Los Angeles, California, November 22, 2010 - Forecasters believe the growth of outsourcing makes short-term contract workers more attractive to firms than full-time employees, especially with the uncertain economic climate. Of course, broader technological changes are at work as well - cell phones and broadband make it easy to farm out work, even complex, interactive tasks that previously only made sense to do in-house.

The rise in telecommuting is the unmistakable message of the recently released 2009 American Community Survey data. Between 2000 and 2009, the working at home market share increased nearly 6 times as much as the transit share in the major metropolitan areas (38.4% compared to 6.4%).

As Wendell Cox highlights in his article with NewGeography.com; at the current rate, more people could be working at home than riding transit by 2017. Moreover, this seems to have happened without any loss of productivity. Companies like IBM, Jet Blue and many others have switched large numbers of their employees to working at home. These firms, which necessarily seek to provide the best return on their investment for stockholders and owners, would not have made these changes if it had interfered with their productivity.

Drake Bennett notes in his The Boston Globe article: This shift has begun to trigger a more fundamental examination of what a job is and what we expect to get from it. Despite the vast diversity of the work people do, the traditional notion of a job has tended to be a standard bundle of responsibilities, roles, and benefits: We do our work for an employer to whom we owe our primary professional allegiance, and that employer pays us and provides us health insurance and a sense of professional identity. In the United States, many of the laws that shape health insurance, retirement, and tax policy are structured around this model.

What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once.

Information technology and communications technology enable telecommuters and freelance agents to perform jobs that used to require being in the office.

As Wendell Cox concludes when analyzing the 2009 American Community Survey data; given the remarkable rise of telecommuting, its low cost and effectiveness as a means to reduce energy use, perhaps it’s time to apply at least some of our public policy attention to working in cyberspace. It presents a great opportunity, perhaps far greater and far more cost-effective than the current emphasis on new rail transit systems.

As the demand for telecommuting and use of freelance agents rise, so does the need for systems that can handle these trends. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn have clearly found a market for private users. To the frustration of both large and small businesses, this network structure has been implemented in systems developed for the business market. However, these systems only function in flat organizations or isolated groups, as Jens Welling, CEO at Los Angeles based LunaLista (www.LunaLista.com) highlights, “The challenge for companies is finding communication systems that create collaborative group structures which reflect the actual communication dynamics within the organization. A communication structure, where some information is shared across group, and others are not. These needs have to be understood and met.”

LunaLista has focused on these needs and created the next generation professional communication and intranet system that will help companies offer much needed flexible employee/freelance/client relationships. SIP (Simple Information Push) from LunaLista keeps communication organized. Jens Welling points out: “What differentiates SIP from other collaboration systems is its ability to adapt to the overall organizational structure of a company and the changing needs it may have. It adapts to the organizational hierarchy built around groups or projects. The users can connect the groups and/or projects, in whatever way they choose, irrespective of the organizational structure.

As Jens Welling, CEO at LunaLista concludes, big and small companies need to start preparing themselves for an organizational model that embraces these changes. This includes implementing systems that can support a flexible work force. SIP is developed to enable organizations to make this transformation in an easy, adaptable, and cost-effective manner.

Sources:
The end of the office … and the future of work, by Drake Bennett, Boston.com
Decade of the telecommute, by Wendell Cox, newGeography.com
Newsletter from Dr. Roger Selbert and the Growth Strategies Group, RogerSelbert.com
LunaLista, www.LunaLista.com