the anywhere worker: essential tools to keep teams...

The Anywhere Worker: Essential Tools to Keep Teams Connected

The Anywhere Worker: Essential Tools to Keep Teams Connected | Citrix © 2012 2

Replicating the In-Office Experience

Take a minute to think about the people you’ve communicated with today. You might have dealt with a freelance designer working out of his home in Wisconsin. You might have traded emails with a business partner about a deal that’s hatching in Europe. Maybe you collaborated with a virtual team that joined an online meeting from their home computers, smart phones, and tablets from different geographic areas and time zones all around the world.

In this increasingly mobile world―where work is outsourced and international partnerships are formed quickly and easily―workers need to be able to collaborate with colleagues, share information, and access programs just as easily from a distant continent as from the cubicle next door.

These expectations―demands, really―are changing the role of IT department from organizations that build proprietary technology tools to organizations that choose which existing tools will best meet workers’ needs, and then adapt those tools for business needs. These demands are causing IT departments to figure out new ways to let in-office and remote workers connect, collaborate, and communicate in familiar ways.

Serving the “Anywhere Worker”

Call this development the Anywhere Worker. Companies are finding that when they are able to replicate the in-office experience for mobile and home workers, they work faster and more effectively, and can forge the deep relationships with colleagues and customers alike that once could only be achieved by sitting across a table from one another.

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Companies are finding that when they are able to replicate the in-office experience for mobile and home workers, they work faster and more effectively, and can forge the deep relationships with colleagues and customers alike that once could only be achieved by sitting across a table from one another.


This is being achieved through a myriad of technology advances, including video-conferencing that replicates the feeling of an in-person meeting; remote access tools, which give workers the ability to access critical files on their work PCs at home or in the field; and social platforms designed for small businesses, which give far-flung teams a virtual hub where they can collaborate effectively.

But it’s being driven by the demands of workers, as lifestyles and views of what work is, change.

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Getting Results: The Multiple Payoffs of Working from Anywhere

The reasons for, and benefits behind, the Anywhere Worker trend are multifaceted. For starters, in tight economic times, many companies find it has become an economic imperative to have employees work from home or other remote locations, rather than from pricy office space.

“All office space is overhead,” says Laurie McCabe, cofounder of the SMB Group, a consultancy for small and medium-size companies. “If you operate a hair salon or a retail store, you need space. But I truly believe most information workers need less and less space—and that’s true whether you are a one-person business or work for a Fortune 500 company.”

What’s more, the notion of the Anywhere Worker is fundamentally changing people’s expectations about how business should be done.

Balancing personal and professional lives

“If you go to a coffee shop on Saturday, you’ll see many small businesspeople conducting business―perhaps pitching someone to come on board with them,” McCabe says. “Even a few years ago, if you had a business meeting, you wanted it in a more professional setting, but a lot of that has fallen away. Mobile technology has opened so many opportunities for small businesses, leveling the playing field and making it a whole different ballgame.”

The concept of the Anywhere Worker fits into the growing trend of the mobile workforce and the idea that work is a thing you do, not a place you go.

Consider the emerging notion of “workshifting,” in which employers empower workers to decide how, where, and when their work gets accomplished. This moves the focus to results, rather than on presenteeism. With mobile tools, and always-on

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connectivity, many professionals are working longer hours; they are simply not locked into a 9-to-5 schedule. A salesperson who takes the afternoon off to watch his son’s school play can keep an eye on crucial business matters on his mobile device. That’s workshifting―making work work for you, so that your personal and professional lives are balanced and productive.

A variety of industry studies have concluded that productivity increases by 27 percent on days when people are workshifting, in part because they can work when they are most productive, can avoid workplace distraction, and are boosted by the feeling of being trusted by their employers.

As technology and lifestyles are erasing the boundaries between work and personal life, companies need to acknowledge this change and rethink what boundaries and rules are still relevant. This could make a big dent in the $150 billion issue of “absenteeism,” where employees arrive at work unable to physically or mentally give their all.

Flexible work schedules can also reduce other problems—studies indicate that nearly 80 percent of employees who call in sick do so because of stress, personal needs, or family issues—all things that the Anywhere Worker can help alleviate.

With all these benefits, Cornerstone Technologies, an IT consulting firm, adopted an integrated, high-definition, group video conferencing system in an effort to provide better work-life balance for its employees.

“We’re considering a completely work-from-home mentality,” says Eugene Alfaro, the company’s director of IT professional services. “It has raised productivity, profitability, and morale—what better combination could you have?”

Making customers happier

The use of the Anywhere Worker model doesn’t just raise the spirits of employees; it can even boost customer satisfaction. Customers—across all sorts of industries—want the benefits that come from working with people who use the Anywhere Worker approach and can respond immediately to their needs.

