Kate Lister, the author of “Undress for Success,” has come up with some impressive figures when it comes to the amount of money that could be saved by switching U.S. employees who have jobs compatible with telecommuting to actually working from home for at least half of their working time. The bottom line, according to Lister, is a potential total saving of $500 billion. Lister’s numbers are based on the telecommuting savings calculator she’s built, using figures from the U.S. census.

Currently, less than 2 percent of U.S. employees telecommute for the majority of their work time. An estimated 40 percent of those employees hold jobs that are compatible with telecommuting, however. The savings available if all 40 percent could work from home for at least half of their work time are impressive. These are just a few of the savings that make up that $500 billion bottom line:

• Businesses could save over $100 billion — that’s $8,300 per employee — in real estate, electricity, employee turnover and absenteeism costs. There are other potential savings in security, maintenance, parking, ADA compliance and, of course, coffee.
• More than 218 million barrels of oil could be saved which, at the price of $80 per barrel, translates to a savings of $17 billion, and could reduce Persian Gulf oil imports by 28 percent.
• Employees could save between $3,400 and $10,500 in transportation and other work-related costs, not including eliminating daycare or taking account of the home office tax breaks that many telecommuters are eligible for.
• More than 73,000 people could avoid traffic-related injury or death, together with almost $8 billion worth of accident-related costs. Telecommuting won’t wipe out traffic accidents, but it could make a dent in the numbers.

The calculator does account for factors like the increased costs associated with working from home and those employees who may make the switch to telecommuting but have already brought down transportation costs by using public transport or car pooling.

Of course, the likelihood that 40 percent of employees will make the switch to telecommuting in the near future is very low. But it’s important to keep in mind the savings available both for the country as a whole and for individual companies. These numbers can make for a compelling argument if you’re working on convincing an employer to let you work from home on a regular basis, or you’re trying to get a corporate telework pilot plan approved by senior management.

You can read more about Lister at her site, the Telework Research Network. She also provides a variety of telecommuting resources, including information on telecommuting opportunities.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Image by Flickr user Sean Dreilinger

Many large companies have policies that allow employees to spend some of their time working on their own projects. These programs are often used to entice high-caliber job applicants, as well as encourage innovation. For example, Google has what it calls “20-Percent Time”, where its employees spend one day each workweek on project they’re passionate about, while 3M calls its version “15% culture,” which “encourages technical employees to spend 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing and initiative.”

This approach doesn’t have to only apply to corporate employees — it can apply to web workers as well. Whether you’re a freelancer or a corporate employee, if your work is measured on your performance rather than your presence, your work hours may be flexible enough to accommodate your own “20-Percent Time.”

But why do it in the first place?

• Innovation and creativity. Innovation is one of the most cited perks of 20-percent time. According to this handy infographic, half of Google’s products are a result of this employment perk. The products that have resulted from 20-Percent Time include Google Adsense and many Google Labs features. An example that might seem closer to home is cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. He drew his first gapingvoid cartoons during his downtime while he was working as a copywriter. Now he’s published a book and does commissioned art. He may not have had a firm policy on creating things outside of work, but it’s easy to lose sight of side projects when one focuses on their “real” work almost every waking hour to the exclusion of everything else.
• Exploration. By making the time to pursue personal passions, you can dabble in different areas, which sometimes results a broader understanding or a new perspective on the field you’re working in. It might even lead to a new line of work altogether. 37signals started as a web design firm, but couldn’t find collaboration tools suited to their needs so they created Basecamp. This led them to develop their own web apps instead, eventually leading to the Ruby on Rails framework.
• Opportunity. By making time for personal projects you give yourself license to act on ideas, questions and passions that you might not be able to do during your work week. You’ll have a chance to do tasks would’ve been too risky, or even seemed downright strange.
• Motivation. In a popular TED talk, Dan Pink discussed the science behind three major motivators in the workplace (which I elaborated on in a previous post). These motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though your experience with the latter two may depend on the project you choose, giving yourself 20-Percent Time allows you to exercise your autonomy.

Setting Your 20-Percent Time

Before you schedule your 20-Percent Time, remember that the number shouldn’t be taken literally. Allocate the time that works for you. You can take one day each week, an entire weekend, or even 30 minutes each day. Personally, I like to start my day working on a personal passion project. It gives me fuel to work through the rest of the day. Plus, it eases me into a heavier workload ahead — after all, if I make a mistake on my personal project, none of my clients will suffer.

As Simon noted in a previous post, it’s easier to get burned out when you don’t work a typical 9-to-5 job. With that in mind, how can the typical web worker manage to have 20-Percent Time especially if they have a busy home life? It’s hard to squeeze in a personal project if your family, pets, and home errands suddenly require your attention.

