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About six months ago, I wrote a post for this blog on Work-Life Balance vs. Work-Life Blur. In it, I shared two definitions of flexible workers: as ‘Integrators’ and ‘Boundary Keepers’. Boundary Keepers “keep things separate,” I wrote. Integrators “mix things up”.

San Sharma (@WorkSnugSan) is community manager at WorkSnug

I was a Boundary Keeper, I said. I’d established a ‘traditional’ working pattern and hours, and I was pretty disciplined about sticking to it. My work didn’t really spill into my evenings and weekends, and I tried hard to fight distractions (sometimes friends and family!) in the day.

Six months on, and I’m done fighting. That’s not to say that I’ve let distractions into my working life, but that I see my working life in a different light - and it’s not always daylight.

I’m starting to embrace a more Integrator-like work-style. It sometimes finds me working in the evenings and on the weekends (like now!), but it also means that instead of fighting distractions in the day I can roll with them.

That’s the advice I’d like to share with you today: if you’re taking up flexible working, you’ve got to roll with it.

As a former Boundary Keeper - and a strict one at that - a personal call in the middle of the day was one of the worst things to happen to me. The phone would ring, and the ringtone might as well have announced “game over!”.

It’s perfectly normal, of course, to announce your working hours as roughly between 9am and 5pm, but what’s the point of flexible working, if you can’t be flexible? When the phone rings now, I pick up - and if I need to work a tiny bit later, I will.

For example, one day last week, I had lots on my to-do list and in my diary, including a couple of meetings. In between, I had to get some stuff done, so I popped into a coffee shop with my laptop. As soon as I did, I recognised someone I knew. Dang, I thought. Maybe he didn’t see me? But it was too late. He waved and came over.

In the past, I would have really struggled with the awkwardness of having to explain that although I was in the coffee shop I had a lot of work to do and I couldn’t really talk. But, that day, I thought, I could actually shuffle some things around. I could talk to this guy now, and catch up with my to-do list after my next meeting. Sure, that would eat into my evening, but I was only planning to watch TV anyway. This way, I could have a fortuitous coffee with a friend, get to my meeting on time and do all the work I wanted to do as well.

Of course, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes deadlines can’t be shifted. But for everything else, I don’t see 5pm as a ‘deadline’ any more. It’s more like a good time to stop, but it’s not a deadline: it’s a blurry line, if anything :-)

I think, at heart, I’m still a bit of a Boundary Keeper, but I’m a bit of an Integrator too, when the day calls for it. And that’s how I roll.

Lots more people, here in London, will be taking up flexible working for the Olympics. If you’d like more flexible working tips & guides (and no spam!) sign up for our occasional newsletter.

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Photo credit: kbaird

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WorkSnug is based here in London, though our users are spread all over the world. We’re also pretty agile - we’re a small team of flexible workers, splitting our work days (and sometimes nights!) between the office, our homes and third-places, like laptop-friendly coffee shops.

That’s why, when it snowed here in London last year, on what became ‘Snow Day’ for stranded employees and ‘Snowmageddon’ for employers (and slow-news day journalists), we weren’t massively affected. But we did notice the meltdown in the city around us (excuse the pun!): buses and underground trains didn’t run, commuters were stuck at home, employers freaked out.

Now London’s workforce is facing an even bigger challenge: the 2012 Olympic Games.

In training

Some businesses are preparing for a meltdown on the scale of 100 ‘Snow Days’. Others are taking a ‘wait and see approach’, thinking the expected disruption will be less like Snow Day and more like the Millennium Bug.

The authorities propose a solution that is two fold: 1) that London’s transport network has to increase its capacity, and 2) that commuters have to decrease their usage - by 30% to avoid severe disruptions.

Flexible working: Going for gold

Is this interesting to our readers outside of London? Well, yes. Studies suggest that problems with London’s transport network aren’t just to do with the Olympics. The Games are an inflection point of a much larger issue, and an opportunity for businesses to consider the broader challenges of work in the 21st century.

White paper: 2012 Olympic Games Roundtable

This white paper (1.4 MB) by workplace consultants AOS Studley is the result of a roundtable discussion with senior HR professionals in London. It presents conclusions drawn from research and resources that suggest that flexible working is the solution to London’s 2012 woes, but also to the challenges of modern work elsewhere.

It also does a good job of clearing up some confusion around flexible working as a term and as a workstyle, and shares case studies of its benefits and successes.

The white paper also makes an interesting point about one of flexible working’s biggest challenges - and it’s one we talked about with Cisco’s Bas Boorsma on our podcast: and that’s the shift in culture and understanding required to make flexible working a success.

Downloads

Download AOS Studley’s white paper on the challenges of the 2012 Olympic Games and flexible working in general here here (1.4 MB), and listen to our podcast on the evolution of work here.

