Endless Knots

It's the sociology, telecommuters

The New York Times wisely runs a full page of op-eds today on the impact of high gas prices, "Is Your Tank Half Empty or Half Full?", but none deals with the biggest problem introduced by telecommuting: How to really work effectively at a distance. The Times is not alone in headlining telecommuting (well, in truth, only one piece in today's paper, "Pajama Life" by Nicole Benson Goluboff, actually even touches on this). I've seen dozens of articles about the sudden move to telecommuting in the past few weeks, dozens. Having covered this topic in rather excruciating detail over many years, let me leave it at this for now: Our old slogan, "90% people, 10% technology," remains true. It's not about bandwidth, whiz-bang software, or mobile devices. The magic is in the sociology. Keep four things in mind, correct as necessary, and your telecommuting will work just fine: People, Purpose, Links, and Time.

Sun's good results from telecommuting

Ted Samson has an instructive and fact-filled report in InfoWorld on Sun's success in sending workers home, "Sun, employees find big savings from Open Work telecommuting program." This is the emblem of the article I want to just steal and post here but alas, you must click. You MUST, it's that worth reading if you're in the ranks of those who make such decisions or in the ranks of those who'd like to see such decisions made. Thanks to Stella for seeing this one first:

Sun found that its U.S. employees worked at home an average of 2.1 days per week in 2007. In doing so, they saved an average of $870 per year in gasoline (back when it was just $3.26 a gallon) and around $1,770 dollars in wear and tear on their car (by driving 3,700 fewer commute miles). They were also spared -- get this -- 104 hours of commute time, which translates to around two and half weeks. This is based on the finding that Sun U.S. employees have an average commute of 40 miles round-trip per day.

Presumably those savings make up for the fact that employees do need to pay a negligible amount -- less than $20 per year, according to Sun -- for the energy required to work from home, including heat.

Sun also found that employees used less energy at home than they do at the office. "Office equipment energy consumption rate at a Sun office was two times that of home office equipment energy consumption, from approximately 64 watts per hour at home to 130 watts per hour at a Sun office." Contributing to the difference: Office employees tend to use workstations and monitors while more home employees use laptops as well as Sun Ray thin clients, both of which require less power than traditional desktop PC/monitor combos.

And thanks to the small but mighty band of greensters

Had an excellent conversation today at the Work Green, Work Virtually session at Enterprise 2.0. Slides will be posted. Used the stream of posts beginning here, continuing at The Content Economy, and then on to the flowchart from Michael Sampson as per below. We were joined by John Shea, a sport diver, who happens to be working for the company providing media services to the event. John has seen the death of coral reefs around the world, which he told me while we were setting up, so we asked him to say a few words. His contribution plus that of folks from Vanderbilt University, Canada, Washington, DC, and a few other places that I can't remember at the moment made for an unusually deep conversation. Thanks everyone. We collectively need to keep building lots of lookouts for this topic.

Work Green, Work Virtually

Next up at Enterprise 2.0, an early morning (yawn) session, Work Green, Work Virtually. Rise and shine, attendees. 8 AM, Wed. See you there.

"When face time is a matter of life and death"

I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago when someone made the most powerful argument I've ever heard for virtual working: having to travel through armed conflict to get to a meeting. For those of us lucky enough not to be in war zones (I've lost track of how many wars are going on around the world - last I checked it was something like 50), we don't have to consider taking our lives in our hands when we go to a meeting. It got me thinking and I ended up writing "When face time is a matter of life and death" for The Industry Standard. I linked it back to the discussion we've had here on green teams. Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Many people have been killed going to meetings in Iraq.” It was an offhand remark made by a US military advisor in a casual conversation about virtual work -- its benefits, its pitfalls, its resisters, its committed participants. Until that moment, it had never before crossed my mind that traveling to a face-to-face meeting could be lethal.

Turns out Army commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken measures to reduce travel. “One of the first things I did here was set up a collaborative network to offset the fact that we couldn't travel easily or safely," Lieutenant General Jim Dubik explained in an email to me. "Needless to say, doing so contributed hugely to the coordination of our work.” Dubik is Commanding General of Multinational Security Transition-Iraq. Dubik’s work follows a decade-long history of Web 2.0 and other media experimentation in the US Army (see The Social General)...

Continue reading my Industry Standard article here.

 

There's a green team in your future

Chartered Management Institute, a long-standing British research and membership organization (er, organisation), says that three-quarters of executives surveyed believe their workforce will conduct itself via virtual teams within a decade. The Guardian has a nice summary ("Wave goodbye to the nine to five, and say hello to the virtual enterprise") of Management Futures - The World in 2018 (March 2008) that you can download. Thanks, Chartered Management. Rich source of future thinking.

A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and care.

When do we need face time?

