Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I’m lucky enough to be off work this week. It’s a good job really as my Christmas preparations haven’t been going too well!

I just wanted to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas and all the best for 2010. Thank you so much for your support.

Here’s a Christmassy picture of my lovely children, after all, they are the ones who make remote working such a blessing for me!

Before the Snow Storm Hits

So it’s been snowing again…Is it just me or does this happen every year? Here in the UK we’ve done our usual thing and panicked. Of course what we really need is a home-working strategy so that most of us don’t have to make the difficult journey into work. Nick Cavalancia, Vice President of Windows Management at ScriptLogic has written a guest blog post for us on how businesses need to provide more support for remote workers – especially as the snow will hit the transport in and around London in the final working days of this year. He discusses the Microsoft solutions that are out there.

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The benefits of remote working need to be highlighted to businesses this winter as we are set for another productivity-stopping snowstorm in the UK. Last winter, according to government estimations, only 1 in 5 workers could get to work, costing businesses productivity and money as employees were stranded at home.

It is crucial that remote workers stay productive and have access to information to conduct normal business, but this should not be to the detriment of the company’s security.

An essential part of creating an effective home-working environment is having the right software solutions in place where employees stay productive and secure. The following tips can help any IT administrator ensure that workings are “online” even when they are in the office:

Keeping Employees Productive

A range of commonly-used Microsoft technologies exist to deliver applications to remote workers, and usually a combination of technologies including Virtual Private Networks, Microsoft Terminal Server (in the process of being renamed as “Remote Desktop Services” in Windows Server 2008 R2), Outlook Anywhere and Outlook Web Access. Which of these technologies is selected by the organisation depends on the blend of security and data portability it wants to provide to the user. Another major consideration for home workers is how the organisation will support them when they encounter problems. “Free” solutions generally rely on the user having an established VPN connection, or require that the administrator takes control of the end user’s screen to resolve the issue.

The inability to access pertinent company information or applications while working remotely destroys a worker’s productivity. In order to ensure that remote workers have access to a standardized network environment and the information they need to be productive, IT administrators are encouraged to adopt third-party tools to support remote management of workers’ desktops, regardless of whether the user or the administrator is part of a managed domain. Not only does an advanced remote support solution increase end-user productivity, but it also provides significant time savings for administrators through faster problem resolution.

With the best remote support solutions, IT administrators can troubleshoot a user’s PC within seconds from any location, taking advantage of diagnostic tools and performance information without interrupting the user’s work or taking control of their screen. Advanced remote support software eliminates the need for remote users to spend a lot of time describing unexpected behaviour, or have an administrator physically visit their PC.

Keep Data Safe

In organisations which handle sensitive data, employees working from home often have access to large amounts of confidential or personal data, such as customer bank account numbers, patients’ medical records or internal account information. This puts companies at risk of a potential data breach or privacy law infringement. A common scenario is that of workers taking data home on USB storage devices, which are easily misplaced.

To control this risk, IT administrators should consider a solution that places removable storage security policies on corporate laptops and home PCs. A good solution installs a software agent and per-user security policy on each device, providing granular control of USB ports and all other removable storage devices, so privilege employees can be given less restricted access than those who have no need to take data off the network.

Another common requirement is for control over which types or classes of USB device are allowed to connect, based on the device ID or even serial number. For example, if an organisation issues biometrically secured and encrypted USB drives to its workers, it will want to ensure that no other device is used, which requires a strong restrictive policy. And for some types of device (e.g. DVD-ROM drives), the administrator might want to provide read but not write access for non-privileged users.

Respect Employee Privacy

While remote management of a user’s personal computers is necessary for employee productivity, businesses could face legal trouble if they overstep the privacy boundary. When accessing a home worker’s computer, especially if it is used for both personal use as well as business, laws restrict administrators from looking at users’ personal applications and data. Business need to carefully consider the extent to which users are allowed to use non-company-supplied IT hardware for working from home. Remote desktop access through Terminal Server or Virtual Desktops might be one way to address the challenge of providing access without exposing data.

