Fast Company: Can A Corporate Culture Be Built With Digital Tools?
With telecommuting professionals making up an astounding 20% of the global workforce, companies are increasingly exploring new methods for helping teams build a cohesive corporate culture. Fast Company’s Austin Carr discusses the spread of corporate culture into the digital realm, highlighting the new strategies and technological tools companies are using to bring workers together and create an inclusive work environment for remote teams.

Forbes: Hacking Work
Should your business adopt the hacker mindset? Once considered the territory of criminals, hacking has been reframed as a mentality that challenges convention, seeking creative and disruptive ways to jumpstart progress. In this article, Salesforce VP Daniel Debow states that adopting the “hacker mentality” can help companies adapt to fundamental changes in the way we work, consequently improving workflows and promoting innovation.

Yahoo Finance: 10 Top Telecommuting Jobs To Live Abroad
As more companies give their employees the freedom to work wherever they choose, professionals are finding new opportunities to work remotely. Yahoo Finance discusses 10 of the top professions for remote work, ranging from IT and software development to health care and education.

WorkSnug: Got Mobile Workers? Here’s Why You Need Wikis
Information-sharing can be a significant challenge for companies collaborating remotely. Jim Secord, the CEO of Kashoo, suggests using company wikis to simplify information flows by allowing employees to access (and curate) the information they deem necessary. These “living documents” can arise out of necessity, improving the onboarding process for new hires and helping existing employees stay on the same page.

Did we miss anything? Are there any insights you find particularly interesting? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post This Week’s Perspectives on the Future of Work: Week of August 27th appeared first on oBlog.

Being an entrepreneur is hard, and finding great talent to help you scale your business can be especially difficult. However, having the right team is a major key to success in the startup world. But here’s a hint: you don’t have to be limited to people in your local area. Here is what I’ve learned about becoming a successful entrepreneur with online workers.

1. Entrepreneurs don’t have time

My quest started about 3 months ago when I was searching for a researcher for my blog. I needed someone with expertise in pay-per-click marketing to write some killer posts and do research for me. I tried out several sites, but one day I was reading on a well-known affiliate marketing blog, zacjohnson.com, about oDesk. Zac said that he had used the site several times and had a lot of success finding great people to write killer posts. So I gave it a try.

I discovered that entrepreneurs like myself can leverage these talented online workers to manage their workflow more easily. The average job I post takes about two minutes to put up, and within 24 hours I typically have 30+ people that have applied for the job. The site makes it easy to navigate their profiles and choose the best contractor for each particular job, and as an entrepreneur this time in invaluable to me. Spending 30 minutes or less each day on things that I can hand over to my online team has been amazing and has helped me grow my business 10x in the past year.

2. Most entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of resources

The first project that I posted on oDesk was to find a couple of good people to write posts for my blog. I hired about 5 or 6 people, and found one in particular that worked out really well for me: a technical writer from Pakistan named Imran.

I started off having him write an article or two, then it turned into 10, then 20, then 100 articles for me. He’s been one of the top writers that I have ever worked with, so I kept hiring him to complete my articles. oDesk has been there for me the whole time to facilitate the payment transactions, and one nice feature that works really well for many contractors is the ability to get paid through MoneyBookers. Many services out there don’t allow this or only pay through Paypal. This has made my life very easy as Imran lives in Pakistan, where Paypal isn’t accepted.

Without oDesk, I would have never been able to find the help for my blog. Since finding Imran, I have found countless other people willing to help me out and work with me on my projects and tasks, at a rate I can afford.

3. Entrepreneurs need major help, and most of the time they don’t realize it

oDesk has been great for finding researchers, writers, and a variety of other helpful roles that have helped me and my business jump to the top of the search engine rankings. Entrepreneurs can benefit immensely from this. For example, the second person I hired through oDesk came to me the next day with 10 different things I needed to do with my website to make it better. I don’t know if this is typical of every contractor, but I loved it. Some of his tips are still on my website today and have helped me convert many visitors.

Entrepreneurs think they can do everything, but unfortunately they can’t. All they can do is work as hard as possible and do all that they can. Online teams can help take you to the next level, a level that you can’t reach alone. Perhaps most importantly, with online contractors, your business can become scalable. Plus, some of the best relationships I have formed with my team have helped me realize things that I need to be doing to make my business grow, most of which I would have never known had I not found the amazing online team I have today.