Back in December, I began a series of posts on "green teams," the idea being that it's not only us as individuals or them as companies who/that can do something about CO2 emissions. Teams can too by making wiser choices about whether they need to meet in person or not. Very soon thereafter, The Content Economy, a blog written by  a handful of good thinkers in Sweden, picked up on the idea, posted to their blog that there might be something to this. Soon they held a meeting (face-to-face, causing one wag to criticize them for that but they had a good excuse - there was also a client meeting at the same time) and came up with a basic checklist for making teams greener. I posted that list back here.

Thanks to a client, who's looking to promote virtual teaming more broadly in her organization, I had reason to noodle on The Content Economy's list some more, adding to it. Some but not all of The Content Economy's list is included (reworded in some cases). I'm posting the expanded list here with the hope that you, my darling readers, will give this some thought, add some ideas, and we'll all end up with something useful. If anything belongs to all of us, it's a list like this one. (Thanks again, Oscar and company. If you'd like me to specifically annotate those considerations that you all first came up with, let me know.)

Before your next face-to-face meeting, consider these questions:
    1.  Do you need to have a difficult conversation?

    2.  Do you need to make decisions that depend on interpretation of subtle cues in body language?

    3.  Do you need 8 or 16 hours of continuous work together?

    4.  Do you have to share “things” that would be difficult to experience at a distance, like touring a facility or using a piece of equipment?

    5.  Have you calculated the true cost of the meeting in terms of direct expenses and personal wear-and-tear?

    6.  Have you done a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the meeting’s contribution to CO2 emissions?

    7.  Do you sometimes travel because you like it or get the feeling that you are important for doing so? Is the meeting you’re planning one of those?

    8.  If you do absolutely need face-to-face, could you:
            A. Organize a high-end video conference if people have never seen one another?
            B. Or, conduct a series of highly organized conference calls over a week’s time?

    9.  If you absolutely need face-to-face, are you traveling to the most convenient location for everyone?

    10. Is everyone attending the meeting essential? Could some call in for part of the meeting?

    11. If you choose not to travel, can you explain your decision clearly to others?

Checklist for green teams - beta version

The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?

After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)

And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:

1. Start with yourself and where you are – think of how you can reduce the CO2 emissions that you cause at work (we already assume that you think of what you can do at home). Here are some of all the things you can do:
   
   - Turn off your computer when not using it – and unplug the power adapter
   - Drink water on tap (filtered if necessary) instead of drinking bottled water
   - When you go to meetings nearby - take the bike, public transportation by train or bus, or share a car
   - When you stay at hotels - shower instead of taking baths, reuse your towels, choose a hotel with a climate policy…
   - When you need to eat - choose seasonal fruits for the fruit basket, walk to the nearest restaurant, eat locally produced food…
2. Ask yourself when a face-to-face meeting that requires travelling is really necessary - and when it’s not. Reflect on and question your own behaviour – are you sometimes travelling because you like it or get a feeling that you are an important person when doing so?
3. If you need to meet but not necessarily face-to-face, ask yourself if any of there are other ways to meet and communicate than by a face-to-face meeting in real life - phone conference, instant messaging, group chat, web conferencing…
4. If a face-to-face meeting is really necessary, is it an option to meet virtually? Video conferencing, virtual meeting place (Second Life)…
5. If you really need to meet face-to-face in real life, check if you can meet at a location where as few of the meeting attendees as possible have to travel to the meeting, thereby shortening the total distance travelled by the meeting participants. Also question what persons really need to participate in the meeting (identify and try to stop meeting professionals from attending).
6. If you need to travel yourself to the meeting, check what transportation options you have at hand. Try to choose the means of transportation that produces the least CO2 emissions but still offers a reasonable travel time and cost – and be sure to include the cost for any CO2 emissions in the cost! If it takes a few hours longer by train than by plane – can you motivate taking the train if you can work during the travel?
7. If possible, always try to compensate for the CO2 emissions that you cause by traveling. You can calculate how much CO2 emissions you produce and how much you should pay on the CarbonNeutral Company’s web site: http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/businesscalc.asp
8. Finally, be open and proud about your achievements when it comes to minimizing CO2 emissions. Tell others that you choose not to travel to a meeting because you did not find it necessary to meet and that you solved it with other means of communication instead, that you walked instead of taking a cab to the nearby meeting, that you chose to go by train instead of flying, and so on. It will not only show that you care about the environment, but also that you are a responsible and caring person in general. It builds trust. Don't be afraid of how other people might react. For some, it can be an eye-opener and they might be impressed with your reasoning and behaviour, and eventually they will start changing their own behaviour. Others might be offended since it might cause bad conscience. But whatever kind of reaction you will get, telling others about your choices will help move things in the right direction.

Oscar takes the challenge

Further to our new friend Oscar Berg in Sweden, who's thinking about green teams. Go, Oscar! He's "taking the challenge to write a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible."

