1. Does working remotely allow people to be more productive, and how?
2. What are the barriers that could potentially reduce #productivity when working from home?
3. What methods/tools do you use to overcome some of the barriers we just discussed? Are #collaboration focused tools the key?

A few key points came out, for successful flexible working:

- Clear & measurable goals, and continual communication
- Our current ability to measure productivity in the office is limited and this restricts the adoption of flexible practices
- The ability to work to your own schedule and within your own ambitions and motivations enhances productivity
- Do not overwhelm remote employees with technology and give them the time and space to learn them. Engage staff in a conversation about what tools to use.
- Control freak managers are a barrier to productivity and flexible working

The full transcription is available in PDF form here. It was a great success, and we hope to repeat it again soon.
Thanks to everyone who got involved.

It’s a natural fear: I’m an employer and I occasionally share it, but I’m going to argue that it is misguided and disguises more fundamental and harder problems that we need to address.

The national study interviewed more than 1200 office-based businesses with less than 250 employees. It revealed a clear disconnection between employees’ and employers’ perceptions of flexible working: 80% of employees feel that they are at least as productive working from home as in the office. Furthermore, 33% of employees said they could do all or most of their job from home. However, the majority (55%) of employers do not believe it helps productivity.

This week’s Economist highlights similar concerns relating to office productivity in a slightly different context: access to social networking sites from the office. The Economist discusses how employers were initially concerned that Excel would be a distraction as employees used it for creating lists for personal reasons. Nobody today would contest that Excel is a valuable productivity tool.

But how many office employers have metrics for measuring productivity, let alone changes in productivity that occurs through innovation?

For example, at oneDrum, we’ve hired everyone through contacts or (social) networking. Not only does that save us the cost of a recruitment fee but I believe it assures higher quality employees through personal recommendations and shared interests.

My point is two-fold: Innovation increases productivity in ways we don’t normally consider; more generally how many employers actually have metrics around productivity. If you can measure that productivity has fallen because somebody has been working at home two days a week then fair enough. But I don’t know any that can.

This is the first aspect that employers’ concerns disguise: We are very poor at measuring employee productivity. This is a major problem and merits being solved in a first class way and not subordinated to a set of arbitrary constraints about how and where employees work.

In the UK, and across a lot of the Western world, we have put a lot off effort into equality legislation designed to encourage women back into the workforce (e.g. maternity leave). The goal of this legislation is to increase the talent pool. The effect of this for a business is to reduce the cost of talent.

One advantage of flexible working is an extension of this practice, encouraging people to work for you that otherwise would not and therefore reducing your staff costs, hence increasing the productivity of your business. Have you factored that into your productivity calculation?  If you are unable or unwilling to invest in measuring productivity, and you do not trust your (talented) staff to behave, then you’re likely to object to flexible working.

This is the second aspect that employers’ concerns disguise: You have an HR problem! Guess what genius, if they cannot be trusted to work at home then they cannot be trusted to work in the office and you shouldn’t have hired them. This neatly returns to my earlier point about the productive value of social networks: they ensure employees with shared values more akin to current employers and employees.

Employers cited another reason for their concerns about productivity:  ensuring access to people and documents from remote locations. I’m more sympathetic here, after all oneDrum was founded to address this specific problem. But although existing solutions are clunky, and come with greater cost and overhead than I believe they should do, there are plenty of decent options. You can find many of these listed at Web Worker Daily.

I’ve worked from home for the last three years, and sometimes I am distracted by the presence of my three-year old son, one-year old daughter and their mother’s occasional squeals for assistance. But that misses the point: I was frequently distracted when I worked in an office by playing cricket in the cubicle, popping out to Starbucks, and worst of all, stupid and long, drawn out pointless meetings. Even that misses the point: the balance of benefits and costs for flexible working is multifaceted but you don’t know how to measure them and you simply fear the unknown unknown more than the known unknown.

In this respect it is like the nose of a dog. Dogs are constantly sniffing their environment. The dog is trying to understand which of the options to take:

1. Ignore it
2. Lick it
3. Urinate on it

From the dogs perspective, the best result is that it has discovered something worth eating. Sniffing is an efficient way of testing lots of objects for edibility. If they pass, they qualify for the next stage – licking or chewing. The dog can still reject it at this stage. Once swallowed however it is more committed.

Even in the stomach though, even more serious (expensive) organs can still reject (vomit up) the consumed object, but this takes effort and discomfort.

Beyond this, the object is decomposed into materials that are either utilized or expelled.

If Twitter is the nose of the dog then blogs must be the tongue, mainstream media the gullet and academia the gut. At each point we are filtering what is useful, useless and dangerous, qualifying for the next stage.

The nose is not the biggest organ, in fact it is a rather small one. But it is supremely useful and digestion starts there. Twitter will remain niche but it (and the services to come) will allow society to absorb more and higher quality information in this, the information age.

It’s pretty exciting that the next generation collaboration space is really hotting up. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say this again: High quality collaboration is not about looking at how we collaborate in the same building and applying the same rules to the internet (e.g. Video, desktop sharing). We need to look at how we gear our behavior, shifting between synchronous and asynchronous, formal and informal – and providing tools that match these gear shifts.

Initial passes (Wave etc) may not be perfect but they are baby steps on a road that will eventually lead to radically different experiences in how we communicate and collaborate.

This is because we wanted to understand how the system stood up. As a result, through the private beta we have had to make several significant changes including rewriting the user interface and the collaboration engine to get more performance and stability.

Those changes are now mostly working for the private beta group and therefore we will start to roll out logins incrementally over the next month.

We are going to stage it so that our test focus will be in a specific area on a week by week basis.

Next week our focus will be on file sharing; the following week PowerPoint, and the week after Excel. Word is going to come a little later I’m afraid.

If any of you fell particularly strongly about one of these areas, please let me know and it would be great to talk to you about your expectations and experiences.

So again I apologize to the many registrants that have been frustrated by our very slow roll out. Your logins are coming and I am very excited about the next few weeks.

Jasper