Working in an office is so passé. If you haven’t heard yet, all the cool kids are working virtually now. Whether that be working from home, cafes (John’s pushing the limits in China), on the beach, or even “co-working” together at cafes or homes. And now that I think about it, I’ve been working in virtual teams my entire full-time career – how odd.
John on a video conference
On my first day of work at HP back in August of 2001 I met my boss over the phone. My boss, Mike, worked and lived in Atlanta, GA. We did weekly team meetings on the phone and used web cams that streamed our live pictures to an internal “hollywood squares” webpage so that we could all see each other. Over the course of my HP career, I worked with teammates in half a dozen states and numerous countries in Europe and Asia. The cool thing about the organization I came into was that they were sort of the virtual team collaboration pioneers in HP so we experimented with all kinds of tools and techniques, with one of the most memorable being a virtual party we had where there were break out rooms on the conference lines and games like virtual pictionary using the NetMeeting whiteboard. Fun times.
Anyways, this trip down memory lane was spurred when I heard that a former HP colleague of mine, Loyal Mealer, recently put together a nice repository of telecommuting information called CommuteZero.
In Loyal’s own words:
We created it to share the techniques and tools that make telecommuting and other forms of virtual work productive, easier and even fun. We want to encourage the use of virtual work as a way to improve business effectiveness and productivity, save on fuel, reduce pollution, and improve the quality of our lives. What better way to be green than to leave the car in the garage or avoid that next flight? Plus, you’ll lower your stress and have more time for family and friends.
Looking through the site I see many of the great tips and best practices that we used at HP so I recommend checking it out (blog) if you’re already working virtually or just thinking about it.
Once you can get in your own virtual working groove, you’ll never want to go back.
Justin
You should read the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss, he has alot of tips for telecommuting
Bill Fennells last blog post..What makes a great pizza?
I did read that book – awesome stuff in there. I highly recommend it.