A post by Jessica Lipnack about “carbon-neutral teams” gave me the idea and being quoted on her blog provided some extra motivation. I am involving my fellow bloggers Henrik and Anders (Anders wrote a peace called “Are we finally ready for eco-meetings?” a while ago). Anyway, we are compiling a list of candidate items for the checklist and I hope to present it in some time.

By the way, do you know that you can calculate how much emission of carbon dioxide you cause by flying? The CarbonNeutral Company offers calculators and the airline SAS actually allows you to compensate for the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) that you cause when you travel with them. Good initiative. But what we need is to do is also to compary flying to other transportation alternatives.

Let’s take my flight next week from Malmö to Stockholm and back again as an example. By taking the plane, I would have caused an emission of 0.1644 tonnes of CO2. By taking the train instead, I will cause an emission of only 0.00012 tonnes of CO2. Do I need to say more? I guess not. I will take the train from now on.

And I posted this back to Oscar's blog (nothing like self-quoting): "I played with the numbers a little to make them more understandable to those of limited intelligence like myself: if a ton is 2000 pounds, then your flight would release the equivalent of a sumo-wrestler worth of CO2 (328 pounds), while the train ride would release something like a cup of coffee, four ounces."

Choosing trains over planes in "The Content Economy"

So on The Content Economy, Oscar Berg blogs today about "What others predict for 2008," mentioning Bill Ives's post about my "carbon neutral teams" post. I like the example Oscar gives of choosing the train over flying from Malmo to Stockholm, Sweden, and asked him if I could post here, to which he said, "Hi Jessica, please do. I'd be happy to serve as an example of what you're thinking ;)." And, Oscar, I hope you can publish the checklist for green teams you come up with -- so I can publish it here too (as might Bill) and we can really get things rolling quickly on this idea. And soon every team on earth will have to fill out a "green team checklist" as part of its travel request...or something like that. Thanks, Oscar:

As a comment to that [referring to Bill's post, I actually (encouraged by my wife) decided to go by train instead of flying from Malmö to Stockholm next week (600 kilometers). Not only am I saving the environment by not going by air, but I also save money for my company (or actually, the customer) since it will be cheaper than flying - despite the fact that I have to pay for one extra hotel night. The only thing I won't be saving is time. But that depends on how I look at it. On the train, I will be able to work for almost four hours and access the Internet via the wireless network on the train. Maybe I will take some time to sketch on a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible. In addition to that, I also need a checklist for deciding what means of transportation I should be using in situations when a face-to-face meeting is absolutely necessary – should I go by train, air, car or bike? Then I will publish these as post on my team’s internal blog so they can read it via RSS – wherever they happen to be. Well, as long as they are inside the corporate firewalls.

Green teams begin the year

Bill Ives, again, captures the heart of what I tried to say in Carbon neutral teams (below) in his New Year's post, Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008? This phrase, "green teams," has been running through my mind since I first posted. Think we should write a book about it? (Googling reveals that lots of folks are using the expression.)

Carbon neutral or, shall we say, green teams

For years, we've been singing the praises of virtual teams for their ability to bring together differing perspectives, amass greater intelligence, and gain the benefit of more human diversity--then wrap it all together in a world where the sun never sets. Nice stuff.

Along the way, people have also been pointing out that working at a distance is less expensive, less stressful, and more environmentally friendly.

Now comes the news that HarperCollins UK, a Rupert Murdoch company,"has claimed it is the first major trade publisher in the UK to become carbon neutral, after reducing its carbon footprint by 8% over the past year and investing in carbon offsetting."  According to The Bookseller.com, "After focusing on reducing its electricity and gas consumption, cutting business air travel and curbing fleet mileage, its carbon footprint dropped..."

Thus, let me introduce the idea of "carbon neutral" or perhaps better, "green teams." When we talk about "individual" efforts to reduce emissions, perhaps we can also consider "team" efforts. OK, we already have such teams--in our beloved city of Newton, Massachusetts, anyway--that "team up" every spring to remove detritus from the banks of the storied Charles River. Thousands of other communities are doing the same.

But what about making our at-work teams carbon neutral? Instead of that next in-person meeting, whether a few miles away or a few thousand, how about meeting online? How about developing a checklist for why you need to get together face-to-face, then rating each upcoming event? Unless you exceed a certain threshold, you stay put.

I'm not saying we should never have conferences or team get-togethers or anything like that. But consider this: tomorrow morning, we will have an important meeting where we go over some fundamental ideas with a client, or I should say, a client and a potential client. We will be here in West Newton; another will be in Boston; and the third? Bangalore, India. Carbon neutral, all the way.

PS: There's a great roundup on UK and US publishers' efforts to reduce emissions at Publishing News. And need I say that a simple Google search turns up the world's first carbon neutral soccer team?