Working From Home: The End Of Productivity Or The Future Of Work? : All Tech Considered. Hide captionYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Feb. 20, 2013. Under Mayer, Yahoo is ending its remote work policy for employees. Peter Kramer/ASSOCIATED PRESS Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Feb. 20, 2013. Under Mayer, Yahoo is ending its remote work policy for employees. In its bid to reshape itself for the future, Yahoo is returning to a workplace culture of the tech industry's past. The Internet giant has reportedly notified its employees they'll no longer be allowed to work from home. The move goes against a popular workplace perk among tech companies and a wider trend toward more work-from-home options across several industries. Technology has made collaboration easier for employees who aren't physically in the same space, and companies who back telework say it has helped cut costs and compete for wider talent pools. "Ten years ago, it was seen more as an employee benefit.
Yahoo is staying mum, saying it doesn't comment on internal matters. From Digital Habitats to Digital Hangouts in the Enterprise | Idea Ripples. Randy Nelson on Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age. Randy Nelson: One of the things that we do at Pixar and I know some things about Pixar uhm ... is we use improv as a mechanism of helping with collaboration. And in that, two core principles of improv have always guided us. The first is, accept every offer. So if an improv, improviser says to you, "Gee it's funny. It's raining a lot in here today. " You don't go "Raining in here? " You say, "Well that's why they gave us umbrellas. " Randy Nelson: So that ended up being the way that the astronaut core was chosen, was they were looking for people who had not simply avoided failure, but rather those who had seen failure and had figured out how to turn it into something.
Randy Nelson: That's interesting and that's easy to get. For more information on what works in public education, got to edutopia.org. The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time - Sara Horowitz - Business. Welcome to the Gig Life. The boom in independent work is changing the way we think about jobs and careers. Does Washington get it? It's been called the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the "e" standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic.
Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. And, perhaps most surprisingly, many of them love it. This transition is nothing less than a revolution. Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about this profound shift and the three major trends that are central to it. Cultural Agility | Air Commuters Growing in Number. Some 4,000 commuters travel to and from New York City by air for work -- part of a tiny but rapidly growing group of super super-commuters. The most recent census numbers show several thousand commute to work by plane each week, enabled by technology and fueled by economic necessity.
In census data from a decade ago, this phenomenon was undetectable. “What we’re seeing is the collapse of a region’s boundaries,” said Mitchell Moss, the director of the Rudin Center, a New York University transportation think tank. “Distance has been overcome.” Data crunched by the Rudin Center at New York University for WNYC show how this super-long distance commuting is upending notions of work, home and office.
As super commuting rises, Moss said a number of notions begin to fray – like “rush hour” and “the work week.” Scott Sunshine’s commute starts at 4:30 am. “I’m a carpool with a bunch of people from my town who make the same commute,” Sunshine said. Sean Donovan can relate. He ran the numbers. Gaming and Leadership Report. "If you want to see what business leadership may look like in three to five years, look at what's happening in online games. " Byron Reeves, Ph.D.,the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Co-founder of Seriosity, Inc.
Online games put the future of business leadership on display. Management fads and business leadership books come and go. Fortunately there is already a window into this rapidly changing world. That's why IBM partnered with Seriosity Inc., a software company that develops enterprise products and services inspired by online games, to study how leaders operate in these increasingly popular games. The results are fascinating. To learn more about the lessons that online games can teach the business leaders of tomorrow, read the GIO gaming report (PDF, 1.3MB) or order a hard copy of the report online.
Virtual businesses set to grow, but what are the implications for business banking? | Asian Banking & Finance. A report released this month by Cushman & Wakefield property consultants found that Asia is in the midst of a boom in business office rents. Among the findings in the report were that rents for prime business office space in Beijing rose 75% last year and notes that this was the highest increase of any city in the world in 2011. Other Asian cities also experienced similar inflation in business office rents with Hong Kong continuing to be the number one city globally for the most expensive city for office space in terms of total occupancy. I believe that the continued increase in office accommodation rents is likely to become a significant catalyst for fuelling the growth of Virtual Businesses.
