Month: January 2014

The changing workscape: Going it alone

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Whether picking up freelance projects here and there as a kind of sole proprietor or doing something a bit more formal, setting up a company and running it, the current job market coupled with the difficulty of being “seen” by recruiters (even if you’ve got the experience, talent and skills required) are making more and more people choose to go it alone. Obviously deciding to work for yourself requires a kind of independence, confidence and belief in your skills and ideas that will give you the strength to persevere through lean times. The challenges of launching and marketing a new business – and the need to basically do at least two jobs at all times (the job/specialty you are selling and then the actual selling/marketing of those services) can be daunting. Never mind the bureaucracy and accounting work you will have to consider…

But going into business for yourself isn’t all risk, no reward – or people would not do it, keep doing it and loving it.

Beginning to see the light
The job search has been long and tough – very few interviews, or a lot of interviews that lead nowhere, and you start to think that maybe you would be better off – and much more in control of your professional destiny – if you strike out on your own. This initial “seeing the light” can be deceptive, of course, because on the surface it sounds a lot easier to just take matters into your own hands and go from there. If you’ve never started or run a business, though, you could be in for a few surprises in terms of how difficult it can be. Do your homework. But don’t let the challenges stop you. You will actually be a stronger person and may either become a successful businessperson, recognizing that this is where you belong – or you may just bolster yourself and gain insight and independence enough to know that you do belong in a regular job. But the experience of starting your own business and creating your own job has prepared you in whole new ways you could not even have imagined for the job you eventually seek. You are broadening your horizons no matter what road you take.

But first things first.

How did the “light” first come on that made you consider becoming your own boss?

The hard search – not being seen
The aforementioned “not being seen” in the job hunt is becoming more common. A recent, popular thread on LinkedIn discussed the increasing difficulty of differentiating yourself as a job candidate, particularly when you are something of a jack-of-all-trades. This inspired me to write on the subject of recruitment and HR and the foibles therein. A friend and former professor sent me another article about how HR has begun to embrace “big data” – and this is starting to influence hiring and retention decisions to, as the article points out, an almost creepy degree.

A true jack-of-all-trades, as many people pointed out in the comments to this post on LinkedIn, may be better off channeling all of those myriad skills into his or her own enterprise. If someone else cannot take in and appreciate the generalist, DIY, can-do approach to business, who better to benefit from your work than you – and the stable of clients you eventually cultivate?

When you have done your due diligence – and that means, really taking the time to tailor each application you submit (which may mean cutting back on the jack-of-all-trades theme to market yourself as a specialist in a few key areas, targeted for the specific job) – and you still find yourself getting nowhere, it might be time to apply the same efforts you make in the job search to assessing what kind of business you could do on your own using the skills in your toolbox that others have not seemed to cotton to. Do some market analysis – what needs exist that you can address?

This may be the best way to be seen and to make a mark.

The risk of self-employment 
Most things really worth doing do not come without any risk.

The biggest risk – you might fail. Many small businesses fail. It’s par for the course. But is failure in this case really failure? It’s a mixed bag. You may lose your shirt, but you know that there is always another shirt where that one came from. You will never learn as much as fast as you do in starting and running your own business – succeed or fail. If you fail, you take away valuable lessons and experience. You can either apply these lessons to your next business venture (the entrepreneurial bug is strong once you start) or apply the lessons to your next job. You are richer for it. “..a recent survey of 1,000 small business owners (conducted by Deluxe Corp and reported in Business Insider) shows that the vast majority of them are confident in their endeavors and say they’d rather embrace potential failure than never try at all”. Once you make up your mind, you’re pretty sure that you can live with failure – and need to be optimistic about success, regardless of the statistics, or you would not be likely to give the business your all.

Some might argue that it is a risk to work for yourself because you are sort of taking yourself out of the workforce specifically in your field and thus might fall behind on new trends or technologies because you are not active in that field. I doubt this. If you’re leveraging your former experience, chances are, as a self-employed person in a similar field, you have to stay ahead of the curve on trends to be competitive. This is why companies will turn to you – as your own enterprise, you are expected to be on the cutting edge. You might ultimately end up ahead of the game.