Taking a cue from Sylvia Plath, why not work on your project before your household wakes up? This might mean waking up earlier than usual, but even 15 minutes per day spent on a passion project is better than nothing. Plus, the quiet environment might make it easier for you to work.

But here’s some more common sense: mark the end of your workday. It may not be a cutting-edge life hack, but it’s simple and, more importantly, it’s true. Only by setting actual work hours can we draw a clear line between work and the rest of our preoccupations.

Do you set aside time for personal projects? If so, how did you manage it and what do you do with your time?

Photo by flickr user net_efekt, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

There are countless ways to track your brand on social media. Simple methods include using Twitter search and Google Alerts; more elaborate tools include Radian6’s newly announced Engagement Console, which will scour numerous social platforms for any mention of your brand.

So here’s a roundup of some of the more popular tracking tools.

Monitoring Dashboards

Twazzup 2.0 beta (which Dawn wrote about last year) is a dashboard that gathers all the mentions of your brand on Twitter and presents them in an appealing and useful way.

Trackur is another powerful social media monitoring tool. It used to be premium-only, but a free basic plan was recently announced that allows you to monitor one keyword, which is sufficient for most small organizations and personal brands. One of the things I like is the way that you can export any search result to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

SocialMention (which Dawn also wrote about last year) is similar to Trackur in that it will search all over the web for any mention of your keyword/brand. I like how you can set up alerts that will be emailed to you with results summaries. It also lets you break down search results according to where your brand is mentioned: blog posts, images, videos, news items and more. You can even see every time someone has saved a link from your web site/blog to Delicious or shared it on StumbleUpon.

Addictomatic presents all mentions of your keyword or brand on one nicely designed page. You’ll see images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and much more.

Twitter Clients

Some people find it sufficient to keep track of their brand or other keywords of interest via their day-to-day Twitter client, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or HootSuite. They accomplish this by simply creating a new column in the client that displays any tweets mentioning that keyword. The nice thing about this method is that you can reply and respond to people mentioning your brand or product, which makes it a good customer service tool.

Larger organizations that need more than one person to monitor Twitter can use a Twitter clients geared for teams, such as CoTweet, which lets multiple people respond to tweets at the same time. The other useful thing about CoTweet is the way it lets you turn tweets into tasks or action items that can be assigned to different team members, much like helpdesk tickets.

There are also tools that do nothing but track multiple hashtags/keywords on Twitter, such as Twitterfall, TweetGrid and my personal favorite of this type, Monitter. While Monitter doesn’t provide nearly as many columns or choices as TweetGrid, it does sport a slick user interface and feels faster. I do like the fact that TweetGrid lets you share a URL with all of the search terms you’ve assembled.

What tools do you use for social media monitoring?

Photo by: VivaLibre574

I’ve read a lot of articles recently about the increasingly ‘web 2.0′ methods companies are using in the period between candidates accepting offers and their fist day. Onboarding microsites which allow candidates to find out about the company, set up a profile, and see video and other content are becoming more common.

However, whilst some reseach shows candidates like the sites a lot (up to 95% engagement in one survey), we see a danger. Hiring managers could assume that all the work has been done for them. In fact, this isn’t much of a change – I’ve met many hiring managers who think that onboarding is HR’s job and abdicate all responsibility.

If you want an employee who is quickly productive and useful to your team, you can’t abdicate responsibility to any part of his development, especially onboarding. His whole early experience is colored by the one person he knows – the person who interviewed him. Like many things, onboarding is straightforward but requires some effort and a focus on results and relationships – neither of which are developed through a web 2.0 interface.

Oklahoma Senate passes distracted driving bill – Tulsa World – OKLAHOMA CITY — A bill that would allow law enforcement officers to cite drivers for distracted driving even if it … – – and more » – -

The privacy furor stirred up over the past couple of weeks by the launch of Google’s social tool, Buzz, caused the search giant to make some fairly radical changes to the service. It also threw the issue of privacy in social networking into sharp relief. However, Google’s stumble in this space is just the latest in a long line of privacy flubs from nearly all of the vendors in the market. In my latest Long View over on GigaOM Pro (sub. req.), “Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?,” I ponder whether social networking and privacy are fundamentally incompatible, and what individuals and businesses should be doing to limit the damage that can be caused by privacy leaks on social networks.

Privacy and social networking is something that we’ve discussed at length here on WWD; I particularly liked Dawn’s comments in “Private or Personal in Social Media?” Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg I don’t believe that the “age of privacy” is over, but there’s no doubting that the more of your “stuff” that you share online, the less control you have over your privacy. Perhaps social networks will evolve to give us reliable, granular, context-sensitive privacy controls, such as those that ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick argues for. But until they do, we all need to be careful about who we share our stuff with, and where we share it.

