Making Remote Working Easier
Working remotely when you can not get to the office.
Working in the car is different. Getting on a conference call is no big deal while driving, OK you should be doing it hands-free, but trying to do a lot of the things you usually do in your office is not anywhere as easy. I recently have taken a new job, and it is great, but I need to drive back to HQ occasionally and is a six hours drive each way making for some long days and nights too.
What does it mean to you to be a Remote Worker? At to 2BMobile have been working on our definition of what Remote Work means to us. We consider it a catch-all phrase that covers all worker that does not perform work at their employer’s place of work. That is a broader definition than many other terms currently in use by people.
Examples of all the names used; telecommuter, teleworker, home-base, co-work worker, and Internet worker all describe someone who trading the employer’s workplace for another fixed base of work.
Whereas terms like road warrior, nomad, digital nomad and etc imply that the worker is in some state of travel and is not normally confined to a fixed location.
All these different labels that are used tends to splinter these workers into many groups both in their minds and by institutions that count them separately. At 2BMobile we do not see it that way. Instead, we see working outside of the employer workplaces as one continuum of employee’s work options.
When I started 2BMobile, we were thinking about mobility as freeing professional people from their offices by using mobile devices; smartphones, laptops, and Netbooks (what are they?). Today with smartphones and tablets in the hands of almost everyone, mobility has taken a giant step forward in the quest of a truly virtual worker and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) to work. The apps keep driving the independents from any one physical device to allow us the freedom to pick up where ever and whenever we want to.
Ok, the communication part is not perfect, I still can get caught in black holes of cellular and WiFi connectivity but even they are greatly improved in terms of speed and coverage.
One dimension of our quest for the genuinely virtual worker though has not leaped forward as the technology has and that is the physical limitation of a physical world. I may be connected almost anywhere electronically but being too far away from the metropolis of the world has a direct impact on your ability to perceived as viable by your clients.
Over the upcoming months of 2018, we will investigate what it means to be mobile in a technologically advanced world.
What is your opinion on the state of mobility today? Please give me your thoughts and comments below.
The definitions:
Mobile Worker
An employee who does not have one fixed place of work. Mobile workers are linked to a central base by telephone and sometimes by computer technology. A teleworker is a form of a mobile worker.
Knowledge Worker
knowl·edge work·er (plural knowl·edge work·ers) noun
Definition:
The employee in knowledge-based industry: somebody working in an industry such as management consultancy or computer programming that produces information rather than goods
An employee who deals in information, ideas, and expertise. Knowledge workers are products of the so-called information age, in which the emphasis is on creativity and innovation rather than on maintaining the status quo. According to Peter Drucker, in the new economy, every employee is becoming a knowledge worker.
From MSN’s Encarta
Also…
Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results. – Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive (1966)
Finally, these new industries differ from the traditional ‘modern’ industry in that they will employ predominantly knowledge workers rather than manual workers. – Peter Drucker in The Age of Discontinuity (1969)
A key reason for why I decided to create 2BMobile.com was the continuous growth of the number of the mobile-knowledge worker over the last twenty years and the rising needs they have to work effectively outside of traditional workspaces. What is a mobile-knowledge worker you ask? Well, I went to look it up and did not find any definition.
My definition is a worker whose output is information rather than goods and is not at one fixed place of work (often travel to different locations). Examples of mobile-knowledge workers are consultants, salespeople, and support specialists. What’s yours? Please give me your thoughtful comments below.