So here’s my final, bonus tip: Let your business grow. Allow it to grow to be bigger than you. Build real relationships with your contractors and it will come back to you tenfold.

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, writer, full-time computer nerd, and founder of PPC.org. Follow him on Twitter at @JSRampton.

The post 3 Reasons Entrepreneurs Are Finding Success With Online Workers appeared first on oBlog.

However, as many distributed teams can attest, the innovative use of always-on communication tools is making remote team members feel not so distant anymore. Just talk to Elizabeth Yin, former Googler and founder of LaunchBit.

Yin needed to hire an engineer for her burgeoning startup, but couldn’t find the right fit for her team in her immediate vicinity. So she took what felt like a bit of a gamble at the time: she hired a remote team member.

Yin remembers her initial concerns. “I thought that communication would be too tedious over email/IM,” she said. “I thought there would be miscommunication galore. I thought it would be harder to keep morale up when you can’t see someone or talk with him/her face-to-face.” But she wasn’t to be deterred. “I knew that I had to crack the nut of being able to benefit from choice [of talent], but removing the issues that crop up more easily with remote hires.”

Finding a way to bring remote teams face to face

Enter the hero of this story, Apple’s FaceTime. Yin decided to use the Mac app to give her remote employees an office presence, virtually. “We give every full-time employee an iPad when they join and they whip it out every day. Very simply, we just leave FaceTime on all day. So it’s easy to ask a colleague a question, regardless of where they are based. It really feels like you are in the same room.”

Always-on video conferencing was the partial answer — but there were still a few kinks to work out. “One of the pieces of feedback I received from my team was that they thought it was eerie to use video conferencing software on their computers, because the built-in computer-webcams were focused right on their faces,” she said. “It felt stalkerish.”

So Yin improvised. She had employees position the iPads off to the side. Not only did this solve the continual “Big Brother watching overhead” vibe, but it also felt more natural. With the new arrangement, employees saw each others’ profiles and felt almost like they were sitting side by side. According to Yin, “this resonated with the team.”

For Yin and other managers in her shoes, building an effective team is about so much more than just finding the right talent. It’s about imparting vision and creating camaraderie so that people want to come in to work every day. As Peter Chester of Tri.be states,”[The] most important part of building an enduring team of remote contractors [is that] great teams are great friends.”

Video conferencing helps build team relationships

In Yin’s experience, always-on communication tools such as FaceTime create that rapport in spite of distance. She says, “Leaving FaceTime on all day has brought our team as a whole closer together. You can see if someone is in the middle of something or just grabbing a snack. This makes it easier to instigate water-cooler conversations at the right time in a way that IM chat can’t. This has led to serendipitous brainstorms, much like having everyone on the team in a real office. Or even just a crazy joke to lighten everyone’s day.”

As blogger Larry Irons points out, “…shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and community.” When your employees are geographically scattered, creating a strong, connected team takes an extra investment of time and technology. But the payoff is worth it. Using always-on technology allows your team to share stories, deepen relationships and even pass around a bit of gossip. And when this happens, your distributed team becomes more than just a collection of scattered employees — they become a true team.

What have you done to help bring your teams closer together? Tell us about your experience in the comments section below.

The post The Power of Relationships: Building a Stronger Team Through Always-On Technology appeared first on oBlog.

One major Chinese company recently decided to find out for sure. In perhaps the largest-scale remote work study conducted to date, CTrip—China’s largest travel agency with a $5 billion valuation on NASDAQ and 13,000 employees—set out to investigate the benefits, drawbacks and feasibility of implementing a widespread work-from-home policy.

The Study

CTrip selected 255 call-center employees to participate in the experiment, out of those who volunteered and met predetermined criteria for their home work space and company tenure. Half stayed in the office as a control group, while half worked from home four out of five days a week, on the same shifts as their in-office counterparts. The experiment lasted a full nine months.

The results, published by Stanford’s Economics Department and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, with cooperation from CTrip, were overwhelmingly positive:

1. Those who worked from home had significantly higher performance than before, with a productivity increase of 13%.
2. The attrition rate of the home workers dropped 50% compared to the control group, and they reported significantly higher work satisfaction.
3. The company saved approximately $2,000 per employee working at home (due to increased productivity, office cost savings, and lower turnover), leading them to expand the work-from-home initiative to the entire firm with “an aggressive poster campaign to persuade employees to take up the home-working.”

