Author:Johan Hjelm of Techdirt
Discipline and Structure
by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Jan 7
Keeping mobile workers in touch – and keeping in touch with mobile workers – is not different from any other self-governed work. There are two types of structure which are needed: Discipline among the workers; and a clear and well-defined work structure.
To start with the discipline:
When people are not in the office, they must be able to get the information that their co-workers are using easily and efficiently. This means work has to be structured from the start, so that communications can be structured accordingly. Not every task is suited for mobile work. Making sure that everythign works smoothly means routines; discipline means following them.
For those who work from outside the office, the most important thing is to be able to share information with their co-workers efficiently and easily. This does not mean email; if you are on any public email list, it means hundreds of spam messages. Using blogs and RSS is equally efficient. But they must be easy to use, and people who use them must be disciplined enough to enable their co-workers to get the information easily. Cooperating with people outside the company often means email. Of course, urgent requests should be answered urgently – within the same working day.
This also means having good support applications that make administrative work easy, and automates as much of those tasks as possible. A worker which has to fill in forms and discuss them with the secretary every time he wants to get something done is not very efficient. If there has to be meetings (and very rarely there does – except to agree the project plan and task assignments) there must be good support tools for that too. A great teleconferencing system is sufficient, however, if the routine is to take minutes in all meetings – and the routine is to follow them.
The discipline is also necessary to get the mobile workers to publish and backup their work regularly. Making it avilable on their internal blog pages is not only a great way of making sure that others can see what is going on (if they can find it easily, which is a precondition); it is also a simple and useful way to back up work so it does not get lost. If the work always is kept there the most you can lose is a days work. But it means people should not work on hundreds of different things at once, and that brings us to the next structure necessary: Planning and structuring work.
Mobile work is a project: Plan and structure
When workers are independent, deliver according to a pre-agreed plan, and can trust that it does not change, they will work more efficiently (as has already been established on this blog). This goes for everyone, including those who feel that work is a place where you meet co-workers and that you need to ask the manager before even getting coffee. If the work is planned and clearly laid out, and the project plan is agreed beforehand – but there are points where it can be changed without breaking anything – then the workers can be efficient in their own pace. The trick is managing the plan, and not the workers; and get their buyin before the work starts. If they do not agree to the plan, it will only work with lots of painful direct communication between the manager and the workers. Not that direct communication is painful – it is necessary too – but it is a problem if the mobile worker is in a completely different time zone, for instance.
For many managers, it will be a hard problem to agree to a plan and then keep their hands off until the tasks are supposed to be done. For many workers, the idea of agreeing to a plan is somewhat alien. Both have to change.
Motivation comes easily with work satisfaction; satisfaction comes from control, and control comes not only from control over the daily work. But also from control over the project plan. This is why it is necessary for the workers to buy in to the plan beforehand, and why getting them to do this is the most important part of the managers work. If users feel they are involved and that they are driving the work, they will be satisfied when they conclude it successfully.
But with a good project plan which everybody is committed to follow, and the discipline to take minutes, put work on the wiki, blog a couple of times a week – there is no reason the mobile worker should not be equally well knowledgeable about the important part of the colleauges work as if he were in the office.
What Investment Are You Measuring?
by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Dec 9
What investment are you talking about measuring the return on? To measure the ROI, there would have to be an investment which was specific to making people mobile. However, the only investment needed to make workers mobile are laptops, VPN, Internet, and mobile phones. And that is part of the daily work portfolio anyway. So what investment do you want to measure?
The underlying assumption is of course “there will be more costs since I can not monitor my employees”. Well, there are a number of sources – from popular books like “the four-hour work week” to serious studies by national research agencies – that people actually become more productive when they are not micro-managed, but can control their own work. Of course, if you change the management philosophy and the work situation and the same time, it is impossible to tell which had which effect. But generally speaking, it will always appear like people are more productive when they become mobile workers.