As technology and lifestyles are erasing the boundaries between work and personal life, companies need to acknowledge this change and rethink what boundaries and rules are still relevant.


There are few fields that have a more personal relationship with clients than healthcare, and it’s telling that even patients are becoming comfortable dealing with their physician remotely, using video conferencing and other collaboration tools.

Dr. Andrew Barbash, a neurologist at NowDox, a virtual healthcare delivery service, relies on these tools to consult on cases with colleagues. Using a video conferencing solution, Barbash is able to have a secure online meeting with other physicians and examine a patient’s Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) scan, as well as records or notes related to the case. During the virtual meeting, the caregivers can use the system’s annotation tools to emphasize specific areas on the records for all participants to view.

This ability to collaborate online in a way that’s non-obtrusive and also easily share information, drives Barbash’s vision of virtual healthcare―one which easily crosses all the traditional silos and boundaries of care.

“I can comfortably obtain a second opinion from a world-renowned academic institution [which is located far away] as though they were there with me,” he says. “The patient [does] not need to travel or be transferred to another hospital, and we bring the expertise right to the point of care, which brings a huge amount of reassurance, not just for the family, but for the staff, the other physicians involved, and myself as a practitioner.”.


Getting Business: Customers Are Happy to Deal With Anywhere Workers

The Anywhere Worker philosophy also can help a company find new customers and boost sales. With increasing reliance on online communications, customers are no longer wary of working with small companies that are based halfway around the world. This eliminates the need for architectural firms and other small companies to maintain a regional office in every country in which they do business.

“Organizations are recognizing that people don’t need to be in the office anymore for individual work,” says Andrew Laing, director at strategic business consultancy DEGW, and co-author of New Environments for Working and The Responsible Workplace. “Customers and clients don’t know the difference.”

Sales calls go virtual

New communication tools are making customers in far-flung locales more comfortable doing business remotely, giving small businesses the unprecedented ability to expand their geographical scope—and build sales—in a cost-efficient manner.

HYPE Softwaretechnik GmbH, with only 90 employees, is the perfect example of a small company with a global presence. HYPE serves an international customer base, including many Fortune 500 companies. Those customers are spread across 16 different countries, and the company’s consultants work in five different languages: German, English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

Given such diversity and geographic spread, HYPE’s consultants found they had neither the time nor the money to meet with all the clients in person. Instead, the company began to conduct in-person meetings and workshops only to kick off projects. The subsequent appointments are conducted via video conferencing.

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This flexibility “has created a lot of new possibilities,” Feddern says. “We are now able, for instance, to support customers in far-away countries such as India and Nicaragua.”

HYPE has also begun offering prospects online demos. “We offer free webinars for clients and prospects in order to demonstrate new features and products and train them on how to use our solutions,” says Sebastian Pfingsten, the company’s head of marketing.

One reason this is possible is because new collaboration technology provides such a high level of clarity and closely duplicates the feel of in-person meetings.

“Video conferencing engenders trust because participants can see expressions and body language as if we were all face-to-face,” Alfaro says. “In fact, we recently finished several projects where we never set foot in the client’s location, but they were still highly satisfied with our services.”


Getting Mobile: Smart Phones Are the New Desktop

In a fast-moving world, people need to be able to access all the information, resources, and people they need anytime, anywhere, and in any way they want.

Breaking down communication barriers

For one thing, computing power needs to be extended to any mobile device. Consider the case of DPR Construction, a national commercial contractor and construction management company in Redwood City, California.

“The nature of the construction business means many of our employees are mobile, working at job sites and client locations,” says Ron Stinson II, IT capability lead for DPR. “They wanted to collaborate using new tablet and smartphone devices, such as the Apple iPad and iPhone.”

The company relies on video conferencing for various external and internal functions, from discussions with owners about project plans, to meetings with architects and subcontractors, to knowledge sharing among engineers.

“It’s so much faster and more convenient to jump on a meeting from my iPad tablet or my iPhone than having to boot up my laptop,” Stinson says. “Of course, these small devices are much lighter to carry around on a job site or when traveling. Collaboration is now a lot easier and more convenient.”

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Getting Access: Workers Need to Access Their Files From Anywhere

An important development in spurring the Anywhere Worker movement is improved remote access tools. Thanks to advances in technology, employees can access their files, programs, and network—from anywhere—just as if they were at their desks.

A new communications norm

Significant pressure to perform at a law firm often translates into long hours at the office. Easy remote access allows the attorneys to leave the office at a reasonable hour. They can go home, have dinner with their family, and then continue working, because they can remotely connect to office desktops within seconds from anywhere, gaining real-time access to documents and proprietary databases so they can handle an important case.

One law firm that adopted this approach found it was getting more than one thousand hours a month in online attorney time. This raised productivity and improved quality of life for their attorneys.