Do you think that privacy and social networking are fundamentally incompatible?

Photo by Flickr user rpongsaj, licensed under CC BY 2.0

As a web worker, I handle most of my communications online. My first contact with many of my clients is via email or, sometimes, phone. But I still have a big box of business cards sitting on my desk, and I think they come in handy. I’m willing to pay to get professional business cards printed regularly.

Networking

Just because most of my clients contact me online doesn’t mean that that’s how they find me. I ask every new client how they found me and, more often than not, it’s because someone I know recommended me. What’s surprised me, though, is that it isn’t always past clients passing along my email address. More than a few times, it’s been someone that I met at a networking event passing my card along to someone who they thought could use it. These aren’t people who know me well; without that business card in their hands, they would have been hard-pressed to even remember my name. But having that convenient little piece of paper in their pocket led to me landing a new client.

Of course, I’ve landed clients just by heading out to networking events and handing out my business cards in person, as well. There’s a reason that business cards have become standard for business — and why many tools that allow you to share information via smartphone and other gadgets have been slow to catch on outside of technologically-oriented industries.

Professionalism

There are times when even the most web-oriented among us have to meet with people face-to-face. Being able to hand out a business card does more than guarantee that they have your contact information and even goes beyond making it easy to pass it along. It can help establish your professionalism. Depending on the type of work you do, there can be some difficulty in reminding your contacts that you’re a professional — after all, you spend most of your day at home or the coffee shop. But little touches like a professional business card can really help remind clients and colleagues that you are a professional, no matter where you’re working at.

Connecting

I’ve got a couple of business cards in my bag that don’t actually belong to me. I hand them out when I’m handing my own out, though: I have certain people that I work with on a regular basis and if I’m talking about a project they’d be involved in, I like to help them out with a little promotion while I can. They’ve got a stack of my cards, too. The system works out pretty well. We don’t routinely attend events (networking or otherwise) together, but each of us still gets an opportunity to get our cards in the hands of people who might like to work with us. A business card may not be the perfect substitute for your ability to win new clients or projects in person, but it can definitely help in situations where you wouldn’t have been able to be there anyhow.

Do you still use business cards?

Image by Flickr user bargainmoose, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Microsoft SharePoint is an accepted enterprise standard for online collaboration, but unfortunately many organizations don’t use it to its fullest potential. If you’re preparing a telework pilot program, it’s important to ensure that your SharePoint implementation is set up and optimized to support and assist your teleowkers. Here are some tips.

• Test SharePoint via remote access. Since your SharePoint implementation is sitting inside your firewall it is important to test typical SharePoint tasks like accessing document libraries through your remote access solution prior to turning your teleworkers loose. Access issues will only make teleworkers bypass the platform.
• Make SharePoint more social. With a product as customizable as Microsoft SharePoint, you can deploy it in any number of configurations. Unfortunately, these many choices may also mean many SharePoint sites go online with practically no frills. Starting with SharePoint 2007, you can incorporate social media options including blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds into your SharePoint sites. Launching these social media tools can help foster collaboration and ensure your SharePoint site is a focal point for project and communications activities.
• Factor SharePoint into your telework processes. I’ve been working with SharePoint off and on since its inception and seen implementations inside organizations large and small. Two common mistakes I see are SharePoint sites that are too locked down and no better than static web pages, and SharePoint sites that are implemented without input from the project teams or the business side of the organization. When creating your telework pilot plan, factor SharePoint into business processes and communications. Follow up with appropriate documentation and training for your teleworkers.
• Develop a SharePoint test site. If SharePoint is currently underutilized in your organization, then perhaps your teleworkers can help you recoup your investment by developing a SharePoint test site. Developing a test site during your telework pilot progrtam, you can discover which SharePoint features are required and how it is best used.
• Consider a hosted SharePoint solution. There might be technical, budgetary, or logistical reasons for not opening up your SharePoint site to remote access. So if SharePoint is already familiar to your teleworkers and you are looking to take advantage of SharePoint/Microsoft Office integration you may want to consider a third-party host for your SharePoint sites. Microsoft and a number of its hosting partners offer SharePoint on a monthly subscription basis.

How are the teleworkers in your organization using Microsoft SharePoint? Share your tips below.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

While there are plenty of free online image editors available, what makes new offering Picmeleo stand out from the crowd is that it’s embeddable. It’s very simple to set up and offers your visitors an attractive, easy-to-use image editor built into your own site. I made a quick screencast to show you how it works:

Which online image editor do you use?

On a recent cast, Mark gave the credit for the book “1L” to John Grisham, a popular lawyer/author, which was incorrect. He was chagrined to be reminded that the book was written by Scott Turow, an even better author/lawyer.

Mark regrets the error.