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Photo credit: paulcoxphotography

Mobile app developers [x]cube LABS put together this infographical snapshot of mobility adoption in the enterprise workforce.

It gives a good global overview of the types of mobile workers, their devices and preferences.

Apparently, younger employees prefer the Apple and Android smartphones, while older employees prefer BlackBerrys. True?

Check out the infographic below, and let us know what you think.

The Mobile Employee

We’re very excited about the latest release of our iPhone app, which does some really cool things with LinkedIn.

WorkSnug connects mobile workers to the nearest and best laptop friendly places around the world - and now, for the first time, you can connect your LinkedIn account and see other WorkSnug users near you.

It’s a bit like sharing a virtual business card with other laptop workers. It’s completely optional, of course, and you can switch the LinkedIn feature on or off at any time.

Anyway, it’s best to see it in action! So, make sure you check out the video above.

Download

If you’re an existing WorkSnug iPhone user, look for the update in the App Store. New users can download the app here. It’s totally free, by the way.

Read More

If you’ve decided to ditch the office and work remotely, whether that’s from home or on the road, it’s really important to start your flexible working journey off on the right foot. And if you’ve got stakeholders involved, like a boss, a manager or other team members, it’s really important to keep them on board too.

Cora (@corasauras) wrote some excellent tips on that for our blog, as well as some solid advice for making your teleworking experience a success. But I’d like to add some of my own tips - and they’re to do with using Skype to add context to your teleworking experience.

San Sharma (@WorkSnugSan) is community manager at WorkSnug

Off on the wrong foot

I’ve heard horror stories of people starting a flexible working arrangement off on the wrong foot. Some are afraid to leave their laptops and risk being accused of ‘slacking off’. I knew one flexible worker who would turn the volume up high on his computer, so he could hear Skype notifications when he wandered away from his desk. And another, who won’t be named, who would take his desk phone with him into the bathroom, in case his boss rang when nature called!

But the truth is flexible working isn’t the same as being in the office: coworkers don’t see you come in in the morning, or pop out for lunch. They don’t know when you’re away from your desk or when you’re in a meeting.

That is, unless you let your coworkers know where you are and what you’re doing.

It’s really important to do that - not only to manage expectations of your availability - but also to add contextual information about where you are and what’s happening around you, and to invite your coworkers to imagine your work situation for themselves.

Adding context with Skype

Skype is a part of almost all of our work lives - so it’s a great tool to use for this purpose, as it doesn’t involve introducing a new system to the rest of your team.

1. Change your Skype status to truly reflect your availability. If the thought of someone Skyping you via IM, voice or video, doesn’t fill you with dread, then set your status to ‘Online’.
   If that would be a bad idea, like if you’re right in the middle of something, like a document or a meeting, and don’t want to be disturbed - you’ve guessed it! - set it to ‘Do Not Disturb’. And if you’re nipping away from your computer for a bit, set it to ‘Away’.
   You can actually set how many minutes the computer must be inactive for for it to automatically set your status to ‘Away’ in Skype’s preferences, but don’t switch that option off altogether. There’s something quite annoying about thinking someone’s there when they’re not. Oh, and the ‘Invisible’ status seems like a cop out to me. What do you think?
2. Use your ‘mood message’ to display your whereabouts. Skype wants your ‘mood message’ to be like your Facebook updates, for some reason, but I find it far more useful to use it to display my whereabouts. I pretty much change it from ‘At Snug Office’, to ‘Working from home’, ‘At the Hub Kings Cross’, which is a coworking space, to ‘Working in a coffee shop’ - to give some context to my coworkers, wherever they are.

So, by using your Skype status and mood message, you can let your coworkers and stakeholders know where you are and what you’re doing, and start to paint a picture for them about what your day is really like.

Unified Communications

If your team is really serious about flexible working, and has a big enough mobile workforce to support it, it may want to look into a unified communications solution, like Microsoft Lync. UC software, like Lync, combines IM, conferencing, voice chat, Office integration and mobile apps, as well as a more robust way to manage and broadcast your status to the rest of your team.

Do you use UC software, like Lync? Is it worth bringing it up with your IT manager, do you think? Or does Skype work just fine for you guys?

Let us know what you think about that, and about using Skype to add context to your teleworking experience, in the comments.

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Photo credit: Justin Shearer

A roundup of the month’s best links for mobile workers and digital nomads

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Here’s what we’ve been reading this month. Let us know, in the comments, if there are any posts that you’ve been reading that you’d like to share with our mobile working readers.

