Oliver Marks wrote a thoughtful piece in his Collaboration 2.0 blog last week. He highlights the dangers of the burnout isolated remote workers experience, and his piece validates some key points about the need for online business practice to incorporate a sense of context and connectedness.
While the percentage of knowledge workers not physically present on site in company offices has increased, the assumption is often that the VPN connection to the corporate Intranet email system is sufficient to enable the individual to participate fully in a work setting. What is missing, however, is the sense of immediacy, interactivity and, most importantly context visibility.
It's not just the dis-location, psychologically speaking of the individual knowledge worker, but team productivity and management effectiveness that is impaired. Without a sense that one can assess quickly the adapting and changing context of a group working on a project, countless hours are spent trying to catch up to the current flow of conversation and important action items amongst a working group.
Online team workspaces are too often simply used as repositories for file sharing, but not used to embed a continuous sense flow of work nor of group interactivity to support that work.
Collaborative team solutions have evolved recently to move beyond the co-authoring, shared work product capabilities of wikis or online project solutions by adding the interactivity of social networking in order to bring that sense of group context into the workflow. From MS Sharepoint to Socialtext one can see the evolution to include more participatory capabilities.
The limitations of relying relying on an asynchronous communication mechanism such as email for communication immediacy, light workflow, and team collaboration for many years was offset by the ability of physically co-located workers to "smooth the edges" and "reinforce the context," by dropping by their co-workers cubicles, or huddling at the water cooler. Selective use of distribution lists and forwarding in email is also a great tool for command and control management styles and information hoarders.
What knowledge workers need, whether on-site or remote, is consistency of visibility and interactivity with their co-workers or team members. It is in that context that they can make decisions and judgements that are relevant to the currents of the project, so that they can contribute optimally to a projects assets.
Much is often made of a generational gap between an older generation of worker hidebound by email and younger generation who is fully versed in the online participatory behaviours. This generational gap, however, is an obfuscation. The real issue is that the old tools often bog down everybody.
Google Wave, for instance is an attempt drive past the email model of group interaction and move straight into a completely contextual and interactive model of accomplishing group work. In this context there is no such thing as a "remote worker."
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