Sumolabs

"The leaner you are, the easier it is to change. The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It's as true in the business world as it is in the physical world." - 37 Signals

“Competitive Advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks” – McKinsey Quarterly, 8 Business Trends to Watch, Dec 2007

Some buzzwords....

Video conferencing, Telecommuting, Teleconferencing, Virtual Worlds, Social Networking, Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks, Micro blogging, Locational Awareness, Web 2.0, Crowd Sourcing, Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Friend Feed, Content Syndication and RSS Feeds, Visual Application Development, Open Standards Based APIs, Cloud Computing, Facebook Applications. The list goes on.

The list of recently hyped up innovations is long, wide and converging at an increasing rate. But what do they all mean? Where are they taking us?

I believe that these innovations are the driving force behind what will redefine and transform the modern working environment: the Nomadic Workforce.

Let's start at the start. In order for us to define the Nomadic workforce, we need to define a few things first:

no•mad (nmd)
n.
1. A member of a group of people who have no fixed home and move according to the seasons from place to place in search of food, water, and grazing land.
2. A person with no fixed residence who roams about; a wanderer.

workforce or work•force (wûrkfôrs, -frs)
n.
1. The workers employed in a specific project or activity.
2. All the people working or available to work, as in a nation, company, industry, or on a project.

nomadic workforce
n.
1. An organisation (or company) for which there are little to no physical office, whose employees are location agnostic and work together through pervasive, ubiquitous, and integrated communication and collaboration technologies.
2. A workforce environment in which co-workers never have the requirement of meeting each other face to face.

“The baby-boomers are starting to retire, forcing employers to compete for new talent by letting younger employees work wherever they please. Even the older workers are becoming nomadic.” – The Economist - The new oases, April 2008

This is way more than telecommuting

Let's take a reality check.

The idea of letting people work from home is not a new one. Let's quickly look at the history of Telework and Telecommuting.

From the start of the teleworking movement during the 1990s — a trend initially pioneered to extend the working day or as a means to achieve a better work-life balance — there have been contradictory predictions of either a huge growth or a total stalling of this market worldwide. The truth lies somewhere in between.

As the trend grows in both strength and breadth, so the motivations for teleworking have extended to include corporate benefits like reducing outlay on office space and gaining tax incentives. In common with other global trends, some parts of the world have been in a prime position to take advantage of this new way of working from the beginning, while others have waited, or are still waiting, for management styles and communications infrastructure to develop sufficiently to enable pervasive nomadic working.

We are not talking about working one day a week from home. We are not talking about flexible work arrangements. We are not talking about vanilla videoconferencing or teleconferencing.

We are talking about innovations in technology, management, work demographics and work culture that will enable organisation’s people to work anywhere without ever having to be in the same physical location. In a nutshell, Virtual teams will become Virtual organizations.

“A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.” – BusinessWeek Magazine

To make it easier to understand, let’s take a look at big consulting companies.

They have desk hoteling, mobile technology and connectivity, policies/procedures in place, some use of virtual teams, and one day a week remote working is broadly adopted. However, the management style and defacto standards for assessing worker performance result is the need to see ‘bums in the seats’.

Gartner has an assessment tool called the Telework Maturity Model which rates the maturity level, from 1 to 5, of teleworking capabilities. Big consulting companies, sit somewhere between Level 3 (Selectively Deployed) and Level 4 (Formalized). The scale however, it rather logarithmic: They have a long way to go to reach level 5 from Level 4.

In a level 5 working environment, teleworking becomes institutionalized. It is a strategic business imperative to have people work virtually with 100% participation. This goes beyond the organizational boundaries, and extends to partners, suppliers and vendors. Virtual work is a "way of life", and any tiny amount of office space that remains would be used primarily for director and executive meetings. Furthermore, management

Level 5 defines the ultimate level in telework maturity. At this level, telework is a strategic business imperative of the enterprise, providing competitive differentiation. One hundred percent of the organization adopts the virtual work style, including administrative personnel, professional, managerial and executive-level employees. Virtual collaboration extends to business partners, suppliers and vendors. Office facilities become primarily convening centers for critical meetings or executive and board of directors; otherwise, all employees work principally on a remote basis. A fully integrated workplace service organization supports a fully distributed workforce. At Level 5, telework is a way of life.

Envision this future: The baby boomers have retired from upper management and Generation Y has entered the workforce. Employees are allowed to work from anywhere as long as you are producing the results and targets that have been set (i.e. See Result Oriented Work Environment). Remote collaboration software becomes increasingly robust, interoperable, and ubiquitous -- resulting in your clients, vendors and customers to prefer to work virtually as well.

You never have to physically be with any of the people you work with. For the most part, you can define your own work structure and working day: The “9 to 5” becomes a management relic of the past.

Impossible you say? The technology is already largely here and is only going to get more sophisticated over time.