Modern Workspaces

• Working Remotely: Is It Right For You?
• Managing a Virtual Team
• 8 Bad Habits That Are Driving Your Coworkers Crazy
• Sabbaticals Are Nice For Employees, Sure—But They’re Also Great For Your Business
• Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest

Tech & Connectivity

• Top 5 Business Uses For The iPad
• iPads in the Office: What Are They Really Good For?
• 20 Clever Apps and Services That Make Great Use of the Cloud
• Squeeze the Most Juice Out of Your iPhone or iPad Battery
• For today’s IT professional, the iPad is an addition, not a replacement
• How mobility is stressing the chip industry
• iPad in the Enterprise: A videoconferencing dream machine?
• Wanted: more predictive collaborative apps

Enterprise

• The Key To A Great Meeting Is Kicking Some People Out Of It
• BYOD and the creeping consumerisation of Enterprise IT
• Where IT is going: Cloud, mobile, and data
• Think BYOD is an issue? Wait for Stealth IT
• The Post-PC Enterprise
• Forget about Instagram, take a look at the Social Enterprise [infographic]

Travel

• 15 Euro For Two Coffees?! How To Stop Overpaying While Traveling
• Secrets of the Most Productive Travelers

Coffee

• How Coffee Revitalizes the City
• Tokyo Cafe Lets You Drink Coffee And Cuddle Kitties
• A calculation to see how many cups of coffee you would need to drink in order to kill yourself.
• Learning Creativity: Coffee breaks and bathroom discussions
• Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Your Morning Coffee.
• Norwich coffee shop refuses service for mobile phone users
• Coffee Was a Originally a Food, and Other Ways It Revolutionized the World [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Morning Coffee May Actually Cause You to Slack Off

Photo credit: marchorowitz

This is what tablet adoption looks like - to me, at least: it starts with fanboys, queueing outside in the rain; it gets handed down to parents (who bug its original owners with support queries!); we want to take ours into work; the IT department resists, then finally caves in.

We’re not quite there yet. We’re stuck at stage 2, helping our parents with their iPad-me-downs. But, don’t get me wrong, the tablet is making its way into the workplace, whether enterprise-issued or as part of a “Bring your own device” policy.

This infographic shows what’s happened so far and the trends that’ll encourage tablet adoption in enterprise in the coming years.

The Year of the Enterprise Tablet

Infographic by Vertic via Techi.com

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In recent years, there’s been an explosion of coworking spaces, coffee shops and libraries offering free wifi, as well casual coworking ‘Jelly’ events.

The bemused home working onlooker might well be asking why all this is necessary, when they already have a perfectly good place to work at home that costs nothing.

The fact is that while living and working in the same place has many advantages, such as allowing more time with family and the ability to juggle work and home commitments, it’s also a double-edged sword.

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In a survey I carried out on my website recently, distraction came out as one of the major challenges for people working from home.

The top three distractions they identified were as follows:

1. Family members you never saw when you were at the office all day may not be quite as aware as you of the concept of working from home - the fact you are around means they want to talk to you or expect you to do the lion’s share of the jobs. As one of my Twitter followers told me - ‘My wife came home and asked why the house was a mess when I’d been at home all day’.
2. Neighbours were mentioned surprisingly often in the survey as a source of distraction. They know you’re at home so they pop round for a chat or to ask for a favour. And suddenly you find yourself becoming the neighbourhood sorting office for parcels delivered during the day.
3. Housework. There’s nothing more depressing than facing a dirty, cluttered house every time you leave your workspace, but too much time spent on the house means lost working hours. To work from home successfully you have to find your own level of acceptable cleanliness and tidiness.

Many home workers find that leaving behind the actual and potential distractions of working in their home allows them to focus in a different way.

Most people are amazed by their productivity in third spaces or at Jelly events, even allowing for chats with fellow attendees, and a friend says her productivity ‘has shot up’ since she signed up with a coworking space.

To paraphrase a well-known quotation, home workers have never had it so good! We can mix and match the benefits of working at home and in other places in combinations to suit ourselves and our lifestyles, and so neatly avoid many of the challenges of home working.

Judy Heminsley (@judyheminsley) is a homeworking expert and believer in mobile & flexible working, coworking, coffee & cake.

Photo credit: joybot

Do you work from home? What are some of the distractions you face? And how do you deal with them?

Do you need to ‘be there’ to be in business? That’s the question The Economist Intelligence Unit asked 862 business leaders in its survey, sponsored by Cisco.

And it’s a prescient question, as distributed teams, like our own, are fundamentally changing how organisations deal with colleagues, partners and customers, separated by long distances.

Long distance relationships

Is in-person communication as powerful as we think it is? Or can we make it work over the airwaves?

Find out the results of The Economist and Cisco’s survey in the infographic below - and let us know what you think in the comments.

The Power of In-Person Communication

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