Source: Stanford University and CTrip

Source: Stanford University and CTrip

Other interesting findings were as follows:

• After the experiment ended, the work-from-home group was allowed to choose whether to continue working from home or to return to the office. Almost half decided to return to the office, which “led to much larger long-run impacts from working at home as workers with relatively better performance at home remained at home while those performing relatively poorly at home returned to the office.” In fact, the researchers estimated that the positive impact detailed above was likely doubled after the experiment.
• The work-from-home group reported “significantly higher positive attitude and less work exhaustion,” largely because they didn’t have to commute.
• The theory that working from home negatively impacts your career due to the absence of face time was disproved. Looking at the duration of the experiment and the nine months following it (a total of 18 months), the researchers determined that there was no negative impact on the telecommuting employees’ promotion rates.

Theory in Practice

oDesk knows a little bit about this topic. In addition to being an online work platform, oDesk has been rocking Work-From-Home-Tuesdays for many years. Similar to the Chinese company’s post-experiment policy, oDesk’s “WFH” day is not required, but approximately 75% of the company participates.

“I really like working from home,” said Mollie, oDesk’s Director of Customer Marketing. “It leads to some really focused working time; I specifically set aside projects that need a lot of concentration and a big chunk of time. It also helps me maintain a little sanity in my life, knowing there’s one day that you can a little flexible.”

And not only does it make employees happy, but it is beneficial strategically.

“Work-from-home Tuesday is awesome,” said oDesk CEO Gary Swart. “We love it. It gives us the opportunity to empathize with what our users are facing every day, not to mention that our employees love it and they get more work done. You have a greater appreciation for what remote work is about when you have to walk in the shoes of people who work remotely. It helps us build a better product for our clients.”

Does your company have a work-from-home policy? If so, what results have you seen?

The post Large-Scale Experiment Shows Working From Home Improves Performance, Reduces Costs appeared first on oBlog.

Week of 8/20/2012:

Harvard Business Review: Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged
Are in-office workers more committed and engaged than remote workers? According to a recent article in Harvard Business Review, the answer is “no”—remote workers are actually more engaged and committed to their jobs than their in-office counterparts. Scott Edinger, the founder of Edinger Consulting Group, suggests that the challenges faced by dispersed teams force them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Xerox Blogs: Asking “Where Do You Work?” May Result In Surprising Responses
Carolyn Dolezal, Chief Executive at SmithBucklin, reflects on her experience at the Xerox Future of Work Dreaming Session and on the increasingly fluid nature of the workplace. Dolezal states that as more workers embrace alternatives to the traditional office, the question, “Where do you work?” will no longer have a straightforward answer—and that the more accurate question may soon be “How do you want to work?”

Management Today: How To Make The Most Of Virtual Meetings
Whether you use Skype, Google Chat or Facetime, virtual meetings are a key part of working with any dispersed team. Mike Hunter provides ten best practice tips for successful virtual meetings, such as pausing regularly for group input and using visual references.

Mashable: These Telecommuting Jobs Will Surprise You
While telecommuting has traditionally been the realm of computer programmers and freelance journalists, advancements in technology have enabled a wider range of professionals to enjoy the flexibility of working from home. This article provides an overview of the telecommuting world and discusses innovative ways companies are using remote workers.

Did we miss anything? Are there any insights you find particularly interesting? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post This Week’s Perspectives on the Future of Work: Week of August 20th appeared first on oBlog.

Rupsis needed to fill several technical positions, but found most applicants minimally qualified for the job. After a long and expensive ordeal, he finally found some local contractors.

However, he wondered, did he really want to go through this every time he needed to hire out?

Trouble holding on to talent

Rupsis’ situation highlights an issue common in rural communities and small towns. While studies have shown that rural residents generally live happier and less stressful lives than their urban counterparts, they also have their challenges. One problem that significantly affects businesses in smaller communities is “brain drain”—the flight of technical talent from rural areas to urban centers.

For many businesses in rural areas, the ‘brain drain’ translates into a scarcity of available talent in the local job market, especially when it comes to specific skills such as certain programming languages. For Rupsis, and for a growing number of small businesses, the solution to his hiring woes meant looking to a new source. He stepped into the world of online hiring and discovered a much more effective method of locating skilled talent.