Those who already are mobile, especially those who travel a lot on business, have no choice. Here, the cost can be significant, though, unless there is free Internet access in the hotel, or you travel in the same country so you escape horrendous data roaming fees for 3G. But any mobile road warrior has been through the same tricks, and knows the cost of not being connected is much, much higher than the 25 euro per day that Swisscom charges in some hotels, for instance. They tend to look for the cheapest connectivity options, because they know how important it is. And the hotels are starting to catch on (although here is a real issue, that not all hotels have, or charge outrageous fees for in-room access). But they are already covered in the measurements of the investment – the cost is part of the travel cost which is part of the standardization budget, or budget for product development, or whatever. The measurement is already in place and there is no specific investment, and the ROI is known and sufficiently high – otherwise, they would not be doing it.
So the simple answer is: Keep using the same measurement methods. There is no specific ROI on mobile workers, because there is no specific investment.
The only thing that has changed is that people are not in the office as often. There are, of course, companies who have tried having less office space by using “hot seats” (not everyone has their own desk), but that generally makes people feel homeless for real. And a small cubicle is not a big investment, even if it is empty most of the time (if it is, you have other problems with the finances of your company).The important thing is to offer people a choice. For some, going to work may actually mean a break from a messy home situation, so it may mean more productivity. For others, it is the other way around. And for those who travel a lot on business, there is no choice.
One issue is that in some countries, the home workplace has to fulfill legal standards. But that investment can be covered by the employee, if there is a need for an investment. Generally speaking, letting someone work from home if they do not have space for it is a bad idea anyway. And in that case, the employee can be responsible for the cost. Or it can be a part of the employment benefits.
So on the whole, there is no specific I to measure the R on. Just keep measuring the productivity of people as usual. It will go up.
Three Ways To Keep Up With Coworkers
by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Nov 28
If you are a mobile worker, there are three ways you need to keep up with your colleagues: Social, current work or project, and knowledge. They are not isolated – you need the social aspect to work in a project, and which projects you participate in determines what you need to learn, based on what you already know. And how nice a person you are.
Keeping up with colleagues, when there is no water cooler, no office parties, no coffee breaks with cake or cubicles where you can hang over the wall? The social aspect of keeping up is probably the most difficult for any mobile worker. If you are in a completely different time zone, you will not be able to take phone calls, and those only help when you are in a one-to-one relationship with the person. Many people prefer this method of communication, and apart from personal meetings it is the only way to provide an emotional context (video conferencing works too, but as it is now, it is no better than phone conferences). But it is hard when you are in different time zones, and it creates interruptions which disturb the work. You can use low-key methods, such as blogs and status pages in a social network system, to keep others informed about what you are doing – and you can find out about them the same way. Not being intrusive is  the most important premise for mobile work.
This goes hand in hand with the third aspect – the learning. Everyone needs to learn new things all the time, and when the project group is not in the same office, and not even the same city, the learning has to be distributed. And nowadays, the best source for everything can be found on the Internet (the Internet itself is not the best source). So it makes sense to divide the knowledge creation needed for the project. This means keeping others informed about what you know. That means either that there is a huge knowledge base in the company, or that everyone makes a blog and tells what they are working on. Project managers can then determine what the project members should study – and what they should focus on learning. And how they should document it, apart from in the work that the project does.
The final way is the project pages. Making sure that only the most current project pages are visible solves another problem: You do not only want to keep track of the current project members, you often need to find someone who worked on a project a long time ago – on something completely different than what they work on today. Keeping all project pages (this, of course, means projects have to have home pages) and making them accessible to everyone in the company (marked, of course, in a way that it becomes visible when they took place) kills two birds with one stone: It becomes easy to follow people through the projects – and to figure out if someone has solved the same problem before. And who.
Forming social contacts, however, is not that easy online as it is to keep up with others. The company needs to organize ways for people who can be useful to each other to meet. Courses is one such way, sales meetings another, internal technical conferences another. Different from phone meetings, blogs, and project pages, this requires quite a bit of resources. Someone has to pay for the airline tickets for all these people.
So by the simple means of logging project work in a company publicly accessible way, keeping blogs of what everyone does, and of course adding a search engine to the mix, it becomes easy to keep track of colleagues, both current and past. You can then call them if you like, if they happen to be in the same time zone. Keeping up in a non-intrusive way becomes easy. But keeping up with people does not work if you did not have a relationship in the first place.
Culture And Trust Necessary For Managing Digital Nomads
by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Sep 24
First, if people need supervision, or if the company feel they need supervision, forget mobility. You can not work in a mobile way if your workers can not be trusted to perform their tasks on their own – and the tasks can be performed in a decently decentralized way. Perhaps some managers need to learn how to distribute work for mobility to take hold, or companies may even choose to get rid of managers altogether.
