Bosses without borders: Essential tools for managing remote workers

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made headlines in February when she banned telecommuting, as did Best Buy when it canceled its telework program shortly afterward. But according to the Families and Work Institute (PDF), remote working is on the rise: Last year 63 percent of companies reported giving employees workplace flexibility, up from 34 percent in 2005. And in a recent Gallup survey, 39 percent of employees said they spent some time working remotely. The research firm also found that remote workers put in more hours and are slightly more engaged than their office counterparts.

It’s all well and good for workers who can opt out of frazzling commutes or choose to crank out a bunch of work in their pajamas, but what about their boss? How can you know if telecommuters are working as much as they say they are, and how can you help them do their best work? Here are some of the best tools available to promote stellar communication with remote workers.

Forget about tedious status reports. This slick cloud platform works as a communications backbone for companies by prompting employees to spend 15 minutes a week writing about their successes, challenges, ideas, and morale in a report that takes a manager only 5 minutes to read. Managers decide the questions 15Five asks, such as “What’s going well in your role?” or “What challenges are you facing, and where do you need support?” With the click of a button, managers can include an employee comment in their own report. Whenever an executive responds to an idea or issue, both the manager and employee receive an email notification, so they can hop back onto 15Five to continue the conversation.

15Five prompts employees to spend 15 minutes writing a status update that will take their manager just 5 minutes to read.
Currently 15Five is off-limits if you use a free email provider, such as Gmail or Yahoo. The company plans to lift that restriction in an upcoming upgrade to the platform. Try it at no charge for four weeks; after the trial period, it costs $49 a month for the first ten people and $5 more for each additional person.

Though millions of people use Basecamp, that solid and popular project management platform no longer offers a free version. Instead, tiers start at $1 a day for managing up to 15 projects. If you’re managing a small business on a tight budget, try Asana, a free product you can use on the Web or on your mobile device.

Asana lets you sort tasks by project or team member.
Asana’s cloud platform (which resembles the three-paneled Web app that Evernote uses) gives you a wealth of information about a given project. On the left you can filter what will appear in the main, middle section by project or team member. Click a particular task there to get more details about it in the right pane—information such as due dates, people assigned to the project, and comments that team members have made about it. Asana lets you attach files from your computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox to any task. The company also nudges new users toward a demo video to make the process of getting started less difficult.

If your employees are coders, you might try Pivotal Tracker, a project management tool for software development teams. It starts at $7 a month for three collaborators and five projects.

For a two-person video call, Skype is easy and free. But if you want to Skype with up to ten people at once, someone in the group has to ante up for Skype Premium, which starts at $5 a month.

For that reason, I recommend using Google+ Hangouts, which is free for meetings of up to ten people. Though you have to have a Google+ account to use one, iOS and Mac users can also take part. In contrast, Apple’s FaceTime isn’t available on Android or Windows.

A Google Hangout, which is free for meetings of up to ten people, lets you share screenshots and pull in popular apps.
Google has baked some pretty cool features into Hangouts, such as Hangouts On Air, which lets you live-stream any Hangout to Google+, record it to your YouTube channel, or broadcast it to your website. You can also share screenshots, snap photos of the Hangout, and pull in apps like SlideShare and Cacoo to give presentations and enable drawing, respectively.

If you need to hold an online meeting with more than ten participants, you might try Zoom. For $10 a month (or no charge if you can keep your meeting to less than 40 minutes), it lets you include up to 25 participants. And like Google+ Hangouts, Zoom works on your mobile device. Unlike Hangouts, however, Zoom supports HD video and audio.

Intuit’s Online Payroll, which easily lets you export data to sister products QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online, is perfect for small businesses. For one thing, it gives you tons of assistance as you enter data during initial setup. This process can be complicated because you have to deal with so many variables, from your pay schedule to federal, state, and local taxes. Intuit’s setup wizard generates a to-do list that identifies required and recommended tasks, and its email reminders help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Intuit Online Payroll helps with everything from time tracking to taxes.
Intuit Online Payroll lets you access payroll information from a Web browser, smartphone, or tablet. It comes in three flavors. Basic, which starts at $25 per month, is strictly for paying people. Enhanced (starting at $35 per month) generates paychecks, automatically fills in W-2s and federal and state tax forms, and reminds you when payroll taxes are due. Full Service (starting at $99 per month) takes care of paying workers as well as filing and paying taxes. Under each plan, you must pay an extra $2 per month for every employee you pay. For an additional $3 per person per month, you can add a time-tracker module to the service: Employees can then clock in and out and complete their own timesheets, eliminating the need for double entry.