Growing a business in a quiet community

Charles Dayton lives in an even more remote locale—Cokesville, Wyoming. “I’m 30 miles from the closest hospital and 70 miles from the closest Wal-Mart,” he explained. But even in this small community, Dayton has been able to grow his consulting business, Action Strategy.

One key to this growth has been the expertise of his remote contractors. An integral part of his consulting work is an online strategy and planning tool that enables clients to track their key projects and goals. While Dayton came up with the original app idea, his online team took that vision and enabled him to turn it into a reality.

“Many times the contractors have taken ownership of the project…and made recommendations [to me],” he said. “It’s better than me dictating the features I want. They provide value by giving their best thinking on how to improve the application.”

Finding talent to expand services

Since his initial experience, Rupsis has been sold on the strategic use of remote contractors.

“I had a client that needed a system built that was beyond my abilities as a programmer,” he explained. He decided to focus on doing the work that was within the realm of his core skills, and give the programming work to his remote contractors. “Since then, I’ve been able to offer assistance to multiple other clients who needed custom technical solutions,” he said.

This ability to hire the best talent possible, regardless of location, has allowed Rupsis to create a stronger, better company. He commented, “Without being able to tap into the global talent pool to complement my own skills, I would have a much harder time developing professional solutions for my clients.”

Good hiring decisions still matter

For other business owners wanting to hire online, Dayton offers some advice. “I’ve made expensive mistakes by hiring the wrong person,” he said. “I’ve had developers flame out. But it’s my fault for not hiring the people with the appropriate background.”

In spite of those initial hiring snafus, Dayton’s expenditures for the project—and for online hiring in general—were still less than he expected. “I’ve been able to hire out jobs that I needed done and I’m not paying…benefits and overhead. A small business like mine couldn’t afford that type of scenario,” he said.

As the future of work continues to become reality, companies based in rural locales are no longer bound by geography. By leveraging online talent marketplaces, top talent can be secured by the click of a mouse—no Wal-Mart within driving distance needed.

Is your company located in a small town or community? How have you made use of online contractors to grow your business? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

The post Small Town Living, Big Town Talent appeared first on oBlog.

Week of 8/13/2012:

NBC: Office on Wheels—RV-Based Workers Telecommute from Anywhere
We are all familiar with working on vacation, but what about vacationing while working? This article from NBC News profiles several families who have adopted a “mobile lifestyle” and turned their RV into an office as they work online from wherever they like. With the growing prevalence of free WiFi—even at campsites—the mobile lifestyle is a feasible option for many professionals, allowing them to travel all over the country without sacrificing their income.

CFO: To Find Skilled Workers, Go Global
Thanks to today’s technology, geography is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to hiring talent and operating a business. As a result, savvy business leaders are looking outside the confines of commuting distance to access talent from around the world, and this strategy is going to become increasingly critical in the near future, according to CFO magazine. The article cites a recent study by Towers Watson and Oxford Economics, which found that 217 million workers in emerging markets—representing 60% of the global workforce—will be college-educated over the next 10 years. These workers can help fill gaps in areas such as finance, management and tech, the article reports.

FastCompany’s Co.Design: How iRobot Reimagined The Roomba As A Doctor
The telecommuting-robots coverage continues with this latest article, and what’s next for these robots? Telecommuting doctors! iRobot, which makes the vacuum-cleaning robot Roomba, has developed a robotic avatar for physicians. Called the RP-VITA, this machine allows doctors to telecommute to any hospital in the world, by navigating through the halls with an iPad and seeing patients face to face through the a webcam-enabled monitor.

Staffing Industry Analysts: Industry (Not) Lost in Translation
The language services industry is growing rapidly—at a rate of approximately 10% to 20% each year—likely due to globalization and increasing volumes of digital information, reports Staffing Industry Analysts. This report discusses the landscape of the translation/language services industry, which is largely dominated by contingent workers, and argues that the industry’s evolution provides a good model for how contingent work in general will grow in the coming years.

Did we miss anything? Are there any insights you find particularly interesting? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post This Week’s Perspectives on the Future of Work: Week of August 13th, 2012 appeared first on oBlog.

It was a delight to exchange ideas with Mariam Naficy, mother of two and CEO of Minted.com, as well as Sarah Leary, vice president of marketing and co-founder of Nextdoor.

