After you put your first corporate telework program in place, you’ll find that the actions and inactions of management, workers staying in the office, and the teleworkers themselves all have an impact on the success of the program. Managing these stakeholders and the politics they bring into play is integral to the success of teleworking in your organization.

Your organization needs to understand that is just not the teleworker who can wreck a telework program. Management, executive sponsorship and fellow workers can also do damage to your program. Here are the primary ways an organization can wreck its telework program:

1. It forgets about communicating and documenting expectations. Management, teleworkers and in-office staff are all going to have their expectations about how the telework program should and should not work. This is no time for “delegate and desert” management or mind reading. The communication and documentation of expectations is why I am such a fan of corporate telework plans.
2. It won’t alter business processes (if needed). Using teleworkers on a project team for the first time may require some alterations of existing business processes. Project managers, teleworkers, and other staff may need to work together to analyze and adapt to the impact that teleworking may have over their day-to-day team workflow and processes.
3. It fumbles expense reports. Teleworkers fudging their expense reports; management and accounting belaboring expense reports; and a corporate telework pilot plan ambiguous about what home office/business expenses the company will reimburse are all certain to contribute to the sinking of your corporate telework program. Put the right accounting and program controls in place up front so finances aren’t even a slight worry for teleworkers and their management.
4. It isn’t accessible. While it is easy to point to the teleworker always having to be accessible, the same rules need to apply to management and office-based staff. As more communications get lost in email inboxes and voicemail, there is a greater impact on productivity which could give rise to the end of the program. If email and phone call dodging is part of your corporate culture then you can expect these problems to contribute to the downfall of your telework program.
5. It forgets the business value of teleworking. After digging myself out from the recent record snowfall that hit my area, I came across many stories of businesses with telework programs where the home office workers didn’t have to work if their employer’s office was closed due to the weather. These businesses didn’t take didn’t take advantage of a natural event where formal and informal teleworking had the chance to really shine. The United States federal government and a number of non-profit organizations and companies shut down for more than a week where even a case-by-case teleworking plan could have meant that at least some business could have taken place, despite the record snowfall left by back-to-back storms. On top of any organization’s list of advantages for teleworking should be business continuity and to forget that is selling a telework program short.

What tools and processes is your organization putting in place to ensure the success of your teleworking program? Share your advice below.

Photo by stock.xchng user bamcopau.

Most time tracking and management applications require some up front work before you can roll with them, but not Windows app Chrometa. This utility starts working for you as soon as you install it. Running in the background, Chrometa tracks all your computing activities including emails, visits to web sites and open applications. It sorts the activities by application or tool and does it all without you needing to do a thing.

You don’t need to work hard to figure out the simple interface, either. A calendar sits on the left side of the screen that lets you go back and review any day, week, month or selected timeframe to see how you spend your time. Categories appear below the calendar. The rest of the interface splits into two sections: Active Time and Away Time. That’s it.

Chrometa's Main Screen

Initially, all activities appear under “Uncategorized.” You can leave it like that, if you’d like. Or you can create new categories by project, client or others. If you want an application to always appear under an assigned category, Chrometa can do that. For example, you could tag Hootsuite and Tweetdeck so those entries always go into the “social media” category, or tag Thunderbird and Outlook  entries for the “email” category (note that if you use a web-based email app like Gmail, this won’t work unless you use a unique browser for Gmail only). Chrometa not only shows how much time you spend in email, but also it gives you an idea of what emails you worked on based on the subject of the email. Web browser activities work similarly, relying on the web site’s title.

Sometimes it’s hard to identify an activity. That’s not Chrometa’s fault. For example, say you start a new Word document that you have not yet saved. Unsaved documents show up in Chrometa as “Document1,” Word’s default name for an unnamed document. Confusing web site items are also out of Chrometa’s control. Furthermore, you can’t edit Active Time descriptions. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because clients who need to see where you spend your time know that they can trust the information. It’s bad because not everyone needs to share data with others.

Chrometa runs minimized, sitting in your system tray out of your way. When you step away, you don’t need to do anything to track your non-PC time. Chrometa knows you’re idle when you stop using the computer for a set time. Upon your return, an alert box appears so you can enter how you want to record the non-PC time or ignore it. This is the only time the app pops up without your involvement.

You can easily block applications that you don’t want to track. Additionally, we all visit web pages or look at an email for a few seconds. This can add up to a lot of activities, but you can hide activities that are shorter than one minute, five minutes and 10 minutes. Like blocked applications, this cuts the noise and concentrates on the real activities.

Other features include the ability to export data to an Excel spreadsheet, and Timestamps for showing a chronological record of your daily activities in one-hour blocks.

Chrometa's Timestamps Screen

You may pause the app when you use the computer for activities not related to work that you don’t want to record. But be warned that it won’t remind you that you’ve paused the time in case you forget to turn it back on. A future release will need to address this.

