4 Articles on the Distributed Workplace

As many of us hustle home for a mid-week Thanksgiving holiday, it’s a good time to revisit the growing trend of the distributed workplace, a model which many firms-including Cardwell Beach-have turned to for maximum employee flexibility. But with a workforce scattered across time zones and office spaces, technology and new office policies are increasingly playing a crucial role in closing the scheduling and communications gap. Here’s a glimpse at the latest:

Google writes your emails now, too: With many offices already relying on Google’s suite of cloud business applications to get things done remotely, it only makes sense that the search engine giant would move into simply writing your emails themselves. That’s what they aim to do by utilizing pioneering technology that analyzes your email responses and formulates responses based on algorithmic patterns. Whether it will fool your boss remains to be seen. [Read more at the Google Blog]

All remote work, no play: Engineer and CEO Baron Schwartz argues that while working outside a traditional office can do wonders for productivity, it can be detrimental to something just as important: your team. By skipping in-person interaction, teams connect only superficially and don’t support each other adequately, he argues. [Read more at Fast Company]

On the other hand, remote work = less employee turnover: In 2014, a Harvard Business School graduate student ran a test: what would happen if he allowed all of the employees at his start-upto work from home rather than a fixed office? As it turned out, their productivity rose sharply, but something else happened that was even more striking: employees left the company at half the rate that they had previously. [Read more at Harvard Business Review]

Practical tips for the remote manager: While employees might benefit from more opportunities to work remotely, what happens to the people tasked with actually keeping operations running smoothly? Here’s where a combination of judicious technology use and well-thought-out operations can make all the difference. Among the recommendations: emphasize communication both on- and off-line, avoid micromanagement, and make sure that employees working remotely feel included on your team, too. [Read more at ReadWrite]

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