Embedding tweet in blog.
Although the vast majority of people in my office are local, rarely do we have everyone in the office at the same time. People are either traveling, telecommuting, or at off-site meetings. Also, several staff members are full time telecommuters and reside out-of-state.
Telecommuting affords employees the opportunities to reach some kind of work/life balance while still being valuable employees, but telecommuters must dedicate themselves to making sure they are able to contribute to their peers at work. In my experience there are good telecommuters and, well, not so good telecommuters. The good telecommuters are:
- Accessible: Good telecommuters are reachable.
- Transparent: Good telecommuters make sure their team knows where they are and when they can be reached.
- Communicative: Good telecommuters communicate status of projects, issues, insights, and generally find ways to participate in office culture.
Gina Trapani in her Harvard Business Review blog wrote about how to Master the Art of Working Remotely. Her four suggestions are practical yet valuable for anyone who has the privilege to work remotely.
- Sharpen your email skills
- Be “present” via instant messenger or Web based chat.
- Collaborate online with the tools that best fit your client and project
- Set up regular voice or video chat check-ins.
If you telecommute or work with telecommuters, these four suggestions can go a long way in creating and maintaining effective working relationships and making good telecommuters out of, well, bad telecommuters.
Oscar Berg of The Content Economy, tweeted 10 insightful questions for knowledge workers this morning. (Try this link to see directly in twitter.) These 10 questions should be asked by anyone doing knowledge work or anyone helping knowledge workers do their work better. Even though, these are questions we ask (or should ask) ourselves everyday, knowledge workers don’t necessarily have the tools to efficiently find the answers.
Case in point–Knowledge worker question #8: How do I keep, access and re-find information that I find potentially valuable? Most people I know keep their important documents and information in their outlook folders and are proud of the fact that they have over a Gig of emails in the pst files. Some of these people actually find the information they need, but they waste half their days doing so. Finding solutions to this problem on a organizational level saves hours upon hours of time and terrabytes of data.
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I just saw that Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) has warded off Twitter. Apparently, Twitter is just too one minute ago. In Scoble’s eyes, Twitter and Friendfeed are not effective agents for creating long term knowledge.
One thing is that knowledge is suffering [in Twitter]. See, [in the blogosphere], it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. What would you like me to find? Chinese Earthquake? Google has it.
Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It’s impossible. I’m an advanced searcher and I can’t find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine.
This is a compelling arguement against using Twitter to share everything that’s on one’s mind–especially if you want your tweets to be found sometime in the future. I’m not going to argue with Scoble about this. In my estimation, he’s right, but that doesn’t mean I’m warding off Twitter too.
My interest lies mostly in the use of Twitter, Yammer, SocialText, etc as communication tool within an organizational setting. In the organization, being able to search for information is important, but Twitter’s strength is in being able to communicate ideas NOW. Yes, Twitter may present problems with Search, but it is highly effective in other ways.
I’m sure there are other benefits for using microbloging in the enterprise, but these are just a few. Any others???
This is the first installment of “Process Alerts.” Look out for more of these. As I find interesting process changes in the news, I’ll post them on the blog as a “Process Alert.” In the comments, please submit your predictions whether these changes will succeed or fail…
Instead of grinding coffee only in the morning, baristas will grind beans each time a new pot is brewed.
From “At Starbucks, It’s back to the grind” WSJ – June 17, 2009 (Subscription required)
Next month Starbucks will begin to make some changes they hope will bring customers back to their shops. Along with changing their coffee grinding schedule, Starbucks will also change how they utilize their coffee brewers. Today, they dedicate each brewer to one coffee variety. Starting next month the coffee chain will begin to rotate the varieties through the brewers as necessary.
There are at least two reasons for these process changes–each having something to do with meeting customers’ expectations.
Whether or not the smell of coffee enhances the Starbucks experience and impacts sales and market share remains to be seen, but the changes are compelling nonetheless. This seems like an excellent example of changing a process with customer expectations in mind. The process change most likely did not emerge from an exercise of capturing boxes, diamonds, and lines on a Visio diagram.