Such new tools are designed to be implemented quickly. Because remote access tools can be deployed as a managed service, they require no investment in hardware or software as a Virtual Private Network does—and they can be deployed in minutes and used with little or no training.

That kind of remote access can have far-reaching implications, as the pace of business continues to increase. Scientists at Apache Corporation, an independent energy company that explores for, develops, and produces natural gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids, go to exploration and drilling sites around the globe, and they often need files located back at the home office. Putting the data on a laptop wasn’t practical because, for one thing, the information is updated frequently.

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Because remote access tools can be deployed as a managed service, they require no investment in hardware or software as a Virtual Private Network does—and they can be deployed in minutes and used with little or no training.


The company needed to find a remote connection solution that allowed the scientists to view the data on their mobile device so that it looked the same way it looked on their work PCs, (e.g., it had to be able to handle multiple monitors, since the scientists sometimes used several 30-inch monitors to view their applications).

“Right now, about half a dozen people use the iPad, particularly when they are on call or on vacation during a critical drilling operation,” says Bradley Lauritsen, the company’s senior manager of geoscience computing. “It’s light and easy to carry, so they can quickly access their desktop from home or a hotel room if a question or issue comes up.”

As a result of being able to access information more easily, Apache calculates the scientists can accomplish $2.1 million worth of additional work in the field and limit costly delays in the exploration process.


Getting Access: Anywhere Workers Require a Virtual Hub

A key element to making the Anywhere Worker concept a success is giving colleagues, business partners, and customers a place to collaborate and communicate easily, even if they are in widely disparate locations.

Adapting social platforms for business

The increasingly mobile workforce, which works outside the traditional office setting, still needs ways to create, manage, and share information with each other. In their personal lives, workers have become accustomed to sharing photos and messages with friends on Facebook and other social media sites. That concept is quickly being embraced in the business setting, as well.

Leveraging a people-centric collaboration philosophy, small and medium-size businesses can turn to cloud-based social platforms that allow them to create workspaces where employees, clients, and contractors can collaborate on a given project. A creative team, for example, could use this social platform to: track project progress and share information, using real-time status updates; manage tasks; and provide feedback to one another.

Importantly, the new social platforms are designed with the flexibility to accommodate the ways that the Anywhere Workers want to work. For one thing, the social platforms need to be constructed with mobility in mind, so workers can access them through mobile devices. They need to connect easily with common file sharing and collaboration products, like Dropbox and Google Apps, so people can continue to work in ways that are familiar and convenient.

An even bigger difference is that instead of using these social platforms to merely talk about their work, they can build custom apps that allow them to do their work. In the latest incarnations of social platforms, workers without any programming skills can create task-specific apps related to the project at hand.

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Leveraging a people-centric collaboration philosophy, small and medium-size businesses can turn to cloud-based social platforms that allow them to create workspaces where employees, clients, and contractors can collaborate on a given project.


For example, an accounting team could create an app that automates their workflow. The notion is that, in a self-reliant age, Anywhere Workers want technology they can quickly modify to suit their personal needs, so they can get their work done faster, better, and more collaboratively.

Because, at its heart, that’s what the Anywhere Worker trend is all about: allowing people to work on their own terms, because they are happier and more productive.

Importantly, the new social platforms are designed with the flexibility to accommodate the ways that the Anywhere Workers want to work. For one thing, the social platforms need to be constructed with mobility in mind, so workers can access them through mobile devices.


Build Your Own Anywhere Worker ToolkitIf you’re seeking to create your own in-office experience outside of the office, cloud services tools can help. Collaboration and IT support tools feature a range of web-based services designed to help you bring your people—and their people, (i.e., clients, prospects, suppliers, etc.)—together. The following are recommended cloud products designed to enable a mobile work style:

• GoToAssist allows you to choose Remote Support, Monitoring, or both to provide support for people and machines.

• GoToMeeting with HD video conferencing makes it simple and cost-effective to collaborate online with colleagues and customers. Meeting participants can share their webcams in high definition, so you can enjoy more personal interactions, without a complicated setup. To learn more, visit www.GoToMeeting.com.

• GoToMyPC gives you and your staff the ability to access and work on your office Mac or PC from any web browser—including an iPad, iPhone, or Android tablet—enabling productivity from any location. Connect to work from home, the train, a hotel room, a café, or wherever else you and your people need to be.

• Podio helps you get work done with your co-workers and clients on a social work platform that you make your own. Work with any group of people inside a workspace and your entire company in your own employee network.

• ShareFile lets you securely share, sync, and store large files. You can send and receive files up to 10GB; all file transfer and storage is encrypted; and ShareFile offers easy-to-use account and mobile features.

Visit us at www.citrixonline.com to learn more about all the products and services Citrix offers to make your company—and its communications—more efficient.


About Inc. MagazineFounded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 710,106, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

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