The Post Geographic Workforce = Less Cost, Less Global Warming

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One of the most important corporate innovations is the structure of the workplace itself. More and more, work is becoming location agnostic, place independent. Note the swarms of espresso-addled laptop jockeys hogging tables at your local cafe. The masses of hunch-headed Treo toters, walking and thumbing at the same time. At IBM, nearly half of the workforce has no permanent office. At Best Buy, execs don’t even have to show up anymore. Sun Microsystems has closed down two Silicon Valley campuses and saved $70 million in annual expenses through its efforts to convince more than half its staff to work from home.

Untethering workers from the workplace saves money. Case Closed.

Still, remote work faces plenty of opposition, especially from crusty clock-watchers and managers who fall prey to “butt-in-chair” syndrome, believing that sitting in a certain place means you are accomplishing a certain thing. Thus a nation of extreme commuters.

Now the remote-work ambassadors are trumpeting another alluring reason to immediately equip your underlings with as much wireless gadgetry as possible: it’s good for the environment. Here’s Harvard B-School prof Shoshanah Zuboff, from her blog The Support Economy, on the subject:

“But inside the support economy is a far more sustainable and profound response to climate crisis. It entails the shift from concentrated to distributed patterns of life, work, consumption. Start with our daily obeisance to the gods of command and control: the commute. The commute exists because in the late eighteenth century canny British factory owners figured out that they could get more work out of people and use fixed assets more efficiently if everyone worked in the same place at the same time. Today, the concentrated pattern of work costs far more than it saves for firms, individuals, and the planet: It feeds needless bureaucracy; it destroys value by insulating employees from consumers; it requires mass-carbon-spewing transport. The barriers to distributed working are not technological or substantive. Progress on this front has been slow because employers don’t want to give up physical supervision, because office politics require face time, because people who work “away” take unfair hits on their careers and prospects. Concentrated work patterns express power politics and are maintained out of inertia on both sides of the power equation.”

Again, case closed.

http://www.businessweek.com/careers/manage...ost_geogra.html

[AnaAndDaniel 0]

dunno. at my current place of employment, we have offices worldwide and collaborate on projects similarly. dang it is a drag. sharp people all over. but time differences and language barriers sure cost a lot. now you add the complexity of splitting the home team? methinks there is alot of value of at least core teams being together and sharing ideas on the fly verbally/face to face.

Daniel

:energetic:

[Nikita2Charles 32]

I know that feeling, specially when your counterpart is all the way in Asia, so it's always Good morning here and Good evening there. So if they have some problems in Singapore or some concern they want to bring, it has to come by email, and the reply a day later. otherwise you have to work late afternoon here on the west coast to catch the 8am meeting in Singapore. Crazy

[AnaAndDaniel 0]

I know that feeling, specially when your counterpart is all the way in Asia, so it's always Good morning here and Good evening there. So if they have some problems in Singapore or some concern they want to bring, it has to come by email, and the reply a day later. otherwise you have to work late afternoon here on the west coast to catch the 8am meeting in Singapore. Crazy

yep.

can be frustrating. when it comes towork being done by groups that are in the same office, the work flies. but as soon as it requires collaboration, it slows to a crawl and you get a feeling that not all the base are being covered.

Daniel

:energetic: