Imagine it's 1970 (unfortunately I can!), and you've arranged to meet a friend on a street corner, prior to a visit to the cinema. You both agreed to meet at 6 pm, but it's already 6:15 and your friend is nowhere to be seen. You find a public phone box and call her house, but there's no reply. Presumably she's on her way, but has just been delayed - except that you have no way of knowing. If she's not going to turn up, you'd like to cut your losses earlier rather than later, so that you can do something else with your evening. But you don't feel you can just abandon the evening, because she'll probably show up if you do. So what can you do, except wait?

This used to be a huge problem, played out thousands of times a day in a variety of circumstances, and which was largely solved by the invention of the pager (and more recently, the mobile phone). In a nutshell, the real problem was not that you couldn't easily contact your friend (although that was nigh-on impossible); the real problem was that you did not have enough information about your friend's whereabouts to be able to make a sensible decision. In today's parlance, you did not have her presence information.

The mobile phone, however, doesn't solve this problem; it merely sidesteps it. If you ring a friend on his mobile phone and he answers, you know that he is (probably) awake and is (possibly) prepared to speak to you. If you get voicemail, that could mean he's on another call, or has turned his phone off, or is underground ... or something. A lack of reply does not convey very much information.

Now think about this in terms of workshifting. You could be anywhere, and so could the people you need to talk to. However, unlike friends (who are probably not that far from you most of the time), your co-workers could be anywhere in the world, which introduces a non-zero probability that it's the middle of the night where they are. This is where presence information can be so usefully factored in. It is extremely useful to know when somebody is available to talk to, but it can also be really valuable to know not just that they are unavailable, but why they are unavailable. The reason: it can help you plan when you should try talking to them again.

Try thinking of it this way. People are continuously available unless (for example)

• It's the weekend (not always Saturday and Sunday, especially in the Middle East)
• It's a public holiday wherever they happen to be
• They're taking time off
• They're asleep
• It's too late in the evening
• It's too early in the morning
• They're in transit (and it's too awkward or not private enough to talk)
• They're in a meeting or otherwise engaged
• They're at the gym at lunchtime
• They don't want to talk to you

...which can result in few opportunities to talk, so you probably want to know when these opportunities occur in order to make the most of them. Now, there is some technological help available here. Many of us are Outlook users, and probably use the calendar facilities on a regular basis. However, it's not that easy to define all the different periods of unavailability in Outlook, and there's no support that I can see in the product for declaring yourself selectively available to some people but not others. Outlook also doesn't handle timezones that well.

But the provision of good quality presence information is not that difficult: you need to know which country somebody is in (from which the timezone, standard weekends and public holidays can be derived), and what their everyday routine is (bearing in mind that there may be several different schedules e.g. for shift workers). Implementing "selective availability" is harder, but not that hard; in the end, it's only another database. And you may well wish to tell people how you want to be contacted - IM during work hours, email if you're busy, mobile phone during the evenings, and not at all at weekends, perhaps. Finally, you need to be able to manage itineraries, so that a change of country at a certain time can be registered in advance, allowing people to schedule calls with you wherever you are (I'm making the assumption that this is a Good Thing; your mileage may vary!). And rather than hiding these choices away in obscure menus, allow them all to be defined from the same menu; make it easy, and people are more likely to take the trouble to keep their information up to date. Of course, if they don't, they may get phoned in the middle of the night.

For those seeking to get in touch with their co-workers, there are some obvious questions that you might want answered:

• Where are they?
• Are they busy or free right now?
• If they're busy now, when are they next free?
• What means of communication would they prefer me to use?

If you need to get in touch with several people simultaneously, then technology can compare all the answers and come up with a set that are mutually acceptable to all (or state that there is no suitable time for everyone to get together).
 
The advantages of this should be obvious: fewer wasted calls, better planned calls, less frustration, and shorter lead times for communications. The disadvantage is that everybody needs to participate, and further than participation only helps others, not yourself, which requires a certain amount of selflessness on the part of already busy people. And ultimately, it's down to the individual.

Can you see a scheme like this succeeding in your workplace?


Photo Credit: Darwin Bell

I don't think there's likely to be much argument if I aver that email is the number one method of communication between remote workers, at least in a business context. And for most people, email is synonymous with Microsoft's Outlook software. So I'd like to use this post to make a few points on the subject, and being me, I'm going to try to be a tad contentious.

OK, so I'll give email one concession: it can be really useful because the world and his dog have it. If you have to communicate with people in other organisations, an email address is all you need, and the software does the rest. Its coverage is thus unrivalled, and it's well used, partly because of its ubiquity, partly because it's so easy to use, and partly because alternatives are a bit thin on the ground.

That's all well and good as far as it goes. But there are many insidious problems with email which can inhibit rather than promote collaboration. Here's my shortlist:

1. Many people may not realise that there are alternatives to Outlook. In fact, there are any number of email readers available, many of them free. They don't all have integrated calendars, but some offer facilities which Outlook doesn't. If you find Outlook frustrating to use, or lacking in some way, take a look at what's on offer outside the Microsoft world, and you may find something that suits you better.
2. Discussions start small, but grow in length. Who hasn't received email with the last few dozen comments trailing off the page, each neatly indented one chevron more than the last? And most of the time, the comments are in reverse order, making it harder than it should be to follow the whole conversation from end to end.
3. Discussions also broaden in context as they age, spawning sub-discussions and often splitting off at a tangent into new subject areas entirely. Outlook cannot cope with this unless the subject line is rigorously changed to match the content (and this is frequently forgotten about). Much better for this kind of thing are discussion boards which offer a multi-threading capability - you get to see who has changed the subject, and which messages are sent in response to which other messages.
4. Careful use of the "to", "cc" and especially "bcc" email fields allow political control over who sees what. It's easy to exclude people - for whatever reason - and you never know who has been copied in on the quiet. As a consequence, you can find yourself in trouble you hadn't bargained for if some lurker decides you've spoken out of turn. Some people also have the irritating habit of starting to copy in their boss when they realise they are losing the argument.
5. Many companies have email retention policies for legal reasons (which are actually email non-retention policies), so you can find that the email discussion of three months' vintage that you wanted to reference has evaporated without so much as a by-your-leave.