Difficulties & hard times
Money, money, money
I think one of the major reasons that more people don’t go into business for themselves, which goes beyond the not knowing how or where to start is the cash flow situation. Not only do you not have start-up costs on hand, but you, like everyone else, have bills to pay. And many people are motivated in large part by the paycheck. A steady job, even one you hate, pays you and ensures that you keep a roof over your head and all the rest. But, while theory won’t keep the wolf from the door, the idea that you work just for a paycheck is the kind of mindset that you should work to change.

Learning curve
You have a lot of skills to apply to the work you eventually want to do in your business. But to get there, there’s a lot to learn about starting, operating and building a business. This kind of knowledge doesn’t come overnight, and you will have to work hard and be patient, embracing what may be a steep and possibly winding learning curve.

Overreaching & lack of planning
You might try to do too much, too fast and overreach. You can easily lose the plot by doing this – and burn yourself out. Be sure to have very specific goals – and don’t stray too far from these, even if you see opportunities to dabble in a bunch of different areas outside your core business. This can lead to trouble, especially in the early days when you struggle to find your footing. You need to have a good plan from the beginning and, while you can exhibit some flexibility, straying too far outside the guidelines can get you into trouble, mired in projects that you cannot fulfill your commitments to. The temptation to do this can be great, especially when money is tight in the beginning, but you’re better off in the long run if you stick to your guns and do not take on something you cannot handle. Does that mean you should not challenge yourself? No, but definitely evaluate whether a project is within the scope of what your business and your expertise can offer. You risk a big bundle of stress, financial losses and a potential hit to your reputation if you don’t manage yourself and your obligations carefully.

Legal trouble
Further on the previous point, if you are careless about making delivery promises or careless in taking care of all the required aspects of establishing a business legally (especially where it concerns intellectual property), you can quickly find yourself in legal trouble. This is somewhere you definitely do not want to go. Failing in a small business is one thing – getting tangled up in lawsuits is entirely another. Always put in the time to make sure everything is above board and legal.

The rewards of self-employment
Flexibility
One of the biggest bonuses of working for yourself is the flexibility you can build into your work life. Sure, you will probably be working most of the time – but it’s your business and your time. When you need to run out and do an errand, no one is looking over your shoulder and asking you to punch a time clock. Your time is your own, and you know that you get what you put into whatever efforts you are making. For me, the home office has been a boon – I have discovered that unknown levels of productivity are possible for me when I am working at home, so the readjustment to office life has just not worked well. Sure, I need to be flexible as well – but having your own business buys you this kind of freedom.

Nonstop learning
If you are anything like me, one of the battles of working in a regular job is that many of them have an initial learning curve (new company, new project) but then once you have mastered a few things, there is not a lot of brain stretching going on. This is not always true – there is always something to learn but you’ve got to be proactive about seeking it out. Sometimes the traditional work environment, even if you are like a sponge, picking up new knowledge and skills, just wants to pigeonhole you into whatever role you are doing, and the lack of growth that results from your gusto to learn leaves the learning less than satisfying. This is never a problem in your own enterprise. You have to learn to keep going, and you will apply everything you learn all the time. For those for whom endless curiosity is a constant nag, self-employment is one salve for the soul.

Building your network, building your reputation
Don’t give yourself a bad reputation! Building up your network of clients is the best way to get more clients. In my own experience, I have tried various types of advertising and marketing, and the single best way – that keeps paying off after literally years – is word of mouth. Former/current clients are asked by friends and peers for recommendations, and even if eight years have gone by, they will remember the work I did and pass my name along.

This leads to the next point – working for yourself, you are the show, so you have to put your best foot forward and manage your reputation. Clearly building a solid reputation with clients makes you memorable, keeps them coming back and will grow your business even without you exerting effort. The effort you make today can pay dividends later.

Satisfaction
You did it! Whether you stick with it forever and keep growing or just do the self-employed thing for a while, you did it. You stuck with it and now have this invaluable experience to show that you’ve got business experience, sense and acumen.

