commuting

Telecom infrastructure deficits spur unnecessary commuting

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Priscilla Sodums, who works as a field representative for the Census Bureau, dealing with a lack of broadband at home complicates her job. “I have to drive out to the Danville Library hotspot and mostly that works. It doesn’t always work, so then I have to drive someplace else. I spend a lot of time just trying to keep up with the demands of my job,” says Sodums.For Sharon Sprague, no broadband means a 60-mile daily commute to an office, when otherwise her job as the director of a bachelor of arts program for an online university would allow her to work at home.“My employer would love it. They’d love to have me working out of my house. Most everybody else in this area works out of their home,” says Sprague.

Source: Some Vermonters Are Still Stranded In A Broadband ‘Wilderness’ | Vermont Public Radio

San Francisco Bay Area’s growing traffic paradox

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The Bay Area is one of the brightest sparks in the nation’s recovering economy but feeding its vitality means residents will have to give up a lot of local control, dig deeper into their wallets, and make room for tens of thousands of new neighbors, according to study released Friday

Source: Bay Area needs powerful regional government, study says – ContraCostaTimes.com

In my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century published earlier this year, I discuss the puzzling paradox of the San Francisco Bay Area. It innovated much of the information and communications technology that effectively obsoletes the daily commute to the office but is nevertheless choking on burgeoning traffic.

Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process? – The New York Times

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Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells, a new study finds. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.

Source: Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process? – The New York Times

The message here is don’t spend time commuting and sitting all day. Work — and exercise — at or close to home. And if you must commute, walk or bicycle.

Silicon Valley stuck in the Industrial Age

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“I think back to the situation when Yahoo disbanded telecommuting,” Allen says. “Marissa Mayer caught a lot of flak for that. I’ve been doing research on flex-work arrangements and work family issues for many years and knew it was not a panacea for individuals to better manage work and family lives.”Other tech giants, such as Google, have moved away from work-from-home policies in favor of creating sometimes quirky but amenity-rich campuses where employees are likely to strike up conversations, Allen says.

Taking this principle to its logical conclusion, the ideal would be for staff to reside on campus as many did in college. Then there would be time for even more conversation over dinner and breakfast instead of getting onto buses and into cars twice a day in the Bay Area’s notoriously congested freeways to shuttle back and forth to home. But most knowledge and information-based organizations still operate today in the Industrial Age model where their members split their lives between the office and home in a distant community. Is all that time spent commuting really worth the daily face time and opportunity for spontaneous conversation that can also take place with a phone call or teleconference? Or is the opportunity for co-located conversation being offered up as a pretext and justification to hang onto the Industrial Age way of working in centralized commuter offices?

Carol Sladek, a partner and work/life consulting leader at Aon Hewitt, says the journal article shines a light on one of telecommuting’s most difficult aspects: the difficulty in measuring outcomes.

Substitute knowledge work for telecommuting in this sentence and the challenge remains the same. Telecommuting is irrelevant. As suggested elsewhere in the article, the real challenge is managing knowledge workers relative to desired outcomes. That remains the same regardless of where people work.

Source: Human Resource Executive Online | Telecommuting, by the Numbers

It’s official: Working from home is the worst

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“If it’s just about you banging out emails or writing a report, sure, you can do that wherever,” Waber said. “But the vast majority of stuff we do at work today—teamwork, not individual work—that is the stuff that really measurably suffers.” For big companies, that decline in productivity can be worth millions of dollars a year.

In a 2012 poll, 62% of employees said they found telecommuting to be socially isolating. And “jobs where individuals are most likely to be telecommuting involve sitting in front of a computer,” Allen said, so it makes sense that people working from home would get less exercise than those who have to commute.

Source: It’s official: Working from home is the worst

For many if not most knowledge workers, that is exactly what they do most of the day: sitting in front of a computer and writing documents and emails. And in many workplaces, they are expected to do that with minimal interaction with others, which is viewed as socializing and break time in the tradition of the water cooler — not working. The cultural ethic is nose to the grindstone in the style of the Industrial Age assembly line.

Tolan is certainly correct that in organizations that encourage collaboration, being face to face is ideal. But as Tolan suggests, most knowledge organizations do not operate as full time focus groups or think tanks. Constant co-located and spontaneous interaction among their members isn’t an organizational expectation. Tolan is also right in pointing out that not all knowledge workers have a suitable home office environment. A growing industry is stepping up to address this need with shared co-working office space in communities where knowledge workers live.

In addition, Tolan ignores the enormous business and personal cost to both knowledge organizations and their constituents to maintain what I term in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century as centralized commuter offices (CCOs) that involve hours of wasted time spent each week traveling between home and office, often entailing significant distance and time. CCOs are unnecessary with today’s information and communications technology that is rendering the Industrial Age daily commute trip obsolete.

For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff – Workplace Insight

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Even hugely disruptive factors such as the proliferation of co-working space appear to be nothing more than an important new addition to the market.

The reasons for this attachment to creating places to bring people together are explored in typically lyrical fashion by the incomparable Neil Usher here. All that remains to add is that so long as people work on the same things and need to develop relationships, they’ll want to share physical space.

Source: For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff – Workplace Insight

Of course the office isn’t dead. Knowledge workers will continue to need them. However, the maturation of information and communication technology (ICT) in the 21st century is redefining the office. The office no longer has to be in high cost towers in urban centers — what I term in my book Last Rush Hour as centralized commuter offices or CCOs.

For example, the co-working office space to which the author refers enables knowledge workers to avoid the enormous personal cost of commuting to distant CCOs when these co-working facilities are located in their communities. There, they can serve multiple organizations and their members residing in a given community.

I concur with the author that people naturally want to develop relationships with their colleagues and ideally share physical space. But for knowledge workers, that’s not necessary on an 8-5, Monday through Friday basis. Much work can be done apart from colleagues along with the benefit of quiet concentration. Collaboration can be done via ICT and avoid the major expense and time suck of daily commuting.