Top news this week:
Member discussion: Telecommuting bad for career?
Members continue to react to Jack & Suzy Welch’s column where they said that “Telecommuting could be a total disaster, especially if you want to climb the corporate ladder.”

Other news stories:

• Autodesk design survey

• 3D virtual meetings
• Bay Area highway meltdown
• Is the “office bus” the next big thing?
• Summer symposium plans
  
  Link to Members Site: 

  NetWORK News May 4, 2007

Community buzzes about telecommuting career issue
Last week, we posted an item from Jack and Suzy Welch’s column, The Welch Way. In it, they said that, “Telecommuting could be a total disaster, especially if you want to climb the corporate ladder.” That comment stirred David Rush and Eric Richert to post their commentary. Excerpts:

David: “Their perspective seems to reflect that of the ‘Traditionalists’ who are typically cynical about non-traditional ways of working. They have a black / white understanding of the workplace, which is to say, they still think it's a physical place, and that if you're not there, you're not really ‘hard at work’.”
Link to Members Site: 
NetWORK News April 26, 2007

Yet another article saying that telecommuting is bad for your career: Working remotely may be ideal for your lifestyle but you can't phone in real leadership, say columnist-couple Jack and Suzy Welch in their BusinessWeek column, The Welch Way. “Companies rarely promote people into leadership roles who haven't been consistently seen and measured,” they say. Telecommuting sends a different message – it says that “you value lifestyle flexibility over career growth.”
What do you think? Are the Welchs right?

Help wanted: Members helping members

Question: Distributive Work Financial Measurements
Haworth's Chris Kearns asked us to post a request to the New WOW network regarding how our members are seeing organizations track financial measures? What are the financial factors/elements that corporations are evaluating the $$ success of their initiatives?? My client is looking to find out how other people are tracking financial indicators and success for distributive work (hotelling, reservable space, etc..). Primarily from the facility performance aspect.

NewWOW benchmarking project: Let's get going
Anyone interested in working as a smaller group on the benchmarking project? So far, Glenn, Eric, Joanne, and Jyrki have commented on this discussion. Please let Joe Ouye know if you are interested and he will set up a teleconference meeting to get started. Joe’s email address is joe.ouye@sbcglobal.net.
To learn more about this topic, see:
http://www.newwow.net/members/node/330#comment-206. You might also want to take a look at the Office density ratios post. You’ll find it at
http://www.newwow.net/members/node/333#comment-210

Member question: Market rates for time utilization studies?
Haworth’s Jay Brand asks: “Often one brick in the foundational rationale for introducing/developing a distributed work model involves time utilization studies of existing corporate office space. In the experience of NewWOW members and participants, what are typical ranges for the cost of conducting a time utilization study of the existing CRE (corporate real estate) portfolio? Obviously, this would be scaled to correspond with how many spaces, etc. I'm most interested in the typical cost of assessing one corporate office location. Thanks for any help or advice!”

Check out the latest on the New Ways of Working site:

TV news show on the new workplace
Jonathan Spira from Basex invites our members to visit The New Workplace - The Way We Work Lab at the Penn Club in New York City on April 16. A camera crew from the ABC news magazine 20/20 will be taping a show about the new workplace.