The Workplace Blog

The latest BusinessWeek has a story on mobile workers and how their ranks are swelling. The article talks about Richard Florida’s book, “The Rise of the Creative Class” in which Florida explains that the future of work belongs to those who will log their hours when they want, how they want, and, most important, where they want. According to him, companies will hire brains, not bodies.

Not surprisingly, technology companies are at the forefront of the mobile worker revolution. 50% of Sun Microsystem’s workforce is mobile, 70% of Agilent’s workforce connects remotely at least part of the time and 40% of IBM’s workforce has no office at the company. These companies see employee productivity improve once they allow employees to work from home. At the heart of this revolution are the technologies that enable employees to communicate, collaborate and monitor each other’s performance remotely.

A new study finds that more than half of all corporate e-mail is not work related. 23% of all messages in a corporate email boxes are personal while 33% are spam. Imagine if 23% of all phone calls at work were of a personal nature. How would organizations deal with that?

Communication technologies have fundamentally changed the workplace but while looking at statistics like these it is important to remember that employees probably do a lot more after hours work at home as well.