Because being mobile comes down to trusting your people. Giving people a task which means lots of autonomy means giving them the opportunity to do it where they like. Tailoring the tasks to the person is tricky (not everyone can create their own tasks and run with them, at least not in a big company). Having a reporting system which lets the manager check every month or so that things are going to plan is necessary, however, as are administrative routines – which have to be 100 % electronic, except for the submission of receipts and similar. And, not too much of those either. Too much administration shows little trust.
A second thing that is needed is a strong culture, so everyone feels they are engaged in the work, and that the workplace wants them to perform – and trusts them to do it on their own.
The worker needs to feel that he has been given the power to do his job anywhere, anytime. But this is precisely where the problem lies. The worker has to be able to do his job, but he also has to be able to manage his job. Making sure there is time for friends and family, making sure there is time for relaxation. If workers just plug away a hundred hours every week, you get a stressed-out society, with people dying from overwork and population shrinking. This means a lot comes down to the person: Making the balance work means not accepting more work than you can handle in the given time, and it means making sure you are only accepting things which are right for you – as a member of a team. The goals for the team (and the goals for the individual) have to be set so that they map to the business goals of the company, of course. But they have to be possible to perform independently.
As an individual, you have to know your limits. Both in terms of work competence and time. How much time does it take to continue to build that competence? Reading a book about your area of work at bedtime may sound less attractive than reading Harry Potter, but it is one way that work will continue to infringe on life. On the other hand, going to the bank on Tuesday morning is not a problem. You have to pace yourself so you get a decent balance.
But you have to be able to trust your co-workers, especially those formerly known as managers, who are responsible for getting your budget for the work you have to do. And trust, of course, goes both ways: They have to trust you to perform. Eventually, the basis for making workers mobile is trust: in themselves, in their co-workers, in the organization they work for. And customers, as well. If you have that, there is no need for an office (other than for security reasons). Building that trust is what companies have to do – and they will be rewarded by more creative workers, who create more of the currency of the future – ideas and solutions. Because the worker is an investment, not an expense, and you have to be careful about your investments. The knowledge in peoples’ heads expand with experience, and that means every hour worked is an investment, too. So for the company to make sure that workers know how to pace themselves is going to be important – merely the cost of replacing a person who dies suddenly is going to put you back against the competition.
So ultimately, maintaining the work-life balance comes down to the worker himself. If you work in a company you trust, with people you trust, and know how to pace yourself. The company is there to help you do it. There are of course checklists you could make and long items you could write about the practicalities of this, but trust is what it all comes down to.
Key Factors For Digital Nomads
by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Aug 16
The laptop is the key to being mobile. With a really big hard disk, and a means to do everything electronically. Storing all your old emails, documents you need for reference etc makes it possible to bring up the background for any discussion when you leave the office. But since the laptop can hardly be switched on all the time, a mobile phone is required – preferably one which syncs well with the laptop.
Two more things you need: A good backup in the corporate network, so you can restore your work in a day or so (if the laptop gets stolen or damaged). And a bundle of electrical adapters, for the different countries you are going to go to. The power adapter of the laptop has to be able to handle this, too. Depending on the philosophy of the IT department, also a network cable – not all companies allow wireless access, and wired is faster. If the company runs a decent VPN, then you do not need an office any more.
Of course, the battery life of the laptop is crucial. It has to be usable for a decent flight, otherwise you will be dependent on electricity. And a secrecy filter helps, too. An office has a big advantage in terms of security: You always know that the person looking at your stuff is friendly. Spread out your things on a tabletop in a Starbucks nearby, or start reading documents on an airplane – and you never know who is looking.
These things you can actually squeeze into a decent-sized bag, which can be a rucksack or have a shoulder strap, and they should not weigh more than six kilos, if you choose to bring a book for the time when the plane is taking off and landing, or when you are standing in the train. Or maybe an MP3 player if you drive, or otherwise is dependent on music or audio books. That the bag is strong and comfortable to carry is most important. Looks matter too, of course. But with these things, and the software available in the operating systems today, anyone can forget the office.
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