sorry, doesn’t work for me. I am definitely not one of those people that needs to dress up to think business. First of all, I rarely, if ever, get pulled into impromptu video meetings. As an organization, we’re not there yet. Thankfully, my day job is casual so even when I’m heading to the office I’m grabbing the jeans and not the panty hose. But I definitely dress differently for the home office. On days I’m working from the basement you will never ever catch me wearing shoes unless I’ve just walked in the door. Just can’t stand the things, and I think better without them.
How about you? Any do-or-die rules for surviving the teleworking life?
If you’re really determined, you can survive as a freelancing web worker. It takes a few months of trial and error, learning all you can, and finding the tools and processes that work for you. After that, most people are glad to find that they’ve survived the hard part, regardless of the obstacles and naysayers.
But it’s one thing to survive as a web worker. To thrive, on the other hand, happens on a completely different level.
Surviving versus thriving
Survival means staying alive, continuing your existence as a web worker. This isn’t necessarily an easy feat. Web working isn’t an easy decision to make, especially if you’re coming from a traditional office environment. With all the obstacles in the way of successful web working, it’s almost puzzling why it’s a growing trend. But if you can regularly pay your bills with the work that you do, and you can do it remotely, then you know you’ve got what it takes to survive.
Unlike survival, thriving is a mindset that allows you to fulfill more than just your basic needs. Thriving is about setting career goals , meeting them, and feeling a deep sense of personal fulfillment when it’s comes to your work.
So how does a web worker thrive?
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Presence and availability information has been one of the key enabling technologies for web workers, providing signaling mechanisms for indicating the ability and willingness of users to communicate, whether by instant message, VoIP call, caller ID or even an email auto-responder.
Together presence and status indicators weaved through our various communication channels make teleworking and telecommuting less painless and provide useful ’social signaling’ that would ordinarily take place in office environments. It’s arguable that time & distance are no longer useful measures of the value or cost of communication, but the richness of contextual signaling available in any one medium.
Personally, I’ve found the most profound innovations in presence, latterly, to be Twitter and to a lesser extent Jaiku. Both provide important mechanisms for richly describing presence location - whether it’s location, activity or even mood…the latter perhaps signaling the solicitation of communication. In Jaiku’s case, it’s not difficult to imagine the universe of Google applications setting and utilizing presence through Jaiku.
Recently, Anthony Townsend of Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future speculated on Telepresence as a Driver for Presence. Townsend writes about the correlation between new communication technologies and long-haul travel, speculating that the arrival of HD videoconferencing and the uptick in fuel prices should be a perfect storm, but improved fidelity is often applied to mundane communication with a premium still attached to in-person meetings when closing down important decisions.
Certainly, HD sports channels are no substitute for watching your favourite team live at a stadium, though such media broadens the appeal and access to physically exclusive events. So despite living at the bleeding edges of human communication, we web workers do place a premium on ‘live’…
Read more at Telepresence as a Driver for Presence and The Future of Presence…
Kurt Cagle, the managing editor of XML.com, recently explored Telework as the New Face of the Agile Workforce in a piece for O’Reilly Media. The article examines the intersection of rising fuel prices, the credit crunch, rising real estate prices and congested transport networks, contrasting them with the steady rise in teleworking and telecommuting.
Here’s a few interesting notes from of Cagle’s analysis…
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