Our Bloomberg host, Emily Chang, was deeply engaged in the exchange, both on air and in conversation after the show. She has a special reason: she is due to give birth to her first child just a few weeks before Marissa Mayer is due.

It was Marissa’s appointment to CEO of Yahoo and announcement of her pregnancy that brought us together to talk in the first place.

As Emily reflected on impending motherhood, I mentally traveled back in time to my own concerns as a new mother with a job I loved. I also remembered that a reader of my last blog post had requested some tips for working moms.

So, here are my recommendations, based on two decades as a working parent:

Set clear boundaries with your employer or client. If you have to leave the office at 5:30pm to pick up your child, make sure you are working for someone who understands and respects your schedule. Employers are more likely to approve flexible hours when they know your limits up front.

Do a really, really good job. This sounds obvious, I know. But are you, indeed, exceptionally good? Do you bring a unique contribution that is hard to duplicate? Do you power rapidly through your work and deliver concrete, visible results that make an impact? Is your manager thinking, “It would be really tough to replace this talent”? If not, figure out how to get there.

Bring a sunny, positive presence to the workplace. Have you noticed that the person with the positive energy usually wins?

I remember being pretty incompetent at my first job out of college. The company told me they were frankly taking a risk on hiring me.

I started at the same time as a young MIT-trained statistician who was brilliant (and brilliantly intimidating). But she was also somewhat sarcastic and stingy with her smile. I worked hard and was friendly, but my work deliverables didn’t hold a candle to hers.

One day, the executives were deciding whether to assign me (the barely useful worker with the positive attitude) or her (the highly useful worker with the glum outlook) to an important project.

You can guess the end of the story, but I was floored at the time. She was so good and I was so green! I carry that lesson with me to this day and it has never failed me.

Although it’s hard to feel perky after spending the night up with a sick child, do whatever it takes to maintain a good attitude at work. Happy things will follow.

Prioritize ruthlessly. Distinguish motion from progress. Each day can be filled with activity, but few initiatives actually move the needle.

Here’s how I think about it: 20% of the effort yields 80% of the results. Constantly ask yourself, “Is what I am working on part of the 20%?” If it is not, stop doing it. Refocus on what has a measurable impact.

Don’t be afraid to get help. It’s easy to fall into the “I can do it all by myself” mindset. Because most of the time, you probably can. But sometimes, a little outside help goes a long way in keeping your sanity intact. From hiring a cleaning service to finding a freelancer to proofread your presentation, there are people out there who can lighten your load.

Delegate like a pro. Many years ago when I worked at Bain and Company (no, not Bain Capital), I learned a simple rule: Always delegate to the lowest-cost resource. It is an opportunity for less experienced people to grow, and it lets you focus on higher-level initiatives.

Don’t limit yourself to on-site employees. Since the economic downturn, many talented professionals began freelancing online. You can find online contractors for many different services, including writing, translation, data analysis, market research, website design, programming, and more.

When you delegate, think through your objectives and deliverables in detail and create crisp instructions up front. People are only as good as the well-articulated guidance you give them; the one thing nobody can do is read your mind.

Be available for check-ins to provide any course corrections, but don’t be a helicopter boss. Most people do not respond well to being micromanaged.

Build strong relationships, both in the office and remotely. We’ve all seen it happen: both colleagues mean well, but tension rises when they misinterpret each other’s motives.

This is why I believe it is well worth the time to get to know—and even share a beverage or meal with—co-workers in my own and other departments. The better you know the people you work with, the more likely you are to help make each other successful.

If you work with freelancers online, the same applies. Provide positive feedback when the work is good and connect on a personal level to build a successful professional relationship.

Flag problems early. But come with a solution. I learned this by observing one of the most inspiring women I’ve ever worked with. No matter how big the mistake, she had the uncanny ability to show leadership by boldly owning the problem before others had even noticed it, articulating what she or her department had done wrong, what they had learned, and how they would fix it.

This woman was widely admired for her integrity and problem-solving skills. She went on to become a very visible CEO in technology, even as she raised a child as a single mom.

Give other working moms an opportunity. It’s good for business, too. Some of the best people I’ve hired worked four days a week or left to pick up their kids from school at 3pm.

Honestly, it would have been easy to overlook them in favor of traditional full-time employees. But their exceptional motivation, work ethic, and talent made a unique, measurable, and lasting impact on the business.

