JWare's blog

ur good friend Paula Bartholome just forwarded me a note with a link to the eOffice blog - eOffice appears to be a UK-based Third Places provider.

The blog itself looks very worthwhile, and it's more evidence that this whole third place phenomenon continues to grow exponentially. The blog also includes an interesting video clip from YouTube (in the post "Getting Maximum Impact from Your Office Space").

And I'm going to go boldly where I've never gone before and attempt to embed that video right here:

Diane Coles, our good friend and client at SCAN Health, alerted me to a recent posting at CareerBuilder.com that lists a number of companies - new and old - that have been aggressively promoting work-at-home programs - "teleworking," to use the most common term.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a recluse, and not ready to become an "Island, entire unto myself" (to quote John Dunne).

But I'm getting more than a little overwhelmed by all these different social networking websites - LinkedIn, PlaxoPulse, Facebook, and there must be a couple of others that I've been somehow dragged into joining (though the fact that I can't remember what they are says something about how (un)important they are to my life and work).

was very pleased to be quoted in a recent short piece in Kiplinger Reports about the growth of telecommuting (Dress for Success - In Your Pajamas, Kiplinger Reports, October, 2008)

Senior Associate Editor Ann Kates Smith called me a few weeks to ask for my perspectives on work-at-home programs. Here's what she ended up including in the article:

James Ware, a consultant with The Work Design Collaborative who counsels companies on telecommuting, predicts that five years from now some 40 million workers will telecommute at least part-time, up from between 20 million and 24 million now. "The combination of gas prices and climate-change issues is going to push a lot of people in that direction," he says.

Managing Telecommuters - Chapter 573.2 - "How do you manage people you can't see?" - that's probably the number one question we get asked whenever we discuss the financial, environmental, business continuity, and social benefits of telecommuting (or, as we prefer to call it, flexible/mobile work).... And it probably won't go away anytime soon. It's a legitimate question, even though we believe the answers are reasonably well-known and not all that profound.