Monday, March 14, 2011

How Telecommuting Lets Workers Mobilize for Sustainability | Reuters

For U.S. businesses, making the transition to go mobile represents a triple win: It provides workplace flexibility for employees to telecommute or adapt other forms of telework, improves productivity while reducing costs, including reducing the amount of office space needed, and contributes significant environmental benefits in the form of reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions.

While I don’t think the main reason companies should implement workplace strategies and technologies is so employees can work from home (I think the main reason is to support distributed teams), some studies and surveys around telecommuting (another common name for work-from-home) have come out recently.

• in a 2008 survey of 1400 CFOs, one-third said telework arrangements are the best recruiting inducement, while half said it was the second-best (after salary)
• since transportation represents about 26% of (Green House Gas) GHG emissions worldwide, telecommuting is the biggest way to achieve significant reductions in GHG, with a relatively small investment in technology and infrastructure

We are seeing lots of surveys telling us that telecommuting is not only one of the strongest recruiting tools, it’s also one of the biggest retention incentives. These are both good news in these tought economic times for cash-strapped companies, as well as now that recruiting is becoming a little harder again.

Of course, if a company invests in technology and infrastructure to enable its employees to work well together, and to work from everywhere, then these same investments already include what most people need to telecommute.

So why not take advantage of these investments you’ve already made, and use them to offer telecommuting as both recruitment and retention incentives?

Posted via email from dianaf's posterous

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Completely Redesigned Evernote for iPhone and iPod Touch « Evernote Blogcast

If you are a mobile worker, use multiple devices (including a smartphone), and are a compulsive notetaker like me, then you should be using Evernote. It automatically syncs with all of your Evernote instances (I use the Mac, iPhone, and web versions; although they have versions for most other platforms), all by itself, with no prompting from you. All of your notes are always with you!

This new iPhone version makes it much easier to add a new note, including incorporating snapshots. This makes it faster to write your notes and include pictures of the speaker and presentation. I use this feature all the time, and the new version really speeds it up for me.

It's also much faster and easier to find your existing notes using tags. This is a huge improvement over the previous version, and best of all, it's free.

Posted via email from dianaf's posterous