How We Work Today – Office vs. the Commute

I know I've thought this...

I realized I haven’t written much about my other love – the environment or sustainability or green business practices, whatever you would like to call it. I guess my job hunt has provided more humorous fodder for my blog lately but while I have been driving around for interviews and such, the nature of how we work has been been a recurring thought.

I read an interesting blog post from Seth Godin, who I follow pretty often, and he had a post called Goodbye to the Office. As I have worked in IT for a number of years, his reasoning to suggest we no longer ‘need’ the office, made a lot of sense to me.  He also narrowed down the one problem I see with eliminating “going into the office” – the need for people to go somewhere.  I don’t think it’s necessarily “the office”  that will be considered anachronistic; it’s our commute.

I don’t think we all need to gather together in the same place every day but there is a great deal of value in gathering

Where's my iPhone?

with other people with whom you can share ideas, tips, technology, shouting matches, etc. I know as a Web marketing person that I benefited tremendously from sorting out specific problems with peers, brainstorming ideas for improving our Web presence or wrestling together over coding or template issues.  And as Seth suggests, I didn’t necessarily need to go into Sun Microsystems to do that nor did I need to meet with my peers everyday.

This why I think the idea of an “office” will remain but our concept of commuting will change.  I wonder if we’ll return to some sort of 16th century guild arrangement, where marketing people will meet in a specific place, architects another, developers the all-night coffee shop the only condition would be that you live within a 12 miles radius or something like that. You’ll gather with like-professionals so that you collaborate, share, and problem-solve. You may work for different companies on different issues but as a professional your access to information, tools, knowledge would extend beyond your company confines to a broader more community-based resource. Yes, there will probably be all sorts of intellectual property issues to work out but I can’t help but think that having a community of experts upon who you can draw can have real benefits.

And can you imagine the money that might be saved on road maintenance that could be put to other uses? How might things like crowd-sourcing be used to expand the benefits or resources of professional communities? On a personal level, meeting new people, learning from experts, or passing on information would be tremendous. And I couldn’t help but think that different “guilds” would become recognized for their expertise. I may be taking the “guild” idea too far but less far, and less destructive (on our cars, roads, etc) than commuting to work.

Need help with your new Website?

I’m often contacted by friends or acquaintances, who are interested in starting their own business and need a Web site. More often than not, they have a clear idea of what they want their site to look like not necessarily what they want to say on it. That’s not a big deal. Crafting content, creating a message and trying to avoid sounding like a twonk is hard. I’d rather think about colors and the placement of animated graphics, too.

I’ve worked on all sorts of different sites: built using a cms tool, hand-coded with css files, etc but what I have found that works great so far for small-businesses just getting started is using Bluehost to host my site,  using WordPress to build my site and Woothemes for design. Yes, I do have accounts with each of them but I am not being paid to promote any of them.

There are a couple of reasons I like this combination:

• ease of use. You may still need someone like me to set it up initially and extend the functionality but eventually you can make edits and create pages on your own.
• scalable. The site you build today will have to adapt to the growth of your business
• focus on the content. Yes, your site is an extension of your brand and your online presence but for now focus on content.
• cost. If you’re a small business, this combination of tools can provide you with a professional Web site for less than 4k-5k.