Expensify—offered by a San Francisco startup whose tagline is “Expense reports that don’t suck”—is an online tool and mobile app that greatly simplifies tracking expenses and creating and submitting expense reports. When installed on your employees’ mobile devices, the mobile app lets them record expenses on the fly, snap photos of receipts, use GPS to figure out how many miles they’re driving, and track how many hours they’re spending on a project. This is especially handy now that Expensify offers invoicing features.

Expensify’s mobile app lets employees record expenses on the fly.
Once back in the office, workers can access the Web app, which syncs with information entered on the mobile app. From there, they can use Expensify’s SmartScan technology to analyze photos of receipts and automatically fill in date and amount fields. If users import bank and credit card transactions, the platform will generate e-receipts for expenses that will pass muster with the IRS, so nobody has to keep files of paper receipts.

Expensify integrates with many popular products, including Evernote, FinancialForce, FreshBooks, Google Apps, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Salesforce. You’ll need a premium subscription to connect to some of these accounts.

The free version lets bosses accept, review, and approve the expense reports of two employees. Coverage of additional staffers costs $6 per person per month. Users can upload as many receipts as they want to Expensify. Free SmartScans are limited to ten per month, after which they cost 20 cents each.

Want more? If you need to track remote workers’ time on the job, give TransparentBusiness a whirl. It does things like take screenshots from an employee’s computer every few minutes. For phone-intensive businesses, ShoreTel Sky’s VoIP technology (priced at $35 to $50 per user per month) enables your people to transfer calls to each other even if they’re all working remotely—and it lets you see how much time they’re spending on the phone. Need to group-chat with a bunch of people at once? Try HipChat. Harvest is great for time-tracking, managing expenses, and invoicing, and it integrates into many project-management apps. FreshBooks is a good cloud-based accounting service that integrates with a plethora of other software platforms that your employees might already be using.

Honestly, the list could go on. There has never been a better time to embrace remote work, because fantastic, affordable tools abound that make keeping in touch with telecommuters dead simple.

Zhengzhou Journal: The Demanding Off-Hour Escapes of China’s High-Tech Workers

Fun Factory: Blowing Off Steam in China: After spending a shift on the factory floor, young workers in China’s manufacturing cities let loose.

 
ZHENGZHOU, China — The hottest nightclub in this factory town is a neon-encrusted dive down the road from the industrial park where iPhones are made 24 hours a day. Tucked behind an open construction site, “Through the Summer,” as the nightspot is known, had it all on a recent Saturday night — plastic whistles, fruit plates, a toddler with a mohawk, counterfeit light sabers and a bawdy comedian who imbibed beer through his nose. 

 Thousands of young Chinese come to the city of Zhengzhou to work in electronics factories. To escape the monotony of the assembly line, many take up roller skating as a hobby, like at the outdoor roller rink. More Photos »
Liang Yulong, 19, who tests iPhone motherboards at the Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park, arrived at the club with a single goal in mind: to obliterate his dreary daytime reality on the spring-loaded dance floor. “Dancing lets me vent my anger and stress,” he said, cigarette in hand. “When I’m here, I forget everything else.”

 
Here on the gritty outskirts of Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan Province, the nocturnal menagerie reveals a little-explored aspect of the global supply chain, the off-hour escapes that give the masses of workers the motivation to return to the assembly line.

 
The hands that make the world’s electronics belong almost entirely to young people with dreams of their own, and a lifetime of contented industrial drudgery is not among them. Their precious time off is a rare chance to enjoy the present as they strive for a better future.

 
“Everyone gets psyched for the weekend,” said Bai Sihai, 24, as he navigated open potholes on the way back to his dorm after work one afternoon. His plan? A video-game binge session at an Internet cafe followed by a long-distance phone call to his girlfriend.