Where are they now? One is president of a thriving business. Another is senior vice president of marketing at a publicly traded company.

Support for working moms has a long way to go, but I believe we are making progress. I hope some of these strategies—adapted to your own beliefs and circumstances, of course—will help you achieve success, while you embrace the indescribable joys (and challenges) of raising your children. And if some of the summary points need more discussion, let me know. I can take a look at unpacking them in a future post.

The post Love the Way You Work, and Be a Parent Too appeared first on oBlog.

On most ecommerce sites, information about the supply side of the marketplace is digitized and publicly available, while information about the demand side is generally not. For example, Amazon, Expedia, iTunes, Etsy, etc., all collect and display detailed data about the items for sale, but there is generally little to no information about the consumers with the demands.

If we look at the labor market, the reverse is true—it’s the demand side that’s digitized. On online job boards like CareerBuilder, Monster.com, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc., job posts have detailed descriptions about the nature of the work, skills required, location and approximate salary, but the job seekers—the sellers—generally do not create profiles that describe themselves.

It might seem like the reasons for this difference are fundamental, but I think that’s unlikely. If you look at certain labor markets, the supply side is being digitized—primarily through LinkedIn (in a big way) and sites like oDesk (in a comparatively smaller, but more comprehensive way). On these sites, workers create permanent, searchable profiles for employers that contain rich, employment-relevant data about themselves.

With the rise of LinkedIn, we are witnessing an unprecedented, voluntary data collection and digitization of the supply side of the labor market. On LinkedIn, individuals can create public profiles and list their education, professional credentials, associations, skills, current and past work experiences and, critically, their other professional connections (indicated by approved links to other LinkedIn users).

As of July 24th, 2012, approximately 19% of U.S.-based Internet users had a LinkedIn profile [*see note below for interesting background for this figure]. According to LinkedIn, as of March 12, 2012, more than 160 million people have created profiles, and in many industries a LinkedIn profile is expected of all applicants. In fact, I talked to oDesk’s corporate recruiter, asking her how many of the candidates for in-house oDesk positions had LinkedIn profiles. She responded:

“I’d say it is close to 100% (and certainly 100% for viable candidates). I can’t think of an example of someone who I have screened who didn’t have a profile on LinkedIn.”

This “supply digitization” is going to be very impactful, because once the supply side of the labor market is digitized, platforms can begin making data-driven, highly contextualized recommendations to both sides of the market. In other words, the more detailed digital data these platforms have, the better they are able to recommend highly relevant jobs to job-seekers and equally relevant candidates to employers.

In addition, the platform’s recommendations can potentially have the advantage of being informed by a holistic view of the marketplace. That’s because, in computer-mediated marketplaces, essentially every piece of data that goes into—or is generated by—the marketplace is by necessity captured in an electronic database, and this mountain of data can be used to inform recommendations.

Of course, job boards do try to make recommendations by suggesting job openings to workers, but these recommendations are limited to whatever search terms and perhaps geographic and/or salary constraints a job-seeker enters in a relatively brief search session. The platform cannot condition its recommendations on a worker’s employment history, educational background, skills, current employment status, professional connections, certifications, personality, test scores and other match-relevant factors, nevermind try to balance recommendations to navigate the twin shoals of market thinness and market congestion.

Unfortunately, a lot of this work on recommendations will likely happen within companies in a state of semi-secrecy, but hopefully enough will be made public that others can contribute, such as with the Netflix algorithm prize.

It’s a little sad that so far society has expended more machine-learning research effort in trying to predict movie tastes rather than job fit, despite the enormous economic and even humanitarian consequences of improving the labor market. However, I predict this will change, and I expect a lot more work to be done on this topic from computer scientists and market designers in the coming years.

*Origin of the “19% of the U.S. population has a LinkedIn profile” number

In writing this blog post, I wanted to get an accurate number for what fraction of the U.S. population has a LinkedIn profile. This number was proving to be hard to come by, so I decided to try a relatively new service launched by Google called Google Consumer Surveys. For 10 cents an answer, you can pose questions to a supposedly representative sample of U.S.-based Internet users. You also get some of the respondent’s basic demographics, such as inferred age, gender and income. I launched a one-question survey and got 1,511 responses in less than a day. The screenshot below shows the main results, but it also includes some neat tools for looking at the data in different ways. I made the survey public—check it out here. I’m quite pleased with the service and plan to use it again.