Seeing the signs – Do it alone
The way things are going – both in the job market as a whole and in specific industries, and perhaps just in your own field – you should be able to read the writing on the wall to assess whether the time has come to strike out on your own and make a go of it.

It’s not that I am a vocal advocate of starting one’s own business – I have done it because I found myself unemployed and with few options living in a new country. And if it seems like a bureaucratic rat maze navigating the vagaries of legal, financial and other considerations in starting a business in your own city, imagine doing it in a foreign country in a new language. But the fact that I managed means that pretty much anyone can do it if you have a solid plan, a target clientele, a way to market yourself and a lot of patience – and networking skills don’t hurt one bit. It is hard work – perhaps even harder and much more time consuming than going to a regular 9 to 5 job, but it can be a salvation and even an addiction once you start to see positive results and the fruits of your labor.

For whom to cook? Chicken pho and coconut tapioca pudding with mango

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Everyone knows I love to bake – and I bake and bake to the point of exhaustion and then come up with creative solutions for transporting all those freshly baked morsels to my office.

Sometimes, though, I go through cooking phases. I read a lot of recipes and gather inspiration for making real food. Trouble is, during the week I do not have a kitchen. And cooking only for myself is a drag. I need food guinea pigs and lab rats. And much more time at home in my kitchen.

Today I am overdosing on reading the archives of the Smitten Kitchen blog – filled with magnificent recipes, stories and pictures. Of course, what kicked it off was the post yesterday about chicken phở (me being a soup-obsessed wolf eel) caused a great stir in my brain. It also made me scroll through loads and loads of the recipes, dreaming about trying some out, experimenting. But why would I make a beyond-tempting coconut tapioca pudding with mango just for me – if I could even find tapioca with ease?

The changing workscape: HR – no recourse, no resource

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I will be blunt – when it comes to recruitment and hiring, human resources (HR) is a crock. A lot of time, it is just dumb. Not dumb in the sense that there is no value to HR whatsoever – but dumb in the sense that it is incomplete and inadequate for the functions it tries to perform. It reminds me of the tech talk surrounding the challenges faced by network and cable operators and their becoming “dumb pipes“, e.g. delivering the technology while content providers – and everyone but them – make use of their pipe and profit from it. HR is a kind of dumb pipe sometimes, performing a lot of functions, delivering what they are supposed to – but somewhere the value and content is not what it should be.

I make this blanket statement knowing that it is not always true and that sometimes HR departments are very tightly integrated with the entire company and departmental aims – enough to understand what a company needs (at least to the level that they can screen out clearly unqualified candidates). However, I have experienced just as many HR departments that function as though they are an island, cut off from the rest of the company, completely out of touch both with the needs for which they are trying to find a match and with what the company actually does. (And HR has other responsibilities that are important and better focus areas for them than recruitment, in many cases. Employee relations and development once people are onboard, for example, particularly in environments that have a lot of legal stuff going on.)

Both the employer and potential employee(s) lose out in the HR-led, HR-centric recruitment scenario. Employers may not get to see the applications of candidates who may not have all the right buzzwords in their applications but who do possess the right skill set and broad experience that illustrates an aptitude for whatever kind of work for which they are applying. I think this HR-as-gatekeeper approach often means that the employer does not see the full range of what is available to them – the less integrated an HR department is, the less likely they can adequately screen applications and pass on the best of what is available.

Potential employees also lose out, of course, because in many cases, there are very few avenues by which they can bypass HR. I read an article today about how “jacks-of-all-trades” don’t get hired – often don’t even get interviews. Yes, arguably, there is an art to writing applications, resumes, cover letters, and any applicant in this market knows that you really need to tailor your application package for each job, so creating a three-page resume that delves into all the things you can do versus tailoring an application for the specific job for which you are applying and highlighting your skills and achievements within that field is not the best strategy. Being a jack-of-all-trades and trying to capture all that information and experience in one one-size-fits-all application doesn’t work and probably never will.

