July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

By Jaleh Bisharat, VP of Marketing, oDesk (the world’s largest online workplace)

Just one week after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer issued her ‘work-in-the-office-only’ policy, Best Buy is dominating a new wave of headlines by following in her footsteps — delivering a one-two punch to the flexible work movement.

Best Buy, which was considered a trailblazer of flexible work through its popular Results-Only-Work-Environment (or “ROWE”) program, has revoked telecommuting privileges for some 4,000 non-store employees. Now, remote work will happen by exception and with managerial approval.

At Yahoo reportedly nobody is exempt, not even those who were hired with the understanding that they could work from home, a coffee shop, a co-working space, or wherever else they could find a productive environment to contribute from afar.

In the age of Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox and oDesk (where I work) these are pretty stunning pronouncements from one of the industry’s most progressive companies, and from Marissa Mayer, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched working Moms.

Where did it come from?

It seems that a practice presumably designed to attract talent is arousing suspicion. Are remote employees working from home, taking their children to the park or doing a bit of both?

It’s certainly true that working near crying babies is neither productive for the company, nor good for their harried professional moms.

But must we throw out the baby with the bathwater by ordering everyone back into the office? Must we go back to limiting ourselves to the talent that happens to reside within 25 miles of the office and the people who sit in a cubicle during traditional business hours?

Or is it time to reflect on how we can best harness talent, regardless of where it happens to be?

I know what it is like to be a working Mom, with small children blooming at home while I was tucked away in an office across town (in fact I blogged about it here). I also know what it is like to manage a team that is sometimes remote, because here at oDesk we have 120 employees in-house and 250 contractors around the world.

Some of my favorite tips for work-anywhere teams are as follows:

1. Expect a professional environment, wherever it is
If you wouldn’t have a baby in your office, then think twice about allowing a situation in which the employee is simultaneously babysitting. In most cases, this is not a recipe for producing exceptional work.

Workers don’t have to be in a cubicle, but they do need a space in which they can conduct professional business without distractions.

2. Clarify the boundaries
Develop a crisp understanding of the employee’s limits. One exceptionally talented working Mom I hired in the past, for example, had to pick up her young daughter at 3 pm. We accommodated the shorter but clearly stated in-office hours. In return, she made a tremendous impact on our business. I suspect she was so extraordinarily productive because she was free of guilt and worry, as well as grateful for the opportunity. She is now a well-respected leader in Silicon Valley.

3. Communicate relentlessly
Make sure everyone on your team, remote or local, understands what s/he need to accomplish, when it is due and how s/he will be measured. Put it in writing; it forces you to be crisp and removes any doubt as to what is expected. Conduct frequent status check-ins to review accomplishments, upcoming goals and any milestones or red flags.

4. Measure people by the quality of their results
Agree on measurable goals. This might be increased sales, higher levels of customer satisfaction, a well-designed product or whatever else moves the needle for your business.

If the goal is met, what matters least is where the work happened, or when it happened — as long as it was completed on time.

Some of the very best employees have a meaningful impact on the business because they deliver quality results in record time. They know how to push past “90% finished” and cross the finish line. They use ruthless prioritization to focus on what makes a difference to the business.

These people are not usually the ones who spend the most time in their cubicles. They may be working in their bunny slippers, after their children are in bed.

5. Embrace an integrated culture
At oDesk, we are avid users of collaboration technologies including Skype, Dropbox and Google Docs. Each conference room is equipped with large monitors so we can integrate remote remote participates into meetings via Skype or Google Hangouts.

We have developed an etiquette for how we work as virtual teams. Each meeting begins with an inquiry as to who is remote that day so we can bring them in via Skype or Google Hangouts. Supporting documents are distributed in advance. We greet team members who enter the meeting on a screen as warmly as we greet people in the room. A remote person wishing to speak is given priority.

Most companies invest sizable resources to find and attract the people who are most brilliant in their contributions. Should we turn our backs on exceptional flex workers who make up a large portion of our population? Or should we put our energy into designing ways to make them — and ultimately our businesses — more successful?