This is not to say that we shouldn't use emails; there are plenty of cases in which email works well, for example 1:1 conversations and the broadcasting of a message to a large group. But if you are expecting the next email you send to burgeon into a wide-ranging multi-person conversation - then maybe you should be thinking about an alternative rather than hitting the "send" button.

So, have any of you tackled this problem? And what happened when you did?



Photo Credit: Somewhat Frank

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

My fellow "Citrite" Tal Klein just provided a great insight in his comment on my recent "Eruptions" post. I hope he won't mind if I replicate it and discuss it here, because it is evidence of a new style of thinking which (I have to say) I rather like. Tal's comment was:

I think teleworking is now officially a part of my life. I'm even teleworking when I'm *in* the office because I have meetings with people all over the world and I honestly don't care if they're at home or in an office as long as they're getting their work done.

I'm pleased to see this, because Tal's insight is into the very nature of remoteness itself: remoteness means "remote from each other", not just "remote from HQ". This is akin to the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican thinking; HQ is not the centre of the universe, rather there is no centre, just lots of locations, all some (possibly variable) distance from each other, just as stars in a galaxy do. So your organisation could consist entirely of one-person home offices, or (because locations tend to cluster) the offices could be cubes in one of many floors in one of several buildings on a campus, as part of a large multinational. Most companies are somewhere in between. But the crucial point is the shift in the basic, underlying assumption, from:

The world is basically centralised, and anything that's elsewhere is a special case

to:

The world is basically distributed, with co-location of entities being a happy convenience

The centralised world is very tempting to live in, because it's simple; but the distributed world is real life. So what's to do?

Well, we can really only make the obvious compromise: let's recognise and allow for the distributed nature of things, and exploit any benefits (which are, to be fair, huge), but we don't really want to deal with all the complexity it introduces, so let's try to hide as much of it as we can to make life simpler for anyone who has to plug themselves into this world. And this is what the computing world has been doing ever since it came into being: as the power of computers and the breadth of the communications between them grew, the more complex the applications that could be built, and the greater the need to simplify the user experience to keep pace.

Translating this into practical terms, organisations that wish to fully embrace teleworking should ensure that all their staff are as fully equipped as the homeworker with phone, computer, webcam and headset, so you don't end up with the situation where our teleworker can't use the power of the communications at her disposal because her co-workers back at the ranch don't have the same kit. If two staff members happen to be co-located, either temporarily (say at a meeting at a customer's office) or more permanently (working in the same building) then they are fortunate enough to be able to converse face-to-face as well. Having said that, many intra-office discussions are still carried out by email! So we shift from "face-to-face normal, webcam if needed" to "webcam, unless we can do face-to-face".
I hope this doesn't sound too pedantic (although I prefer the term "accurate"!); the difference in thinking might seem trivial, but the change in overall perspective is huge.

What's your perspective?

Photo Credit: iammistletoe

The UK has become a quieter place this last week, with the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland. (What is it with Iceland? First it declares bankruptcy, then it catches fire ... sounds like the mother of all insurance frauds to me!) All plane flights have been cancelled, giving the long-suffering residents of Heathrow and Gatwick the ability to hear each other speak. Tens of thousands of people are stranded - both visitors to the UK, who are unable to leave, and Brits abroad unable to get home (like my sister and her family, enjoying an extended holiday in the Mediterranean at some airline's expense). For many, life is temporarily better.

But for others, it will have got more complicated. One of my team is currently in Naples (that's Italy, not Florida) - he can't fly home, it's a little far to drive (and most European car hire places don't do one-way rentals), and the only ways of getting across the English Channel - ferries and the Eurostar train - are overbooked. But that's OK; he's currently logged in, using the PC in his office here in Cambridge (UK, not Massachusetts, although that would be no harder), talking to us on MS Communicator, and working more or less normally. He'll be joining in our meetings using conference calling and some of our company's own products, and he'll be drinking better coffee than we will. In fact, I'm beginning to wish it were me in Naples and him here.

However, all this would be infeasible without the right technological support, and without helpful company policies. I suppose I could insist that my missing team member used any means of travel whatsoever to get back to the office and continue work, but this would be churlish of me, and would probably waste resources all round, not to mention creating ill-will quite unnecessarily. And because all our team elect to work at home now and again, we are all used to working remotely, and working with others who are working remotely. And those of us who work in virtual teams - which may be spread worldwide - accept this model of working almost as natural.

What I find strange is the organisation that requires its staff to work in virtual teams, but then refuses to allow them to work at home. In this situation, the thing that's stopping them can only be the notion of working at home (a place traditionally associated with leisure, although again I know people whose home lives are so busy they come into work for a rest). I can only marvel at the tortuous logic that gets used to justify such practices, arising largely from fear of loss of control, and from a lack of trust. I think the moral of the story is not to work for organisations which, whilst trusting staff with trade secrets and corporate plans, simultaneously refuse to credit them with the integrity to work whilst out of sight of their boss.
It needn't take a volcanic eruption to jolt organisations into the modern age; but every such disruption helps in bringing about a seismic shift in the way people work.

What are your thoughts?


Photo Credit: Plasmastik