But what struck me is that many of the comments on this article focused on the inefficacy of HR. In a case where an applicant does have a very interesting, rich resume filled with his jack-of-all-trades background, an HR specialist might discard the application because it was a bit rough around the edges and because it did not explicitly address specific points in the job ad. This is their job and probably all that time and volume allow for. That said, if non-HR people (departmental staff/management) were actively involved in the hiring and resume-review process, chances of the jack-of-all-trade generalist resume being noticed are probably much higher. Someone working in the department/area for which the job opening is advertised would have much greater insight into the current and future needs of the team and might identify considerably more valuable traits and skills in the applicants’ materials that HR would not be looking for.

Perhaps there is some mutual responsibility here – not wanting to make HR the scapegoat because it has its place and time in the corporate landscape. But removing the HR-as-linebacker function (particularly in cases where HR is really out of touch) and involving departmental resources from the very beginning could open consideration a little wider. Meanwhile, applicants have to take the time, care and responsibility to tailor each application individually.

Likewise, most professional people are essentially jacks-of-all-trades; finding the two or three key strengths in one’s professional skills arsenal does pay off. Example – at my core, I am a writer. I have worked in technical writing, marketing, communications (internal and external), have worked in huge global companies and in tiny little companies as well as my own businesses. This work has crossed industries and sectors and required tremendous adaptation, adoption of new skills and learning whole new industries from the beginning (my most recent jump was from the IT/browser industry to medtech/healthcare with no life sciences or medical experience at all, but I jumped in and learned). This is likely the reality for most professionals – agility and readiness to keep learning and changing. Being able to tailor each application to elevate those key skills that pertain directly to the job to which you are applying, and then adding an “attractive garnish” by including useful and complementary aspects of the other, but less related, skills, will probably produce more results – or at least open a few more doors for interviews.

Maybe this is what HR screeners are not able to discern or appropriately value when reviewing more complicated resumes – this readiness to learn and change and the evidence of it.

NFL Football Advertising

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Everyone knows that the Super Bowl is the biggest advertising event of the year. But I realized while streaming the playoffs the other night that the NFL and the advertisers know their audience: men who want to be rugged by driving trucks. I swear that every commercial was about trucks – big trucks.

One old ad about Ford trucks always freaks me out.

Winter has come to Sweden – Temperature drop

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Winter usually arrives much earlier than this. But no, this winter, everything waited for January. Last week it was +7C and raining.

This morning when I drove in the warmest temperature I saw was -8C (about 17.6F) and the coldest was -17C (1.4F), which was at my house.

Winter took its time to show up with a vengeance.

The Changing Workscape: Causing a Commotion, the Misery of the Open Office, Another Reason to Telecommute

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One of the reasons that I feel a desperate need to work from home is the trend almost every corporation has embraced – the open-office landscape. I have been loving (sense the sarcasm!) how managerial types stand up in front of their workforce and announce smugly how much creativity and interaction is enabled by opening up the office and throwing us all into a big fishbowl together. (They say this, smiling, as they shut their private office doors behind them.)

In my last job, a new manager for our team was brought in during a reorganization – he insisted on putting all of us (about ten people) in one big open room. I think every last one of us voiced an objection to this, and he nodded condescendingly, claiming that he understood. Nothing more than a cursory, “Yeah yeah yeah…”. Because ten against one or not, it was, as Patrick Swayze said in the godawful film, Road House, “…my way or the highway.”

No one was happy with the arrangement, particularly because this manager felt like he could play 1970s Nigerian music to inspire the whole room. He would force creative brainstorming sessions that lasted for ages – and most of us had either to concentrate (since I research and write) or to produce (it was a creative department producing the website or print materials). Brainstorming is for some other time. Not the middle of a workday. His ideas to revolutionize the place didn’t work, and he left. But the open office remained until the whole company moved to a new office, which was basically ALL open offices with 100 people on each open floor. (At least in the old office I had started working from home most of the time, and an intern stole my desk in the open-office floorplan, so if I did come to office, I just found an empty space and worked in it.)