“There isn’t an effective [digital] alternative to the white board.” – Anonymous blog comment

The enablers

1. Video conferencing and Visual Interaction tools will play a large part in the future of nomadic working as using it will be as common and easy as using the telephone. The act of dropping by a person’s desk simply becomes double clicking their name to bring up both parties on video. In fact, it is even more efficient since most video phone clients allow you to determine if a person is busy or not (Thus not interrupting them during their thought process).

2. Collaboration Technologies (web 2.0 and beyond) will allow workers to effectively collaborate, navigate relationships between other people and draw out the most valuable content through crowd sourcing and collaborative filtering. Organisations, due to the falling cost of storage, will store everything and anything created in these collaborative tools, and interoperability between systems will enable the mobility of that information onto different systems.

“An advantage of workers moving from verbal to email or other web communication is expanding the written documentation trail. This can assist not just in meeting compliance requirements, but also in other areas such as documenting user needs for IT system requirements. In addition, more communication in writing means it will be easier to share information on a company's intranet, aiding knowledge management throughout the firm.” – AT&T Point of View

3. Management Monitoring Tools
Management needs to be able to ensure that their people are getting the job done. This will manifest in one of two different ways. In the first, obsession with time continues and workers will be remotely monitored or ‘watched’. In the second, organisations transform into a ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) where management only cares about output or results, and cares little of monitoring the time of a worker.

For the time obsessed: http://www.RescueTime.com or http://www.odesk.com
For the results oriented folks: A corporate version of http://www.friendfeed.com that feeds in activity data from every IT system, and telecommunications event.

4. Flexible Work Spaces

This already exists today. Consider a global contract with a hosted office service such as Regus, which offers fully furnished, serviced and connected offices on demand. Such a service offers employees a global portfolio of offices accessible on demand.

What is to stop your local starbucks from offering huddle rooms and private call rooms? Included of course, with the purchase of a coffee.

Any many others

“Mobile working is perceived as a major enhancement to productivity, making it increasingly popular with employers and employees alike. But is not without its share of governance and security issues.” – Information Age

Benefits and Challenges

Benefits

• Reduced real estate costs
• Capability to scale the workforce independent of physical facilities, to recruit employee talent from distant locales and to form diverse teams, regardless of location
• Enhanced work/life balance, improving workforce morale and retention
• Workplace resilience; using telework techniques during episodes of business interruption
• Reducing employee commuting, thus reducing energy costs, auto emissions and wasted commute time
• REAL Access to a pool of global talent

“Once freed of having to gather employees in a single place, companies can adopt far more flexible recruitment strategies. As AT&T’s Mr. Roitz puts it: “The talent pool is not limited to local talent, or to people who have the ability and desire to relocate their families.”
– AT&T Point of View

Challenges do exist

• How to effectively monitor the results of remote workers
  

  “There seems to be a lingering view that unless workers are physically monitored, they won’t work. Indeed, ‘the difficulty of monitoring output of remote workers’ emerged as the main perceived obstacle to implementing remote working. It is true that managers have to get used to dealing with staff they can’t see.” – AT&T Point of View

• Loss of perceived benefits from 'real life' face-to-face interactions
• Operating in a very client facing environment (This won't be an issue once everyone is confortable with remote communication technologies and becomes the norm. When videoconferencing and holographic communication are as common as the phone, your clients won't need to meet you face to face)
• Perceived management concerns over difficulties in coordinating a virtual workforce
• Network Security restrictions
• Opposition from the older, more senior management (See expressions "Out with the old, and in with the new.", and "You can't teach an old dog new tricks")
• Cost of ensuring remote workers have the necessary access to tools, resources and network infrasrtucture
• Perceived threat to company culture
• Business Continuity concerns in the even of network failure (Which is not really any different than them losing their network connect AT the office)

“[The WebApp] is where our team — local and remote — gathers everyday. We use it to chat, show each other screenshots, get feedback, upload files, collaborate on copy, share code, get alerts when sites are modified, search previous conversations, and much more.” – 37Signals

“Gartner last fall did an extensive survey of 260 enterprises, in which it learned that 90 percent of enterprises worldwide have remote workers. But 25 percent of the organizations don't know exactly who those remote workers are or what "remote" looks like, he said. Were they executives, salespeople, engineering? Were they teleworking full time or only a few days a week? The IT departments often had no idea; they just provided the same service to everyone.” – CIO.com, April 2008

Everyone is better off

“Remote working has emerged as a key factor driving corporate success. Employees can expand their
working day, operate more productively – and in many respects lead healthier lives. Employers save on office overheads, are not limited to hiring those able to relocate to where they’re based and get better performance from their staff.” – AT&T Point of View

The future, at least from my perspective, is bright. From an organizational perspective -- companies will be able to lower real estate and other operating costs, make employees more efficient and productive, and also have access to a world of talent (instead of being restricted by geography). People, will be happier (See the "University of Minnesota Flexible Work and Well-being Report")