Whereas office workers might be sent on courses or receive on-site training, Out of Office workers are often responsible for their own professional education. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are to education what OOO is to work; they allow you to time-shift and place-shift your learning. In this episode, Chris shares his experience with doing an online course using popular course provider Coursera.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here

Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).

References:

• Chris’s blog posts about his experience
• The Coursera course about data analysis (which Chris did)
• Coursera.org
  

When you’re working Out of Office, you often don’t get the natural distractions that come from working with others. Although some of these distractions can be annoying and harmful to your productivity, they also have some positive side effects. In particular, they prevent you from spending excessively long intervals working at your desk. This means you have to be disciplined enough to create your own management plan to prevent stress, poor posture, and overwork.

The Workshifting team has five suggestions to help:

1. Take frequent breathers.
2. Stretch.
3. Walk at lunch.
4. Play some of your favorite tunes.
5. Don’t be afraid to say No.

Read the full article here.

On 22nd February, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer made a ruling that all Yahoo staff need to be physically in the office – in other words, no more Out of Office work. The decision sparked off discussion, debate and arguments, both in the tech media and in mainstream media as well. Now that the dust is settling, we’ll discuss some of the issues around this – including productivity, convenience, comfort and collaboration.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here

Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).

Initial reports:

• Yahoo! Orders Home Workers Back to the Office
• How Marissa Meyer Figured Out Workers Were Slacking Off
• Here’s the Internal Yahoo! Memo

The backlash:

• Mayer Feels The Heat Over Telecommuting
• Richard Branson Says She Got It Wrong
• 4 Reasons It’s An Epic Fail

Support for the move:

• Why Your Company Needs You in the Office
• Why Working From Home is the Worst of Both Worlds
• Let Marissa Mayer Do Her Job
• Back to the Office Policy Mends Morale
• Yahoo’s Desperate Need for Innovation

Other references:

• When Working at Home Is Productive, and When It’s Not
• 7 Great Reasons to Encourage Working Remotely
• In telecommuting debate, Aetna sticks by big at-home workforce
• Working at Home and Workplace Productivity
• What inspires your work-at-home policies?
• How Teleworking Can Improve Your Health
• 80 Percent Of Success Is Showing Up – But Where?
• Employers Using Sensors to Track Your Productivity
• What Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer Did Right and Wrong

Although many organisations now recognise, allow and even embrace telecommuting for employees, it’s still the exception rather than the norm. Even when it’s permitted, one of its disadvantages is that telecommuting employees are sometimes at a disadvantage because they are not seen as often.

If you’re worried about finding yourself in this situation, read Eric Bloom’s tips for managing this situation.

Read the article here.

Many online services help you to create new offline relationships and strengthen your existing relationships. In this episode, we explore a range of online tools that help you enrich your offline connections.

Listen to the episode here:

MP3 File

Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).

Additional resources:

• Pingg
• Foursquare
• Tripit
• MeetUp
• Eventbrite
• Facebook
• Google+
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Ning

One of the biggest advantages of telecommuting is of course the opportunity to have better balance in your life. But this doesn’t always work in practice. Lea Green suggests these five tips for telecommuters in order to increase your balance:

1. Empower yourself to power down.
2. Compartmentalize to create and recreate.
3. Experiment with your creative cycles.
4. Daydream to dream big.
5. Train your mind to focus.

Read the full article here.

Many organisations are facing the issue of employees wanting to use their own phones, tablets and other devices at work. This is called “BYOD”, or Bring Your Own Device.

Most of the discussion around BYOD is about how organisations can manage security, access and privacy (One of my friends, who works in IT for a large organisation, calls it “Bring Your Own Disaster”). But it goes beyond that, and perhaps users think these devices are more powerful and more productive than is actually the case.

Read more in this Lifehacker blog post.

Working from home isn’t right for everybody, and there are many challenges to overcome. But when it works, it can be ideal for everybody involved.

ApogeeInvent published an article about how they manage telecommuting within their organisation. In the article, they interview some of their team members, who share some of the pros and cons of working from home.

Read the full article here.

One of my clients, Michael Harrison, recently spent a month in hospital and 3 months at home following a major medical procedure. This slowed down his work, but didn’t stop it altogether. During that time, he spent a lot of time in online meetings, and discovered both their pros and cons.

Read his blog post about it here.