What do you think?

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The latest U.S. census data says that working from home for at least one day a week grew 34 percent, and this comes just a couple of weeks after CEO Marissa Mayer famously killed the Yahoo’s telecommuting policy.

In 2007, 7 percent of U.S. workers spent at least one of their working days in a home office. In 2010, the most recent data that the Census Bureau released, 9.4 percent were telecommuting at least one day a week.

That’s 13.4 million people across the country, and these aren’t low-level employees that we’re talking about.

In fact, the Census Bureau says that they’re more likely to be in management and business, saying that “advances in communication and information technologies have allowed for a more mobile workforce.” And a growing segment of them are programmers, developers, and engineers.

The number of computing, engineering, and science professionals who work at home grew 69 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“The matter of how people work is as it has always been: What does it take to get the job done in a way that affords an equitable balance — a quid pro quo — between the organization and the individual?” said Joseph M. Pastore, a professor emeritus at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “For most companies, the issue is pretty clear: Do what works.”

What wasn’t working at Yahoo was home workers who were certainly home, but — alas — not workers. They were not logging into corporate systems like Yahoo’s VPN to get their work done.

But as someone who just had a child might realize, you don’t necessarily need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Foursquare, and IBM realize.

Unless, that is, you want to do a stealth layoff.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Thank goodness someone finally had the courage to stand up and say that telecommuting is officially banned. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has the courage to say it, point blank, without apology. And her honesty is going to help all of us.

Telecommuting has been dead for a while

Facebook has something called lock-down, where no one can go home. Kids come to Facebook if they want to see their parents. Really. Which means that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also been promoting the end of telecommuting, but it’s actually more difficult for her to come out and say it when she is also championing the cause of women and encouraging them to “lean in” and have kids alongside a huge career.

Both Mayer and Sandberg really want women to succeed in business. They don’t want affirmative action for women. Mayer and Sandberg have young kids, and they are giving up their time with their kids – in an extreme way – so that they can run big, important companies.

The message here is that if you want to work at a company where people are doing big and important things, you have to give up everything. It’s okay to say that. Sandberg and Mayer are giving up everything, so why can’t they ask that of everyone else?

Telecommuting is for people who don’t want to give up everything for their company. Mayer doesn’t want to work with people like that.

Companies move more efficiently if everyone is at the office

The reason flexible jobs are hard to find is that most companies demand that you show up and put in face time at the office. We have been clamoring for ages that women want flexible work, but companies don’t want to give flexible work. (In fact, women are so fed up with the lack of flexible work that they are starting businesses at a higher rate than ever, and Forbes called entrepreneurship the new women’s movement.)

The Harvard Business Review combines easily-found data to show that innovation happens faster if people work at the same office, and company culture is easier to control and more energizing if people share physical space. Also face-time is linked to higher performance, which is linked to the idea of propinquity, the word to describe why people work better if they are in the same room. If you are near someone, you get along with them better. It’s how human beings work — it’s part of our social DNA that goes back millions of years. We understand each other if we see each other, which makes sense, since we read so many nonverbal cues. So people who are physically together are more efficient, more productive, and more innovative than people who are not physically together.

This is the type of data Mayer is relying on to justify her demand that people work at the office. Sure, there is data that individual workers are more productive if you let them handle their personal life with flexible work. But there is also evidence that top firms don’t need to accommodate those people. In Silicon Valley, home to Facebook, Google, Airbnb, none of the most desirable companies make room for a personal life. They don’t have to. They have plenty of people hoping to give up their whole life to the company.

Telecommuting encourages a less dedicated workforce

The poster-child for flexible work is Deloitte. Vice chairman, Cathy Benko, wrote the book on flexible work, literally, and Deloitte even goes as far as to do consulting for other companies on how to make flexible work for women. But let’s be real. Deloitte is a consulting firm, which means people with power and big careers there must travel. A lot. And they are flexible for the sake of the client, not for their employees’ kids. If you want to telecommute at Deloitte, your career is on a slow track. It’s an alternative career.

