Is Being “Out of Office” Your Job?

28.02.13 Posted in Work by

“Out of Office” – probably the most common auto reply in the world, so popular there are even tutorials on how to write one. But times are changing and the term is gradually losing its meaning. From telling people that you would not be working, Out of Office is becoming where more and more work really happens. To many, work is no longer a place you go but a thing you do. Like Podio user Todd Vachon put it recently: 

“The [Podio] mobile apps help us communicate on the go without having to wait until everyone is physically present to discuss the finer points.”

Todd is not alone. We hear similar stories when talking to you, everyday. Sometimes you call it working-on-the-go, telecommuting, remote working, workshifting, or mobile workstyles, but one thing is certain, a lot of work happens outside the office.

Work like Richard Branson?

“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they [are] at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will,” said Virgin Group Founder, Richard Branson.

Few of us have working lives similar to Richard Branson’s, but there are many professions where being out of the office is your job. And, although his quote was in response to some companies moving away from remote workforces we get the feeling that the world is moving towards more flexible work styles, not away from it.

Not only black and white – not only Home vs. Office

The debate that has erupted in recent weeks around how and where we should work is important. How do we ensure that we can attract and retain the most talented people, that those people and motivated, productive, and innovative, and that a company vision and culture is shared by everyone?

This is not black and white – it’s about providing the flexibility to have work evolve in the most efficient and satisfying way for employees, it’s about moving work to the optimum time and place, and if we only look at the Home vs. Office argument, we fail to see how the concept of the office itself is also changing.

Everyday, over a third of people using Podio’s mobile apps use these apps for the same or more time as Podio on the web.

 

For example, the sales team at Danish brewery, Nørrebro Bryghus, now spend half a day less in their physical office each week because they have Podio on their Android phones – to them their real office is being out meeting clients and bringing in new business.

As for bricks and mortar, I recently talked to Ryan Anderson, Dir of Future Technology at Herman Miller, who was giving a talk at Techonomy. He explained how companies are now reconsidering their real estate investments as each office they own is now “at least in theory in competition with any other place where somebody might want to go do work” due to the rise of mobility and cloud. For an office space to truly deliver ROI it must prove to be the best place to facilitate a particular type of work.

Where do you work?

While big companies like Google or Facebook are known for their efforts to make their work campuses and offices great places, I am more curious to hear about the places you work from. Where is the place you feel most productive? Where do you spend most of your working time? In which situations do you work on-the-go? If you’re in one of the many innovative agencies using Podio, you might spend a lot of your work time with your clients, so maybe your office is your clients’ office?

How do you get the optimal mix of productivity alone and the benefits of interactions, spontaneous chats, and ideation? Professor Sullivan from San Francisco State University points out that productivity is likely to be higher if working from your home but “if you want innovation, then you need interaction”.

For me personally, it makes me proud to see that people seem to have found a solution in Podio. For example Marlene Eick from LiveStockPromotions writes: “We work with multiple staff members in various locations throughout the country and rarely have in-person meetings. Podio enables our staff to collaborate in a way that mimics the social interactions that are gained from working in the same physical office.”

So, what’s your “office” or is “Out of Office” your job?

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About the author

Co-founder at Podio. For several years Jon Froda has been researching the field of social software, specializing in strategies and tools that help organizations develop knowledge, lead and stay ahead of the market. At Podio Jon is involved with marketing, product development and customer service.

Twitter
@Podio
Email
froda@podio.com
  • http://twitter.com/adrianysan Adrian Y Roessler

    Personally, I wouldn’t want to miss working in the same physical space with the amazing team I’m a part of. There are definitely times when my productivity is suffering from interruptions and noise, though. So often I’m most productive in the early mornings or late evenings.
    I think the important point is that I still have the possibility to work from anywhere at any time. Both in terms of “permission” as well as ability since I have the right tools that enable me to stay completely in the loop, interact with my team, and move things forward while at a conference, at home, or at the airport. It also helps that in our team we have such strong shared vision, so you know exactly where you’re heading, even if you’re working remotely for a longer time.

  • http://twitter.com/testing4success QA Team

    I run an outsourced software testing/QA business (Testing4success.com), and this requires me to be in and out of our test lab on a frequent basis. I rely heavily on my iPhone to allow me to take calls and view emails. Recently, with the emergence of some quality apps, this has now transcended to the next level. With apps like Podio, I can pretty much do everything I need to while out of the office. In addition, as we test mobile apps; testing on the iPhone has become significantly easier, as we can now take screen-shots of bugs and enter them directly into Podio. I can pretty much run my entire business from a single mobile device now. Generally speaking, being able to run a business effectively when out of the office has until now, not been possible. But, this is the way communication and collaboration is heading. Its an exciting time for any business that is prepared to move with the times and embrace what mobile technologies can offer us.