Extreme Commuting – a dying trend?

I was pleased to see Ewan McIntosh (digital media expert who has recently been working for Channel 4) reporting that his travel this year was down 50% in mileage on the previous year: 41,902 miles in 2009 compared to 82,000 miles in 2008. I’m all for people cutting down on their long distance travel and hopefully people are making efforts to do this and signing up for 1010.

However Ewan claims that this decrease in mileage is not due to long-distance travel but something he calls ‘extreme commuting’ (apparently a term originally coined by Mark Penn, who pens the microtrends series). Ewan regulary made the round trip from Scotland to London as part of his work. His commute was more killer than most.

As Ewan explains:

“It’s a trend that, thankfully, is becoming less and less common as companies feel the economic pain of sending someone around the world for face-to-face time. In January I noticed that my plane was less about 30 suited and booted regulars from the previous six months. By August, they had been replaced by tourists filling up cheap seats on their way home to the States and the Far East.“

Not only does such a commute burn a hole in a companies budget (and of course the environment too), it results in an exhausted workforce who have little to offer because their brains have been fried!

“Extreme commuting is tiring by its regularity, bad food at weird times, and the sneaking suspicion that your constantly stuffed-up nose is related to the circulated air you consume four times a week. You feel hungover for the day before and after your extreme commute, regardless, I’m afraid to say, of how much fun with a bottle of shiraz you have actually had.“

A recent article in the Times (Extreme commuting: How far would you go?) suggests that rather than being on the decline extreme commuting is on the up.

“1 in 10 people spends more than 2 hours commuting every working day, and for 740,000 people – 3 per cent of the population – getting to and from work is a marathon lasting 3 hours or more“.

Although the commute is no longer dead time due to the impressive ‘travelling kit‘ now available it is still really hard going for those who do it regularly. Life is not just about work, sometimes you just need to be where your nearest and dearest are. At the moment I’m running a series of Web 2 and Social Web workshops for the cultural heritage sector. This has resulted in me doing a fair amount of travel, most of it late at night or very early in the morning as working part-time means I have child care duties too. I couldn’t do it long-term, I wouldn’t be a nice person to know!

In the Times article Chris Sanderson, co-founder of strategy and forecasting company the Future Laboratory, concludes:

“The future is a place where people live and work either at home or close to it, walking to “hubs” – shared office spaces – where we will sit next to workers from any and every kind of industry: journalists next to sales directors, publishers next to bankers.”

Aaaah, it’s the remote office centres I posted about earlier in the year.

Sanderson believes hubs will lead not just to happier workers but happier communities, as people engage more, and spend additional time, with their families, friends and neighbours.

““What would you do with an extra 90 minutes a day?” he asks. “You could spend it with your children, join a gym, take up a hobby… You could notice that your street looks shabby and become much more local and community-focused.”

Sounds good to me!

Is Copenhagen our last chance?

The next few weeks could potentially be the most important in our planet’s history. Today is the first day of the two-week UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Delegates from 192 countries around the world have come together to work on a global framework on carbon emissions which will eventually replace the Kyoto Protocol. As Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen puts it, this is an “opportunity the world cannot afford to miss“.

I’d say I’m a fairly opinionated person and throughout my youth was a quite an activist, I regularly attended animal-rights rallies, political meet-ups and went on anti-BNP marches. If there was an opportunity to shout about something I believed in I was there. So now I’ve grown up and have children of my own. I’m a busy working mum with lots on my plate, going out demonstrating is something I felt I’d left behind. However recent times have shown us that there if we don’t change the way we work as a planet we are in serious trouble. Now is not the time for apathy.

I’m not going to argue about the statistics, others are quite capable of doing that. Whatever the finer details the problem is clear. Today our route to school took us by flooded fields aplenty. Not a strange sight for today’s kids, heavy rain is pretty normal these days. We don’t really know what effects climate change will have on us but isn’t it obvious that we can’t keep on beating up the world we live in?