The program has only a couple of niggles. The Active Time data sometimes disappears, and the only way to get it back is to close and open the application. The app could also stand some usability improvements to make it easier to change categories, or to move things around. However, the time management application is ahead of many others in its ease of use and effectiveness. The impressive thing about Chrometa is that you can benefit from the collected data without doing anything.

You can download Chrometa for free. The free version has all of the features of the paid version, and works for 30 days. After 30 days, you’ll need a license key to continue using the app either by purchasing Chrometa for a one-time fee of $99 or qualifying for a free license.

What do you think of Chrometa?

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

While we may not all agree on the “rules” when it comes to marketing, we can all agree that marketing has changed considerably in recent years, largely due to social media. “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” by HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah is a primer for those looking to learn how to make the most of social media to pull in customers.

A broad book, its contents revolve around how to get prospects to find you through blogs, search engines and social media. Halligan and Shah also discuss converting customers and how to apply that to your business and web site.

The short first chapter explains what has changed in marketing, and how online technologies effected the change. The first part of the book provides little value with its brief coverage of your web site as a marketing hub and creating a remarkable strategy. Really, these first chapters set the tone for the rest of the book in that its contents are wide and shallow.

The bulk of the book rightfully focuses on “Getting Found,” with 100 pages devoted to the topic out of the book’s roughly 200. Despite that much coverage, it’s still elementary stuff. The section on converting customers only lasts for three chapters, and it needs more material than the five chapters of “Make Better Decisions.”

The “Make Better Decisions” section included a whole chapter devoted to picking a PR agency and another on how to hire the right people for your marketing team. The advice given on how to find marketers who are digital citizens, however, is outdated. For example, the suggestion to hire people based on their web reach recommends looking at how many followers they have in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of us know that raw follower numbers have little value, with so many low quality users who know how to rack up the numbers.

The authors are also behind the Website Grader and Twitter Grader web sites, which they mention so frequently that at times it reads like a promotion. This book really is just a primer: You won’t glean anything new if you know the basics of search engine optimization, such as the difference between organic and paid listings, and you already know how to use social media tools and connect those tools with your business and web site. ”Inbound Marketing” does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business and want to understand the bigger picture.

Have you read “Inbound Marketing?” Please share what you think in the comments.

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

This week’s Recruiter magazine has a case study about the actions one agency took to fill a contract in the Falkland Islands. Giving there are only 3000 people on the Islands, they had to find someone who had the right capabilities and was willing to move from the UK to the South Atlantic temporarily. Amazingly, they had someone on their books who had both the right experience, and who had had ‘visit the Falkland Islands’ on her life’s list! The most interesting part of this article, however, is the ‘Lessons Learned’, aimed at the agency. However, if you reverse the advice, it’s as applicable to candidates as it is agencies.

Build Relationships – Keep in touch with your temps and take an interest in them. Knowing the candidate’s love of travel helped them identify her as potentially right for this role. If you have a desire to travel, to work in a particular company or industry, let your contacts know. They can’t help if they don’t know.

A Lucky Challenge – This agency just happened to have the right person on their books. Luck is sometimes a big part of the development of your career. Putting yourself out there – meeting people, being part of associations, volunteering for projects and activities – helps you be more lucky.

Word of Mouth – Talk about hard to fill placements, the person you’re talking to might just know the special candidate. Talk to your contacts about your next move – even if you think they can’t help, they might know someone who can.

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/south-atlantic-mission/1004511.article

Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend:

• ReadWriteWeb: “Kevin Rose’s 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs”
• Reeta Luthra: “How to Make Better Decisions”
• Execupundit: “Showing Your Personal Side”
• ProCopyTips: “15 little secrets your freelance clients won’t tell you”
• FreelanceFolder: “Uh-oh! Seven Steps to Deal with an Unhappy Client”
• Steve Rubel: “Ads Drop Dot-Com URLs in Favor of ‘Facebook Us’”
• Ars Technica: “Internet overtakes print in news consumption among Americans”
• Mix: “A Common Sense Content Strategy”
• Six Revisions: “How to Make Remote Team Collaboration Work”

What are you reading this weekend?

A few weeks ago, we reported that popular iPhone email search app reMail had been purchased by Google. As a result of the purchase reMail was no longer going to be available in the App Store.

On Friday, reMail founder Gabor Cselle made a second announcement with some good news for reMail’s fans: reMail’s code is being made open source. It’s being distributed under an Apache 2.0 license via Google Code.

Cselle indicated in the announcement that he hopes reMail’s code can serve as a building block for other mobile email apps. He also indicated that he has provided some documentation of the code and started a Google Group to encourage development of projects using the code.

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?