People telecommute so they can decrease the conflict between work and personal life. Brigham Young University shows that people can work 60 hours a week as a telecommuter and still maintain low conflict in this area because of the flexibility that telecommuting enables.

Mayer doesn’t want to work with anyone who is working 60 hours a week. She is in Silicon Valley where an 80-hour week is full-time and 50-hours is part-time. In fact, women who have taken the mommy track at big law firms have been saying for a decade that at top firms, 50 hours is a part-time week.

This is true of startups as well. I have written before that the reason women are not startup founders is that startups require 120-hour workweeks. When I cut back at my own startup to 60 hours a week, my coworkers talked about how I had basically quit working.

CEOs should get to choose who they work with

If you want to have a slower career, you deserve to be able to make that choice. But you shouldn’t get to work with people who are giving up everything for their job. It’s not fair. Of course it’s fine for you to leave work to eat dinner with your kids and put them to bed. Actually, I think it’s really nice. But it’s not fair to go home to your kids at 5 p.m. and start working again at 9 p.m. when your coworker has been at the office those five hours. Your coworker deserves more than that.

Who do you know who has given up more of their life for work than Marissa Mayer? I can’t think of one other person, actually. She was renowned as one of the hardest workers at Google, where hundred-hour weeks are de rigueur. And she is renowned for being the only CEO in US history to deliver a baby while running a Fortune 500 company. Marissa Mayer can tell anyone that they are not putting in enough hours. She’s giving up everything for work; she has a right to demand that her coworkers do that same.

This is true for most firms where A-players work. People who want to be top in their field want to work with other top players. That seems fair.

The future of work is better with Marissa Mayer running the show

Mayer is more honest than everyone else. The workforce divides into two halves: people who try very hard to decrease the conflict in their life between work and home, and people who try very hard to get to the top of the work world. You can’t do both. You know that, you just don’t like that Mayer is institutionalizing it.

Once we get honest about what you need to do to get to the top, we can start having a real discussion about how to make choices in adult life. The reality of today’s workforce is that if you want to have a big job where you have prestige and money and power, you probably need a stay-at-home spouse. Or two full-time nannies. Which means most people don’t have the option to go on the fast track, because most people have not set their lives up this way.

So let’s just admit that most of us are not on the fast-track. Stop bitching that people won’t let slow people on the fast track. Stop saying that it’s bad for family. It’s great for family. It means people will not continue operating under the delusion that you can be a hands-on parent and a top performer. People will make real choices and own those choices.

This is true for men and women. There is no longer a gender divide at work. The declaration that Yahoo no longer allows telecommuting is monumental because Marissa Mayer smashed the last shard of the glass ceiling. Today, anyone can rise to the top if they give up their life to do it.

Women graduate college at a higher rate than men, and women earn more money than men. Until there are kids. Then women slow down. By choice. Women tend to start slowing down at work around age 28  in order to be done having kids by the time they are 35. Generation Y women are well aware of this, and the pattern is so ubiquitous that business schools unofficially let women in earlier than men because women need to finish working at full-capacity so early in their career.

Which means the top performers at work are mostly men. But it’s not a gender thing, it’s a time thing. That’s what Marissa Mayer is saying: Don’t think about coming to my company unless you’ll give everything for your job.

Mayer is not saying parenting is bad. She is saying she doesn’t want to work with hands-on parents. But look at the CEOs of any Fortune 500 company: They rarely meet anyone who is a hands-on parent aside from their spouse. Hands-on parents don’t exist at the top of the Fortune 500.

People still have lots of choices, you just can’t have everything

Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids. The Harvard Business Review reports that if someone works 60 hours a week, they are three times more likely to have a stay-at-home spouse.

This workplace shift has already happened. Mayer is just forcing us to admit it.

If you want to parent — really be there for your kids — then you need an alternative career track. You can telecommute, you can work part-time, you can freelance, you just can’t work with people who don’t need those same accommodations.

So today, people have choices, people have more control over their lives than ever, and people have good information to make intelligent decisions. Mayer is forcing you to make hard decisions. You don’t like that. But don’t blame her.

Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons. This story originally appeared on Penelope’s blog.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In many ways, I’m the worst kind of work-at-home employee. I do my grocery shopping during work hours. I chat with friends about things that have nothing to do with work. Sometimes I watch TV. Much of my laundry is done while I’m working. Occasionally, I’ll go see a movie. I do all of the things that people who hate work-at-home employees complain about.

But in many ways, I’m also the best kind of remote employee. I get things done. I’m available for meetings at odd hours. Need to have a conference call with the team in Bangalore late at night? Sure. I don’t clock out as soon as I leave the office. As a product guy, I’m always paying attention to products. It annoys friends when I’m on vacation and I will dissect a suboptimal point-of-sale transaction experience on the spot. I can’t help it. I love what I do.

That’s why I find the recent changes to Yahoo’s work-at-home policy bewildering. Yes, Yahoo has a lot of deadweight. Yes, Yahoo needs to jettison that deadweight. But there is more deadweight that comes into Yahoo’s offices on a regular basis than there is that works from home. (Just based on sheer numbers this has to be true.)

There are plenty of dedicated work-from-home employees out there. One of my closest friends arranged a work-from-home situation with his employer. He’s often cooking dinner while he’s “on the clock.” But he gets his work done. He’s been doing it for nine years. When he started, it was an exception. Now it’s become very common at his company. Because relatively few companies support working from home to this degree, it also serves as a retention tool. It would take a lot for him to give up the flexibility he has.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson took to the company’s blog to criticize the Yahoo decision:

We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.

I’ve been a remote employee in more normal situations and I’ve managed remote employees. What I care about is whether the work gets done and done at the quality level that is needed.

The best employees also know what is stupid and what is needed.

In one case, my entire development team was based in Dublin. But I was required to be in the office in Virginia on most days. I had to deal with an hour commute each way so that I could come into the office and email with people half a world way. That is stupid.

In another case, my employer was widely supportive of telecommuting, but my specific manager wasn’t. My team was based in San Francisco but I had to work from San Jose, where my manager was. That is stupid.

When I’ve had remote employees, I’ve trusted them to get the job done. And most of them didn’t disappoint. But the ones who were screwups would have been screwups whether or not they were working from home.

Remote work does have its challenges, but some of these are actually opportunities. I found that when I was working with developers who were remote, I had to be much more explicit in what I documented for requirements. I didn’t take for granted that they understood certain things because they happened to be in the same room. You know what? That also worked better because there were fewer misunderstandings.

If the problem is that you have lazy, unmotivated employees, the solution is to get rid of the lazy, unmotivated employees. But there isn’t a 1:1 correlation between working from home and being lazy and unmotivated.

In a situation like Yahoo’s ultimatum, you have an adverse selection problem. The best, most motivated remote workers will leave because they are readily employable. The lazy, unmotivated ones will find a way to drag their asses into the office and will goof around there. Never underestimate the ability for employees to goof off in the office. I recently toured the Boeing factory in Everett, Wa., and an employee had Facebook on his screen.

The other argument in favor of having employees on site is that it can foster collaboration. I can buy that argument in certain cases, but not in the way large companies like Yahoo work. At an early stage startup, it can make a lot of sense and you can iterate much faster when everyone is in the same room. Ideas that seem stupid at first can get tossed around and turned into something. (Or vice versa.)

But large companies often have offices around the world. When I worked at Aol, at various times I had dev teams in Dublin, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Bangalore. Sitting in a company facility on the other side of the world or the other side of the city isn’t much different from working from a home office or coffee shop. Unless Yahoo is committed to putting all of the members of a team together, the claims that this is about promoting creativity (and not perceived control) ring hollow.

Besides, technology offers a lot of ways to help spark collaboration. I use a Twitter a lot for collaboration with a broad network. In corporate environments, I’ve used tools like IM, MediaWiki, and Yammer to brainstorm and collaborate.

We’re in an extremely competitive labor market in Silicon Valley. It seems short-sighted to limit your talent pool to just those who live close to the office or are willing to endure a one-hour slog on the 101.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: Elena Elisseeva/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Suddenly, telepresence robots are the hottest gadgets that don’t fit in your hand.