The post Digitization of the Supply Side of the Labor Market appeared first on oBlog.

Week of 8/6/2012:

The New York Times: Average Is Over, Part II
New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman argues that, due to “advances in globalization and the information technology revolution,” average is no longer an option. This article presents a fascinating discussion of political versus corporate perspective on what it means to compete in the world today, and how organizations hire. Friedman concludes that in order to adapt to global competition, whether economically or scholastically, we cannot be complacent.

The Wall Street Journal: My Life as a Telecommuting Robot
Imagine navigating around the office and stopping to chat with colleagues on your way to a morning meeting. Now imagine that all the while you were at your desk, over 300 miles away. For a few weeks this summer, The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Silverman did just that, choosing to telecommute to the office via robot. She concludes that while technological advances have helped remote workers connect to the office with ease, robots are not yet the best tool to give remote workers a physical in-office presence.

ZDNet: The Olympics Changed How We Work
While the Olympics brought excitement to London, they also brought hundreds of thousands of visitors and substantial gridlock. In response, London-based companies began “a gigantic working-from-home experiment,” letting their employees telecommute to avoid the traffic. Steve Ranger, the executive editor of ZDNet, argues that this kind of flexible working should only grow in adoption from here on out, not be relegated to an event-related anomaly. In presenting his argument, Ranger examines how “the modern office is a strange relic” of industrial times, one that is no longer suited to the way the world works.

New Geography: Characteristics Of The Self Employed
In “Characteristics Of The Self Employed,” Joshua Wright presents EMSI’s latest data on self-employment in the United States. The article provides a detailed summary of employment trends—such as self-employment growth rates, self-employed workers’ average income and age, and most popular work categories—and elucidates the recession’s effect on freelance workers.

The Wall Street Journal: Getting Into Working Outside
New York entrepreneurs are taking their work to the streets… literally. “Getting Into Working Outside” details the creative ways startups and freelancers are circumventing pricey office space and getting work done. From Wi-Fi-enabled parks to benches under the Manhattan Bridge, New Yorkers are embracing unconventional workspaces and adding a dose of socializing to their work routines.

Did we miss anything? Are there any insights you find particularly interesting? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post This Week’s Perspectives on the Future of Work: Week of August 6th, 2012 appeared first on oBlog.

A report earlier this year from Gartner Research also highlighted the role of innovation in the future of work. “The core value that people add…lies in the non-routine, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that people make, which often relate to discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning,” wrote Tom Austin, vice president at Gartner.

Recognizing new opportunities requires the ability to connect ideas—to look at the abstract and extract meaning. This spark fuels creatives everywhere but have we, in general, lost our touch?

Where did creativity go?

The value of creativity has been on the rise over the last decade, largely due to the emphasis on knowledge workers. Daniel Pink outlined the growing need for it in his book A Whole New Mind back in 2006, arguing that the rise of trends like automation and abundance are driving a need for more inventive thinking.

If you hail from the startup or entrepreneurial domain, innovation likely lies close to the heart. But among those who’ve risen through other environments—where doing and deadlines have been prioritized over the new and unexpected—career myopia is on the prowl. Kristin Cardinale, author of The 9-to-5 Cure, describes career myopia as “a loss of function in our imagination resulting from an inordinate amount of time spent focusing on our work life.

“We lose the ability to even visualize the big picture for lack of exercising those muscles in our imagination,” she wrote. “As a result, our field of vision narrows, and the big picture becomes fuzzy. We lose sight of our dreams and instead fixate on merely surviving instead of thriving.”

One researcher has even gone as far as to state that the U.S. is in the midst of a creativity crisis, with our overall ability to generate ideas—particularly unusual ones—on a steady decline for more than 20 years.

How can you encourage innovation?

On-demand creativity is unrealistic, but fostering an environment that encourages fresh thinking is not. There are myriad ways for an organization to empower a more creative team; here are a few:

• Take a hands-on approach. Dean Newlund of Mission Facilitators International cites scientist John Medina’s recommended physical changes—from turning to color theory or using full-spectrum lightbulbs to walking during meetings—to create an office space that helps keep ideas flowing.