In the place I work now, it’s the same sort of thing – an open floorplan. My department’s desks are all right along one of the corridors near where people enter and exit and where there are a bunch of meeting rooms, so there is a lot of conversation, a lot of potential for interruption. And strangely, there are a lot of weird politics around the placement and use of desks. Apparently one desk in our area was “off-limits” because someone senior to the majority of us wanted it. There is a large contingent of people who travel into the global HQ once a week but are in the office physically rather unpredictably, so with space being tight, the company decided to cut the lunch/kitchen area in half and create “hot desks” for these “remote” workers, all of whom seem miffed about not having permanent desks any longer.

For me, it feels like a company should make a move one way or the other. If a company insists on going open-office for the “collaborative boost” it supposedly provides (studies show that it doesn’t), they should be open to greater flexibility overall. Given that the move to open offices is more about corralling more people into a smaller space (thereby saving money), at least let the cattle graze away from “home” – if you really want to save money, also embrace letting them work where they want to work and work where it’s most comfortable and productive for them as much as they want to. If that is in the office, great. If that’s at a coffee shop, great. If that’s at home, as it is for me, even better. As illustrated in my previous articles on remote work, companies adopting this kind of flexibility can save a lot of money on real estate and other associated costs. Be revolutionary – don’t let anyone settle into too much of a pattern. Make your whole open office into hot desks so no one actually has their own “desk” if it is going to be such an issue.

A recent New Yorker article highlights several of the ill-effect of the open-landscape office. The article illustrates University of Calgary research that determined employees placed in an open environment suffered. They felt disrupted, stressed and felt that the environment was “cumbersome”. Instead of being closer, the office workers felt “distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.””

In essence, an overview of studies about the office environment declared that the talk of “unified corporate mission” that happens with open office structures is largely symbolic and all talk. The reality shows that damage is done. Other than the increased stress and anxiety, the open office – bottom line – comes down to the commotion and noise. This is distracting and also has actual health effects (Cornell University found that office noise led to increased levels of epinephrine, which creates a fight-or-flight responses that causes people to compensate for the stress with ergonomic adjustments, creating more physical strain.

American Football – Go Seahawks – No Saints!

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In any other game or season, I would cheer for the New Orleans Saints. But when it comes down to it, I have to cheer for the “home team” (one of my homes anyway) – the Seattle Seahawks! Normally Seattle teams suck, so it’s a futile exercise in cheering endlessly for the underdog throughout the existence of our teams (until they are taken away from us, like the Sonics). It’s heartbreaking but expected. When one of our teams does something, it’s like we cannot actually believe it’s happening – and even as it’s happening, it is like we cannot have real faith that the success will continue. I always expect our teams to lose it.

Tonight I am watching the Saints-Seahawks game and despite the Seahawks’ season-long success, I am still sitting here waiting for the other shoe to drop. Normally I would not bother watching, but I managed to find a stream that works (I don’t have a tv). It’s fun to see how Seattle managed to put on one of its typical January weather “shows” (crazy wind and rain).

Made-up Cream Curry Onion Soup

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Soup rarely has a recipe – I write it down sort of, if it works, and maybe try to replicate it again. My Thai red curry carrot soup was an experiment that continues to wow me but other experiments are not as successful.

What will this makeshift onion soup be like? When I made it, I didn’t know.

Here’s what I did:

I sauteed about ten red onions in olive oil in a cast-iron skillet on medium heat. I left this to do its magic for about 30 or 40 minutes. Meanwhile I boiled about four cups of water with one cube of vegetable bouillon, one tablespoon of curry powder and some chopped garlic – I let that simmer until it reduced considerably. When the onions were ready, I dumped them in the broth pot, let it simmer another ten minutes and then blended with a stick blender. Afterwards I stirred in about half a cup of coconut milk – but you could use cream or milk or whatever you want.

Not bad, if you like onions. Actually it is not pretty but it tastes really fabulous – a hint of the caramelized flavor, only a hint of the curry (but it makes a difference) and coconut milk instead of milk or something else gives this a very slight sweetness that plays well off the onion and curry. I am happy with this even though I was scared. I will definitely do this again. Especially because I often have so few things in my house with which to cook – but I always have onions, always have coconut milk – and that is almost all you need for this!