The virtual business model avoids the heavy overheads of business office accommodation. There is however more to the virtual business model than keeping office accommodation costs low however. I wanted to briefly consider that for this months feature article. Let’s start with what we know. 1. 2. 3. EXCLUSIVE: The gadgets of 2025: A vision of the future.
PowerPoint Presentation - University of Vienna - May 11, 2009. We, the Web Kids. PASTEBIN | #1 paste tool since 2002 create new paste trending pastes Pastebin is 300% more awesome when you are logged in. Sign Up, it's FREE! Public Pastes Logs25 sec agoSCIP CHAPTER STRAT...16 sec agoUntitled9 sec agoUntitled10 sec agoError Log report10 sec agoUntitled13 sec agoUntitledJavaScript | 15 sec agoUntitled18 sec ago We, the Web Kids By: czerski on Feb 15th, 2012 | syntax: None | size: 10.85 KB | hits: 57,189 | expires: Never download | raw | embed | report abuse | print Text below is selected. Piotr CzerskiWe, the Web Kids. create a new version of this paste RAW Paste Data Piotr Czerski We, the Web Kids. (7) Kes Sampanthar - "Motivational GPS: Understanding the Science of Mo... The Long March from Crowdsourcing to a Global Meritocracy.
OK, this isn’t working anymore. Too many people either don’t have a job or the ones that do are predominantly dissatisfied. We’ve been talking about networked organisations and distributed work for decades, but productivity gains have been dim the past ten years. Everything worked just well enough to not think about structural changes. We tried to apply collaboration and fancy search platforms like new paint on a crumbling house that could be fixed. But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed.
And that’s, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long. Bruno is a European-born entrepreneur currently busy building a simple marketplace for professional services, work|i|o. Here’s how it could work. So why again is the relationship revolving around permanent affiliation, and not expertise?
Earn a Living on Workio | work|i|o Insight. The Emergence of Teams in Online Work. When I started as an assistant professor, back in 2004, and I joined the NYU/Stern Business School, I got into a strange position. I had funding to spend, but no students to work with. I had work to be done (mainly writing crawlers) that was time-consuming, but not particularly novel, or intellectually rewarding. Semi-randomly, at the same time, I have heard about the website Rent-A-Coder, which was being used by undergraduate students that were "outsourcing" their programming assignments.
I started using Rent-A-Coder, tentatively at first, to get programming tasks done, and then, over time, I got fascinated by the concept of online work, and the ability to hire people online, and get things done. As I started completing increasingly complicated projects using remote contractors, I started thinking on how we can best manage a diverse team of remote workers, each one being in a different location, working on different tasks, etc.
Do we see teams being formed online? What's coming? How to Be Happier at Work - Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown. Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't 'Average' Hide captionHank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth's record for career home runs as he hits No. 715 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on April 8, 1974, on his way to a career 755 home runs. Research suggests that in a wide variety of professions, including collegiate and professional sports, a small but significant number of individuals perform exceedingly well and the rest of individuals' performance trails off. For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what's known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good, a few people to be very bad and most people to be average.
The bell curve powerfully shapes how we think of human performance: If lots of students or employees happen to show up as extreme outliers — they're either very good or very bad — we assume they must represent a skewed sample, because only a few people in a truly random sample are supposed to be outliers. The Internal Use of Social Media for Innovation Efforts. This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Social Media: Add Power to Your Innovation Efforts, which is due this fall. Using social media internally for innovation can help lay the groundwork for taking your initiative to an external audience. The platform of choice for doing this for many businesses is Yammer, a popular social media platform that sets up private, secure enterprise social networks that can be used to drive innovation, especially idea generation/development within their company.
I will be using Yammer as an example throughout this blog post due to it’s popularity and since the advice I put forth work equally well for other kinds of social media tools and services used internally. It can be fairly easy to recruit people for the Yammer platform. It is, however, much more difficult to keep the users engaged over time. So what kind of engagement drivers work for innovation initiatives on Yammer? • How should this challenge be framed? Hurdles and goal-setting inShare12. The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz. By Tony Schwartz | 8:53 AM March 14, 2012 Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?
It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive.
It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. I know this from my own experience. If you’re a manager, here are three policies worth promoting: 1. 2. 3. It’s also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. 1. 2. 3. Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work. Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive? - Ndubuisi Ekekwe.