Double Robotics blew the lid of the category just a month or so ago, I’ll be checking out a Vancouver startup’s new product next week, and a number of other pitches are hitting my inbox.

But none of them will will own the market for remote presence if Scott Hassan has his way. He’s the CEO of Suitable Technologies, which launched its competitor to the marketplace, the Beam RPD tonight.

RPD stands for Remote Presence Device, and that’s exactly what Suitable is aiming to provide. Focusing initially on the high-tech industry in the Bay area, Suitable intends to offer talent-starved leaders such as Google and Apple access to talent all across the country,  even the globe, while still giving them the ability to “be” on-site, remotely.

Source: Suitable Technologies

The Beam RPD

But Hassan has two big problems, price and style.

Where competitive devices like Double offer a telepresence solution starting at just $2000, the Beam is a $16,000 investment, plus another grand for the docking charge station. That not just a little more, it’s a lot more.

And despite the high cost, the Beam looks like a boring beige vacuum cleaner. I almost want to apologize for saying that. But design is a competitive advantage, as Apple has taught two entire industries, and where the Double is all sleek sexy modern, the Beam is a boring blob with stalks.

Hassan fights hard, however, to make the case that the Beam is fundamentally different than the Double product, or other products on the marketplace.

“It turns out that reliability is the most important feature,” says Hassan. “It has to be as reliable as a phone … when you use this to set up a meeting, it has to work.”

Where an iPad — which Double uses for its camera, screen, and speaker — is designed for a single person’s close up use, and has a camera field of view and speaker designed accordingly, Beam has two high-quality wide-angle lenses, both of which are $100 components.

And Beam offers a full 17″ screen, to show headshots full-size, an incredible six microphone audio pick-up system with noise cancellation and the ability to focus just on the speaker, and not one but four WiFi radios in the unit, just so that the Beam can negotiate access to a multiple wireless access points simultaneously, the better to never lose connection and interrupt a meeting.

So it’s definitely a well-engineered product.

The question remains: eight times better than than much cheaper competitors?

That, I think, is a hard sell indeed.

See Beam in action here:

Image credits: Suitable Technologies

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It seems like every company, every article, and every startup CEO today proclaims that the workforce is changing, and the need to be in the same physical space no longer exists. Sure, we’d all like to think it is. Heck, I spent years building software and finding tools to help me work remotely, saying, “We don’t need an office space.” I was wrong.

When starting a company, you just can’t replace what happens when people are in the same room. Creating a company is all about vision and pushing that vision forward, day in and day out. These things don’t translate as well over email, chat clients, or even phone calls. While it’s easy to “work remotely,” it’s much more difficult to keep everyone on the same page and believing in the same vision. These elements are critical in the early stages of a startup, when things are constantly in flux and companies just can’t afford to wait.

The remote workforce may work at later stages of operation. But after being part of three startups, it’s more clear to me than ever that the office, and the collaboration and the establishment of company culture that goes with it, defines how the vision manifests.

Here are seven reasons why early-stage companies should start up in the same physical office space:

1. Decisions happen on the fly. In the early days, many company decisions are based on intuition and made at the last minute. The time it takes to set up a meeting, receive an email response, or even convey the correct message is insurmountable when in a hurry. These decisions require the right people in the right conversations, and that’s much easier when they are sitting right next to you.

2. Hallway conversations are priceless. You can’t create true serendipity over instant message. It’s crazy to think that one discussion can make, break or change the path of a company, but sometimes, those “accidental conversations” do turn into some magical idea, approach or direction. The early collaborations can determine what the company becomes, and the more interactions that can be had within your company, the better. It also makes everyone feel like they’re part of the process and the company altogether.

3. Passion in person is contagious. I’d argue that it’s almost impossible to convey passion accurately to someone at a remote location. If you think back to times when you’ve been convinced to do something, it usually results from face-to-face interaction. It’s harder to influence and create change through the digital highway. Also, in-person passion helps to create a social pressure that makes people work better. If the person next to you is working late, it’s much easier to ignore if you can’t physically see staying in the office longer.