Onions ready for caramelizing and becoming soup

Onions ready for caramelizing and becoming soup

Not pretty but quite yummy - onion curry coconut soup

Not pretty but quite yummy – onion curry coconut soup

Bread Bonanza – Ciabatta Experiments

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I used to make bread and stuff like cinnamon rolls quite a lot in my younger years. Maybe I had more patience. Maybe I wanted to eat more bread. At some point dealing with temperamental yeast and waiting for all the rise and re-rise processes to finish became too much for my feverish self. I think in some ways my interest started to wane at the same time as bread machines became all the rage. It seemed like such a lazy shortcut to let a machine supersede the beauty of the long operation of making bread completely by hand.

Perhaps I am getting back to that calmer, more patient self because my interest in bread baking is rekindled.

Now after making the hell out of focaccia bread (about five times in the last month), it’s time to try out ciabatta. It’s more complicated and time consuming than focaccia so not sure when I will try it – but will naturally write about it when I do.

Ciabatta recipe
Starter

1/4 ounce fresh yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
3 cups regular flour

To make the starter
Cream the yeast with a small amount of water. Sift the flour into a bowl and gradually add in the yeast mixture and enough of the rest of the water to form a firm dough. Turn onto a floured surface and knead for five minutes. Return the smooth dough to the bowl and cover with a well-oiled plastic wrap. Leave in a warm place for 12 hours.

Dough
1/2 ounce fresh yeast
1 2/3 cups lukewarm water
4 tablespoons lukewarm milk
4 1/2 cups strong bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

To make the bread
When the starter has risen and started to collapse, it’s time for the next step.

Sprinkle three baking sheets with flour. Mix the yeast for dough with a bit of water until creamy. Mix in remaining water. Add this yeast mixture to the starter and mix well. Beat in the milk with a wooden spoon. Mix in the flour by hand for about 15 minutes, forming a very wet mixture.

Beat in the salt and oil. Cover with a piece of oiled plastic wrap and let rise for two hours (or until doubled).

Once risen, turn one-third of the dough at a time out onto the prepared pans (trying not to deflate the remaining dough in the process). Flour your hands and shape each bit of dough into oblong loaves about 1 inche (2.5 cm) thick and flatten slightly. Sprinkle the dough lightly with flour and let rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425F/220C and bake for 30 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

The Changing Workscape: The Upsides of Remote Work

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“When asked whether the company has meetings, he replied: “Has anyone ever said ‘I wish I could go to more meetings today’?“” – President of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg

While for me, there are no downsides to remote work, I can understand employers’ resistance and arguments against it. It’s new territory for most of them, so it’s easy to throw out a bunch of ill-considered objections: “if I can’t see or monitor my employees at their desk, I don’t know what they are doing” (which essentially means they do not trust their employees anyway and need to rethink staffing or their tendency to micromanage); “we need to work face-to-face to inspire creativity and innovation” (this may be true some of the time but is no reason to eliminate remote work); “we’re afraid productivity will suffer” (most studies conclude the opposite), etc. It comes down to a need for control.

Discussing the backwardness of the move away from remote work (in reference to Yahoo!’s hotly debated 2013 decision to forbid distance work), Jennifer Owens, editorial director of Working Mother Media, stated in a Forbes article by Jenna Goudreau (“Back to the Stone Age?” – sure feels like it!), “It comes from fear. Fear that if I can’t see you, I don’t know what you’re working on. It’s a distrust of your own workforce.”

The trick perhaps is both in making policy and accompanying attitude changes toward distance work – and finding a balanced approach to distance work. As Wharton research shows as part of its Work/Life Integration Project, there is no ideal “one-size-fits-all” way to do distance work. But offering the possibility means that a company has more tools to tackle all the challenges they face in attracting and keeping the right staff for its needs.