  • Don Mennig

    An across the board ‘banning’ policy on telework is the wrong approach. VDI, Lync, cloud VoIP technologies (and Podio of course) have provided opportunities for folks to be productive (and interact) both in and out of the office. To me the most obvious win is the flex-time these services enable for employees that need to maintain a healthy work / home balance.

    Folks not believing in telework may also not be considering the savings – employees no longer need $1,000 laptops when they can function perfectly well using VMWare and a $200 netbook (or better yet, BYOD). Telework in call center environments in particular can provide huge savings.

    Another hard to quantify savings can be for workers who are sick. Not only can they stay productive at home, they won’t be getting others sick by being forced into the office to avoid taking PTO. Nothing worse than the flu chasing a sales team out of the office at the end of the month. One of our marketing managers literally just wrote a post about her work-from-home-with-the-flu experience today: http://blog.evolveip.net/index.php/2013/02/28/breathing-easy-with-hosted-lync-and-virtual-desktop/

  • http://twitter.com/ChrisLCampbell Christopher Campbell

    I’ve worked for Citrix for almost 14 years and was not quite sold on this whole “Social Collaboration” for work thing. I now stand corrected. Even when we implemented Podio throughout Citrix I was one of those holdouts…sticking to my email and other tools too many to mention. Then a colleague of mine created a workspace for Synergy Barcelona. He added all the Citrix internal stakeholders to the workspace along with all the external vendors we were working with. He added a Project Management app and created one for Support along with using the Calendars, Assigning Tasks, etc. I was blown away! It was the most efficient Synergy prep we had to date. Everyone knew the status of each task and where we were at. I know, I know I work for the company so I could be giving you that company talk. Look, it’s free, try it out for yourself. I personally use it for every project I run that requires both multiple stakeholders both internal and external. Podio simply rocks!

  • http://dottedmusic.com Andrew Apanov

    My company (DottedMusic.com) doesn’t have a physical office at all. My team members are from all around the world and of course, they work not only in front of their computers (often times, I don’t have a single idea and don’t really care where they are at the moment, unless the work isn’t done). So yes, we make Podio workspaces our virtual office!

  • Maggie Langley

    For me as a Virtual Assistant, I know that I’m more productive when I work from home. I juggle lots of client’s needs and can do this best when I can get my head down and work. What I like about using Podio is that I can still have, what I consider to be the equivalent of office chats but online. The key difference is that I have them at the right time instead of as an unwanted interruption,

    Let me give you an example, I have been helping an author with her new book. Sometimes, I might read something that triggers a thought, I can share a link with her and spout off my ideas in a Podio comment. I would never have bothered sending it to her as an email, but since it’s in our ‘Ideas’ Podio application, I know she’ll read it at a time that’s appropriate. That one idea, can spark a conversation we have in Podio that can help shape a chapter of the book. The best part is that I can continue the conversation when I’m at my most creative. It might be midnight, it might be 5am. It might be a thought that comes a week later. In a face-to-face conversation, time moves on with or without any good ideas being shared.

    It will always be important to do some things in person, but innovative and creative individuals will express themselves using whatever communication tools are available to them. If you can’t meet face-to-face, magic can still happen online. It’s just made easier when you use a great tool like Podio.

  • MartinDower

    We managed to cut our office ties at the end of last year and went completely location-independent. It’s gone way better than we would have ever thought, so much so that I wrote a short blog-post about the the first 60 days being liberated http://www.connected-uk.com/2013/02/cutting-the-office-strings-the-first-60-days/ the most important thing that allowed us to do this was a 100% shift to the cloud – mind you that took nearly 3 years of planning and migrating to get right.

    Looking back now I wince at the thought of being tied to an office and wince even more at how our infrastructure, rather than liberating us, tied us to a physical location containing racks of computers. Nuts.

    We now work anywhere that takes our fancy. Working at home does play a large part of this but so do trains, planes, bars, cafes, restaurants, clients, suppliers and libraries (neat idea that one).

