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Working virtually and flexibly are facts of life for many of us. For some it’s a blessing, for some a curse and for many it just is what it is–the way the world is going. For those of us who manage people virtually there are two questions: a) can working remotely make us happier, and 2) do the bean counters and policy makers care about our happiness so long as the work gets done?

Recent research shows it might not be an either/or question. Working virtually can increase employee happiness and satisfaction (if it’s done right) AND there’s a way to quantify that satisfaction to satisfy the money folk. The key is to do it right.

Philip Ross is the CEO of Cordless Group and Unwork.com. He’s an author who looks into the future of work.  Bob Gaudreau’s an Executive VP at Regus, the world’s largest provider of flexible workspaces. They recently collaborated on a white paper called “VWork: Measuring the Benefits of Agility At Work”. Not surprisingly, (Regus, does after all, make their money renting temp and flexible office space) they found all kinds of benefits to working virtually. What’s more surprising is a forumla they use to show return on investment: what they call the “Agility Dividend”.

It measures three things: the “Efficiency Dividend” (property costs x fixed and operating costs), the “Productivity Dividend” (downtime x salary costs), and what they call the “Happiness Dividend” (commuting costs x time and cost savings).

It might be a stretch to suggest that our happiness is inextricably tied to our commute, but the numbers are pretty interesting. Most people in cities want a 10-15 minute commute, but most of us travel over 45 minutes each way. If we didn’t have to schlep to the corporate headquarters every day we could save a lot of time, stress and money.

This means that using so-called “third places” like temporary or shared office space, branch offices with “hotelling” capabilities and even the local Starbucks can give employees more choices in where and how to work. Technology makes it possible, the wide availability of choices makes it practical, what stands int he way much of the time is company policy (finance, IT and HR). That’s where convincing the people with the purse strings comes in.

According to Ross and Gaudreau, this isn’t a simple issue of the “soft and mushy” human side that so frequently gets discounted in company discussions. There are tangible benefits to increasing employee “happiness”.

• The time saved in the commute almost always goes to productivity. Studies show that people who don’t spend lots of time getting to work actually spend most of that saved time working. If you can knock a half hour off your commute each day, that’s an hour we spend actually doing our jobs.
• That number doesn’t include the amount of time and energy spent ducking or avoiding the commute. Quick, take a look around the conference table in any meeting at 3:30 on a Friday. How much real work is getting done even though people are present and accounted for?
• As companies rethink the amount of office space needed, they’ll generally find that smaller regional or shared office space saves money over the costs of a single large headquarters.

Of course, one sure way to increase employee happiness is to give people choice in how they work best. For example, the study shows that the majority of us like the idea of actually going to work instead of working from home, we just wish it wasn’t so darned far away. We also would love to have some choice in the technology we use.

If companies can save money by getting more out of people while spending less on infrastructure that would seem to be a pretty good deal for all concerned. The trick, of course, is to create the policy and strategy consciously instead of just letting it happen by accident.

You can download the full report, “VWork: Measuring the Benefits of Agility at Work” here. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Read more:

• Telecommuting can save you money–and cost you customers
• Having a team communication plan is great–making it work is something else
• Build a (mostly) failsafe emergency plan for your team

picture by flickr user Kaptain Kobold CC 2.0

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I want one. In every (cool) State.

why do I love this so?

All with the same “celtic” geology….about 2000km

true, so true…but there are obvious areas of hope…if only…

You might know PARC. This is the lab that Steve Jobs walked into and was inspired to make the Mac what it is today. Inside this lab lots of things in the industry were developed:

1. Laser printers and page description language.
2. Tablet PCs (the first prototype is sitting in a display there).
3. Ethernet (first piece of ethernet is still in the wall here, and is seen in one of the interviews below).
4. Object oriented programming.
5. The modern personal computer with graphical user interface.
6. Very-large-scale-integration for semiconductors.

Among other things, which are detailed on Wikipedia.

So, when PARC says “come on over for a tour” you drop everything and go.

While there I met with several people to get a taste of what they are working on now. Visiting here is like visiting Jerusalem (home of the first church). It’s where everything seemed to start and is still filled with brilliant people. For instance, in part IV of my tour you’ll meet Richard Chow. Some of his achievements include architecting Yahoo!’s click-fraud protection system and delivering the Security and DRM components for Motorola’s first Java-based phone platform.

PART ONE: Future of Networking. See the first Ethernet cable in the wall, and learn about Content Centric Networking. Here, Teresa Lunt, Vice President and Director of the Computing Science Laboratory research organization, and Nacho Solis, researcher, tell me how networks are changing.

Anyway, let’s get started.

PART TWO: How Ethnographic research leads to new business ideas. Here we meet Victoria Bellotti who manages PARC’s Socio-Technical and Interaction Research team at PARC where she also developed PARC’s Opportunity Discovery research targeting methods and program. Victoria studies people to understand their practices, problems, and requirements for future technology, and also designs and analyzes human-centered systems — focusing on user experience.

PART THREE: Ubiquitous Computing research (and some historic networking equipment). Kurt Partridge is a researcher in PARC’s ubiquitous computing area. His research interests include context awareness, activity modeling, location modeling, wearable computing, and using users’ natural behaviors to simplify human-computer interaction. He received a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005. Here we talk about what happens when computers are everywhere, which enables the Internet of Things.

PART FOUR: Keeping our Cloud Computing Safe. Richard Chow is interested in systems security, fraud detection, and privacy. Some of his achievements include architecting Yahoo!’s click-fraud protection system and delivering the Security and DRM components for Motorola’s first Java-based phone platform.

Here Richard talks to me about what he’s working on and how he’s developing new techniques to keep our data private and secure. Interesting conversation!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this little tour around PARC.

By the way, recently Malcolm Gladwell wrote about PARC’s role in computing’s development. He got several things wrong, PARC’s managers say, and they wrote a rebuttal on their blog about how the lab innovates and why it plays a key role in Silicon Valley even today.

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