This weekend I attended The Wave march (organised by Stop Climate Chaos) in central London. I’ve never seen so many people together, working towards a common goal (estimates range from 30,000 to 50,000 people – I’d definitely go for the later!). The march was amazing, through strangely quiet and subdued. People were very focused, there was a real recognition that this is not just fun, something has to be done. What is happening is scary stuff. I’m really frightened about what sort of world my children will grow up in.

I’m far from perfect when it comes to being green but I want to do more. If we stop looking away and we start working together I really think this could be the turning point.

Why not have a look at:

• Official website of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen
• The COP15 blog
• The Wave on Twitter
• The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Online 2009: Remote Working in a 2.0 World

Yesterday I made a fleeting visit to Online Information 2009 held at Olympia, London. Online is billed as the largest event dedicated to the information industry and it did seem to be heaving! The conference and exhibition run in parallel and there is also a show floor seminar programme.

The 'tent' I gave my talk in

I was asked along to give a talk on remote working as part of the Information Masterclasses and Career Development Talks track in the exhibition hall. This was the first time I’d presented to a transient audience (the seminar was free so people could pop in and out of the ‘tent’) and I was a little bit apprehensive.

In reality it played out pretty much like a standard seminar (people actually stayed all the way through) but with just a little more background noise. For those who came along and for anyone else interested here are my slides (on Slideshare).

I also managed to get over to the conference to see a few talks in the track on The social Web: transforming the workforce (also given the byline Email is dead! The rise of Twitter, chat and communities). Although there weren’t any great revelations the track was moderated by Ewan McIntosh, Digital Commissioner for Channel 4, who always comes up with interesting ideas. One story by Ian McNairn (Program Director Web Innovation & Technology, IBM) particularly struck me. He was talking about a friend of his who had managed to reduce his email inbox to 20 messages a week, he’d done this through improved use of social networking tools and having a clear policy on his communication with people. He’d basically told people not to email him unless there is no other suitable alternative and he has set up his mail box to delete any messages over a certain size. I must admit to being a little envious of his resolve…

Benchmarking and Quality Marks for Remote working

Benchmarking and measuring quality are standard practices these days in both the business and non-business world.

For goods we have the Kitemark symbol indicating they’ve been tested against safety and performance criteria. The Kitemark has been around since the early 1900s and is owned and operated by the British Standards Institution (BSI).

For organisations we have ‘business improvement tools’ like Investors in People marketed as a way to “transform your organisation’s performance by targeting your chosen business priorities“. One of the big aims of the indicator was that the organisations carrying it would in turn be the sorts of places people would want to work in.

The government runs QA schemes for all sorts of things including the Quality Assurance Scheme for Carbon Offsetting (QAS) and the recent quality mark for pensions.

I’m no expert but it’s clear that measuring quality is a cottage industry that can only continue to grow.

And as for benchmarking, well we are inundated with league tables for everything under the sun, from schools and MP expenses to fridge freezers and wireless providers.

So what about remote working?

Currently the main standard out there is the Work Wise standard, a standard for the adoption and deployment of smarter and more flexible working practices, launched back in 2007.

Organisations wishing to gain the standard will be assessed according to criteria that benchmark their adoption of flexible working practices. Awards against the Work Wise standard will be based on the amount of flexibility for the workforce, the levels of self-determination that employees have and operational benefits derived by the organisation.

A detailed overview is provided in pdf format.

As for benchmarking, well there was the Remote Worker awards I attended which judged organisations alongside individuals. Details of the 2010 awards are now on the Remote Employment site. However there doesn’t seem to be any tables of who employs the most remote/home workers and how organisations compare on the flexible working front.
Most of my data is gleaned from the UK National Statistics office. Not a particularly fun task!

So is there something out there I’ve missed?

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who can offer me any more in this area.