• Look for ways to give people breathing room. ThredUP co-founder and CEO James Reinhart recently spoke to GigaOM about his company’s mandatory “work from home Wednesdays.” While the expectation is that everyone puts in a full day of work, he says the idea is to provide one day each week to step back, focus and get perspective. (In the article’s comments, employee Dan DeMeyere said “Wednesday (by far) has the biggest output of any day.”) Remote or on site, the ThredUP team still scrums every morning on Skype.

• Adapt the principles of Work 3.0. Business author Bonnie Marcus wrote in Forbes that shifting perspective from rewarding in-office time to simply results (and consequently integrating more flexible work arrangements) is the only way businesses will thrive moving forward. “This new model measures and rewards people for their performance and results, not their time,” she said. “It’s about managers and leaders creating an environment where people are free to produce results in the way that works best.”

What do you think—is creativity alive and well, or do you sense this same gap? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

The post Creatives Will Take Over The World—But Are We Ready? appeared first on oBlog.

A nationwide blackout in India recently left some 600 million people without electricity. Given that a large number of oDesk contractors are from India—it is the second-most active country by hours worked—oDesk Staff Economist John Horton set out to see if the effects of the blackout could be seen in our data.

Here’s what John did:

• He checked the number of hours worked and number of job applications submitted by contractors in India for each day during the past month.
• He divided these two daily counts (hours worked and jobs submitted) by the respective totals of each for all work being done on oDesk worldwide.

The results give us a sense of what was supposed to happen on a given day, so we can compare what was supposed to happen to what actually happened during the blackout.

Some of John’s resulting observations:

• There is a notable drop-off in the hours worked. John’s eyeball calculation indicated that contractors in India should have been responsible for about 22% of the hours worked on the day of the blackout, while the actual number is closer to 17.5%. This is less of a fall-off than might be expected given the “Half of India Without Power” headlines. This may be explained by access to private generators, or perhaps oDesk is overrepresented in parts of the country that were less affected by the blackout.

• There is no corresponding obvious drop-off in the fraction of job applications. Perhaps unaffected contractors made up the difference and took advantage of the now-thinner market. If anyone has data on what parts of the country were affected by the blackout, we could test this notion.

• Contractors in India take weekends off, both in terms of working and applying to jobs (or at least more so than their oDesk counterparts from other countries). However, this time series shows the fraction for a given day, so there’s no reason for a strong weekend/weekday pattern. See oDesk Country Explorer for more of this kind of data.

• Indian contractors are generally overrepresented in the application pool, making up approximately 25% of applications but only about 20% of hours worked. However, this could easily reflect differences in the kinds of categories Indian contractors work in—there is a great deal of variation in the average number of applications per opening across the different job categories.

John’s Results Visualized:

The time series for job applications (top) and hours worked (bottom) are plotted below [see here for the code for the plots], with the second day of the blackout annotated in red.

The post The Blackouts in India, Seen in oDesk Data appeared first on oBlog.

Week of 7/30/2012:

The Economist: European Entrepreneurs—Les Miserables
Risk-averse executives, tight capital and a daunting regulatory environment are just a few of the factors cited by The Economist to explain the dearth of entrepreneurship in continental Europe. This article illustrates the historically inhospitable environment facing European startups and asserts that the Euro crisis is forcing governments and professionals to reconsider the significance of startups.

Harvard Business Review: Cross-Cultural Communication Takes More than Manners
From sales to search engine marketing, local expertise can provide the critical insight necessary to succeed in new markets, but it can take a good deal of cultural navigation to tap into these insights. In this article, Leonard Fuld explains how unidentified cultural differences can lead to gridlock between partners. He stresses the benefits of diverse perspectives, and concludes that in an increasingly global workplace a lack of cultural understanding can damage business prospects.

GigaOM: Should Your Startup Have Mandatory “Work From Home Wednesdays”?
Will sending your employees home make them more productive? James Reinhart, CEO of ThredUP, talks about how implementing “work from home Wednesdays” has helped his team succeed. Working remotely eliminates office distractions, allowing people to “really focus on a specific problem” and attack challenges with renewed vigor.

Inc.: Co-Working Boom—More Places To Park Your Laptop
A recent report from Deskmag found that the number of coworking spaces around the world has been doubling annually for the past several years. This growth has been driven by a significant increase in demand from the freelance and entrepreneurial workforce. Do you visit co-working spaces or do you prefer the tranquility of your home? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post This Week’s Perspectives on the Future of Work: Week of July 30th, 2012 appeared first on oBlog.