Have you ever been asked that question, either by an adult (who might understand your answer) or a small child (who probably won't)? How do you describe what you do all day? Well, the answer might be simpler than you think; it all depends on how much detail you want to go into. In truth, there is an infinity of different answers, all of which lie on a spectrum that, at one end, provides no detail at all, and at the other, an excruciating amount. Useful answers tend to be somewhere in between these two extremes.
 
Here's an example: to what extent are people the same? You could categorise us all identically, by saying that we're mammals. Or you could claim that people fall into two categories - male and female. Or you could divide us up by other characteristics: eye colour, hair colour, ear shape, foot size,  .... or you could choose so many descriptive characteristics that everybody, even an identical twin, falls into a category of size 1. In fact, the technique of deciding how detailed your answer needs to be is an important one (as it determines the level of abstraction at which you are operating), and can help us solve some of the problems of remote working.

If you are trying to come up with a technological "solution" (and I use quotes because it will only be a solution if it works for you), then you don't want a view of the world in which all remote workers look different; you want one where they look the same. That way, you only have to devise one solution, not millions. So we need to take a highly abstract view of what remote workers do. An important first distinction is between task workers and knowledge workers; we can lump task workers together, because all they need is access to whatever software lets them carry out their allotted tasks (such as a CRM system for a home-worker who would otherwise be a call centre operative), plus any comms equipment (such as a phone to talk to customers). There's probably a bit more to task workers' lives, in that they may need to communicate with their coworkers, but they generally live at the task end of the task-knowledge spectrum.

So what about knowledge workers (and the knowledge-working component of task work)? Here the situation is more complex, but we can attempt a broad classification, with a small number of categories, which fits most jobs pretty well. It's safe to say that the vast majority of knowledge workers undertake a subset of the following activities, in some proportion:

• Decision-making
• Generating new or improved "material" (any kind of artefact, output or information),
• As a solo activity
• As a group activity
• Finding material
• Which is new to you
• Which you've seen or worked on before
• Communicating with others
• Synchronously (at the same time, e.g. phone)
• Asynchronously (at different times, e.g. email)
• Pre-communication activities
• Discovering who can help you or answer your questions
• Determining someone's availability
• Determining the best way of contacting someone
• Sharing your material with others
• Dealing with incoming material (shared with you by others)
• Filtering (removing the dross)
• Prioritisation (sorting the non-dross)

Some people may carry out other minor activities that don't fall into any of these categories, but the list above is complete for most purposes. Now go down the list and look at each item: with the exception of decision-making and solo material generation, all activities require access to remote people, remote information, or both. Therefore, any software that can realistically claim to be a "solution" must provide the remote worker with help in all such activities. Instantly, we can see that many touted solutions are nothing of the sort, because they only address a fraction of the problem space. And the more solutions you need to get all the bases covered, the less well such solutions will be integrated.

But does integration of these partial solutions matter? You betcha! The brain works through chains of association, by following links between remembered people, places, things and experiences. If software isn't chained together in the same way, it won't keep up with the way in which you think; you'll be dragged down to its pace and way of doing things, not freed up by it. The best overall solutions will be designed around the way you want to use them - that's largely what a great User Experience is about.

In my next post, I'll start exploring some of the technologies at our disposal today, and examine the degree to which they can help the remote worker. But I feel fairly confident in saying that we haven't yet seen the killer app in this area.

Do you agree?

Photo Credit: mkosut