  • http://twitter.com/Froda Jon Froda

    Some great examples from all of you, @twitter-126042389:disqus @donmennig:disqus @matterandrew:disqus @google-8565b42b408c4948209b822596f5fac1:disqus @MartinDower:disqus – Also pointing out that planning is essential when moving from one model to the other. Would love to know more about the process you’ve gone through. How did you move towards less dependency on being in the same location? Was anything holding you back? Did you experiment a lot?

    If any of you happen to be at SxSW this Saturday I am on a panel with Cali Williams Yost, Kate Lister and Richard Leyland called “Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick & Dead” in the session we look at the revolution in remote work and the facts about “workshifting” and remote workers and why it’s the healthy choice for your business and humanity. More info here http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP7473

  • http://twitter.com/ChamberBrian Brian Cleary

    Podio is the ‘always with me’ service. I run a very busy Chamber of Commerce in Ireland and as you can guess, being able to get out there to meet and help businesses is part of my daily routine. Sometimes, being out of the office also means being geographically removed from the area that I work in.

    A few weeks ago something happened that required a swift response. I was in London on business, one of my colleagues was working from home and another was in the office and just about to go home for the evening. A major employer in our town announced job losses. We run a training company that does many things; one of the main things that it does is that it offers training to the unemployed. So we got to work to arrange training for those about to lose their jobs.

    By using Podio we were able to collaborate from a coffee shop looking out on Charing Cross station in London, a beach in south east Ireland and an office in the middle of a Tipperary town just as well as if we had been in the same office.

    Before Podio, we would have required one person to create an excel file and it would have pinged between us in our different locations while one waited for another to add a task or some information – all the while hoping that we were all working from the same document.

    We collaborated perfectly – just as if we were in the same office. Part of me wants to understand why the decision at Yahoo was made, but seeing the benefits of the cloud I can understand why the concept of a physical office is losing its lustre.

  • http://twitter.com/Froda Jon Froda

    That’s a great story Brian, thanks for sharing.

  • http://twitter.com/RockyWalls Rocky Walls

    For us, being a certified Results-Only Work Environment (www.gorowe.com) means that our team members get to choose how, when and where their work gets done – as long as the work gets done.

    Interestingly, though, a lot of the work still gets done in the office. The systems we use to edit video and the collaboration our team has seems to be a draw to the office most of the time. We don’t, however, see regular hours of 9-5 like many corporations do. Team members come in and out as they manage their own schedules for getting work done.

  • Zach Downs

    Jon pretty much said this above, but for more and more of us it’s not about being at the office or at home, it’s about getting work done – just like it should be. Tools like Podio certainly help with getting work done.

    A lot of my team members go to our office because that’s where we have our work machines, but as far as meetings, conference calls, etc., majority of that can take place on Podio. Obviously you could send emails back and forth, but it was really hard to stay organized and know who is in charge of what.

  • http://www.michaelreynolds.com Michael Reynolds

    Like Rocky, we’re a ROWE (www.gorowe.com) which means we focus on the WORK, not presenteeism. The recent moves by Yahoo! and Best Buy are sad and puzzling. It’s 2013 and we have plenty of technology that allows mobile working. Lots of people are just too lazy to learn to use it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/lennart.beeck Lennart Beeck

    “Out of Office” has never been a status at our and my work. Only when we are in holiday and do not work at all because of vacation.
    When you are organizing events, seminars and workshops, work on some policy and similar, work is done on the move. We call to and back all the time, we wrote e-mails all the time, hundreds of them each week. And since Podio we do not do this anymore.
    But we use time in trains, airplanes and elsewhere to work live on topics, processes and policies. So the Podio mobile app is an essential part of our collaboration. We still work in physical offices, but they are only our part-time location to work in. Before Podio we wrote hundreds of mails, with a bit of chaos in it.
    Podio combines physical office work with the teams out in “the field”, giving workshops and seminars or having meetings.
    But also physical offices have to change to still be attractive to work in. And this is the reason why for example Twitter, Facebook and Co. are doing physical offices to something the staff enjoys. Because the staff are people, and people like to enjoy themselves. When we make it possible to combine those two, firms can create the best environment for people that work there. And Podio is the system where work is being combined.

  • Sue Darby

    I’m looking at using the tools I’m developing for several projects completely offline as there is no stable service for internet while on a bus in Alaska! I’m still going to use PODIO as it’s just what I’ve been looking for even w/o a good tablet app for a wifi only tablet! I’ll eventually get a better tablet, 4g or both! In the meantime I can work on stuff at home and at work during lunch which is what I currently do!

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