4. Keeping people in the loop becomes extra “work.” The squeaky wheel is harder to hear over the telephone. The person who is out of the office may have an amazing perspective, but it is difficult to get that voice transmitted via phone or IM. On top of that, it’s hard to keep the people who aren’t at the nexus feeling like they make an impact. Ultimately, the feelings of control and empowerment can easily be lost.

5. Company culture is key. Culture binds a company early on, so maintaining that culture in multiple locations requires extra effort and even a separate “culture team” — members of management who ensure that the culture is universal across the company. Everyone talks about how important it is to set it, embrace it and make sure every single employee believes in it, but it’s hard to live and breathe something if you aren’t actually breathing the same air.

6. “Whiteboards” work in real time and space. Company whiteboards are where the brainstorming magic happens. I haven’t once seen a collaboration session for a critical decision happen successfully from sending files back and forth. The time wasted, the communication breakdowns, and the lost creativity can all be rectified by meeting in one room with one whiteboard.

7. Miscommunication causes too many problems. Miscommunication causes product problems, PR nightmares, culture issues and, ultimately, is the reason many problems aren’t discovered until it’s too late. Clear communication is more difficult with remote workforces over in-person teams due to the response lag time and unavailable immediacy. And no video chat software can capture the unspoken messages of body language.

When considering remote operations for your company, it comes down to where you are in development. If you are truly looking to create a great company, attract the best talent, and in the end build something that will change the world, I’d suggest getting everyone together and getting things done in the same space. Amazing companies are built by amazing teams, composed of amazing people.

People in the same room, that is. Get an office.

Shane Mac is the Director of Product at Zaarly. He’s the founder of Hello There and previously spearheaded marketing for Seattle-based Gist, which sold to BlackBerry. Shane is also an author, a professional musician voted best wedding band in 2009 and is obsessed with creating technology that can connect people and change the world for the better.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC leads #FixYoungAmerica, a solutions-based movement that aims to end youth unemployment and put young Americans back to work.

Office image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Praful Shah is the Vice President of Strategy for RingCentral, a cloud computing based business phone system provider. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

The traditional physical office may soon become a relic of the past.

At RingCentral, we recently surveyed nearly 350 businesses about their office structure and found there is a continuing – and growing – shift away from the traditional on-site centralized work force. A more widely distributed ‘virtual’ office is quickly becoming the preferred model. And as smart phones continue their rapid advances, we may soon wax nostalgic about morning commutes and a shared workplace.

Just 15 percent of the small- and medium sized businesses we spoke with utilize a traditional office model, where employees work from one central physical location. And 45 percent of survey respondents – including those traditionalists – spend more than three-quarters of their time conducting business out of the office.

The on-the-go trend appears to have gained ground as entrepreneurs left the corporate trenches to start their own companies. While they may have had a decidedly un-corporate model in mind to begin with, the economic crisis has accelerated the trend, as decentralizing a workforce lowers expenses.

Beyond cutting office-related rental overhead, opening up a telecommuting option also allows companies to expand their talent pool beyond a limited geographical area. Even those who are still fence sitting on the virtual office can reduce their operating expenditures and energy consumption by moving to a hybrid model – with a combination of traditional and remote workers.

While companies are growing more accepting of the virtual office, they’re still not ready to let their customers know the staff works remote. 80 percent of the businesses we spoke with want to give the impression to their customers that employees are in a centralized location when receiving or making business phone calls.

Emerging cloud-computing technology is making it easier to pull this off. Critical business applications and services – ranging from project management and staffing to infrastructure, collaboration and communications – are now easily accessed from any device via the Internet. As a result, operations are standardized, even though employees are working remotely.

Momentum’s on the rise for the remote office, too. 67 percent of the business owners we spoke with plan on expanding their business in the next year.

Of those, more than half are planning to adopt a virtual distributed office model.

Want to read the full survey? Right click to download a copy here.

Photo by Phil Gyford via Flickr