Objections be damned. Speaking from firsthand experience, I have benefited from the flexibility, increased productivity and benefits of focus, a better balance with work and home life and a much stronger sense of being trusted and valued in the company I was a part of. Likewise, it was true that I felt healthier, happier and almost felt as though things like vacation or sick leave mattered less; that is, while we do need time off, the ability to stay at home and structure my time and projects my own way (as long as I met deadlines and expectations) made all my time feel like my own. The comfort of staying at home also meant I was better rested, lost the misery of commuting and was just in the perfect spot for personal contentment and professional achievement. (Some arguments employees have against remote work, though, include the opposite – that professional achievement and advancement can be more challenging as a remote worker because you’re kind of “out of sight, out of mind” – you have to make extra effort to be noticed.)

The upsides are myriad for those employers who will embrace and allow distance work, not dissimilar to things I list as benefits in my personal views on distance work and telecommuting.

Increasing productivity & time savings
With more actual time for working (less time commuting or just sitting around talking – or being disrupted/interrupted in the office), productivity increases. A professor of management from UCLA, David Lewin, mentioned in the same Forbes article that a number of studies show that telecommuting correlates with higher productivity levels.

Boosting focus & eliminating interruptions
Improved focus is a key aspect of working at home that ties directly to improved productivity. Working in an office environment inevitably leads to a number of interruptions, and interruptions have a real cost. It takes time to focus, and every interruption disrupts that focus. Among other studies, University of California at Irvine research indicates that it takes up to 23 minutes to regain that same focus level. It only takes three “little interruptions” then to waste more than a hour of each day! It’s possible to make office rules, which we’ve tried at my office, to reduce these kinds of interruptions, but the truth is – in the destructive open landscape office environment that most companies seem to favor these days, no-interruption policies can never really be enforced. With people walking in, out and through all day long, someone saying, “Do you have a minute?” is enough to derail serious, hard-won concentration (I am a writer, and I need this!) But even the people in the big open room talking to each other – not to you – is more than enough to do the damage. All of these factors lead to the sense of not having enough time to do what needs to get done, which creates considerable anxiety and stress.

Building the dream team
A company can pick the cream of the crop if they are flexible enough to choose employment talent from anywhere. Not restricting a search to the local search area or requiring the right team members to uproot and relocate, a team can be comprised of the best in the world, not just the best in the local commuting area.

Retaining the best – creating loyalty – improving satisfaction
Showing employees that they are trusted and valued and giving them the flexibility to do their jobs creates goodwill and a sense of loyalty. A 2011 WorldatWork study found that “Organizations that have a stronger culture of flexibility also have a lower voluntary turnover rate. In addition, a majority of employers report a positive impact on employee satisfaction, motivation and engagement.”

Fostering corporate agility
Real savings can be achieved by reducing onsite workforce – that is, major real estate and other overhead and infrastructural expenses. With these savings, a company can have a lot more agility and freedom to operate more flexibly and manage expenses. By selecting best-in-class staff wherever they happen to be, a company may be able to take advantage of time zone differences (these are not always a drawback). Sometimes with a distributed staff, a company has staff closer to its customers who can handle those relationships more effectively than from a centralized location much further away.

Another aspect of this kind of agility is the ability to streamline activities. In companies that are really meeting-heavy, where people struggle to get their actual work done, because the tendency is to schedule extraneous and sometimes unnecessary meetings, a remote workforce has to adapt. It’s not that they will not continue to have meetings, but the number and scope of meetings can be pared down to what is needed rather than just what is convenient to have.

In my current company, there is not just meeting overkill but there used to be two annual marketing meetings to which all employees traveled. (And there is a lot of absolutely cost-ineffective travel taking place still). Finally the company decided to embrace the concept of a webinar to deliver this twice-yearly information to all the local markets. While the company is still firmly committed to an overabundance of in-person meetings, at least the step toward using technology to make up for cost cutting measures moved us in the right direction.

Work-life balance & health
I don’t have the hard and fast numbers on me, but it makes sense that people who want to work at home achieve a better work-life balance, which contributes to greater job satisfaction and to life satisfaction overall.

“Companies should move away from self-destructive, factory models of work where people are rewarded for arriving early and staying late.” – Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/WordPress