 
The captains of industry are beginning to see the merits of off-hours leisure. In recent years, a wave of riots and suicides at China’s huge factories have drawn attention to working conditions. In April and May, two workers and a prospective employee jumped to their deaths from dormitories that cater to workers at the Zhengzhou plant, which is owned by Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant that produces electronics for Apple, Microsoft and other companies. Foxconn maintains that the suicides were unconnected to work at the factory. Also in May, a worker committed suicide at a Samsung plant in the southern province of Guangdong, where labor rights organizations had documented a string of violations like forced overtime and under-age workers.
The industry has responded with carrots and sticks to save both the lives of their workers and their own corporate reputations. Under pressure, Foxconn has raised wages and cut overtime hours. At the Shanghai plant run by Quanta, which makes hardware for companies including Apple, Toshiba and Asus, workers can pay for yoga and taekwondo classes.
After the latest suicides at the Zhengzhou plant, the company instituted “silent mode,” which banned all talk about nonwork tasks on the factory floor. Although Foxconn later announced it had rescinded the policy after a public outcry, workers say it remains in effect.
In the high-tech Olympus of Silicon Valley, employees in ergonomically luxuriant offices can get subsidized massages and haircuts, scale rock-climbing walls, play foosball, meditate and do Pilates — all in the name of promoting creative innovation.

 
The work environment is considerably more bare-bones here. Unlike Apple’s modernistic new campus in Cupertino, Calif., which will be surrounded by apricot trees, the Zhengzhou factory has all the charm of a penal colony. Employees, who must wear matching uniforms, say supervisors routinely curse and yell. In the residential compounds, rows of brick dormitories house up to eight workers in rooms filled with metal bunk beds, a combination shower-toilet, and not much else.

 
Perhaps that is why the world beyond the factory gates resembles a gigantic street fair. As dusk fell one night recently in Zhengzhou, Mandarin pop music blared from hair salons and couples strolled past stalls selling pirated DVDs, sliced watermelon and roses covered in silver glitter. A flatbed truck piled high with oversize stuffed animals drew a mob of young women like sharks to blood. “I want the green teddy bear,” cooed a teenage girl to her boyfriend, who dutifully handed over 10 renminbi, or $1.60.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 17, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article incorrectly described the electronics manufacturing district of Zhengzhou, China. The district is not nicknamed Apple City.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 18, 2013
An earlier version of this journal article referred incorrectly to three suicides at the Foxconn plant. Two were of Foxconn workers and one was of a prospective employee; not all three were employees. All jumped to their deaths from dormitories catering to Foxconn workers, not from the Foxconn plant. And two suicides occurred in April; they were not all in May. The earlier version also omitted Foxconn’s contention that the deaths had no connection to work at the plant.

More on MRSA on Farms and in Farm Workers, and the Arguments for and Against

In my last post I promised to catch up on some of the other research that has been published on the flow of MRSA (and other resistant organisms) between farm animals and farm workers as a result of farm antibiotic use.

Before I do that, though, I want to nod toward two other great pieces published on this. First, Mark Bittman examined this issue closely at the New York Times. And Clare Leschin-Hoar also covered the new research at Take Part. (Bonus: Don’t miss her dissection of the news that a National Geographic photographer was arrested in Kansas after taking pictures of a feedlot — from the air.)

Next, I promised I’d revisit the paper by Tara Smith and group on antibiotic-resistant bacteria on farms and in farm personnel. This research was published in May, but it has been a long time coming. Now that it is out, it is an important addition to the still-sparse literature on livestock MRSA and the influence of farm antibiotic use on antibiotic resistance. (If that idea is new to you, start here.)

As a reminder, Smith and her colleagues were the first to identify livestock MRSA, or MRSA ST398 for short, in pigs and pig-farm workers in the United States, after it had already been identified broadly in the European Union and also in Canada. That first study in 2009 was small and they wanted to do a larger one. Here from their abstract is what they looked for and found:

We collected nasal swabs from pigs and farm workers at 45 swine herds (21 antibiotic-free herds; 24 conventional herds) in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio. MRSA was isolated from 50 of 1085 pigs (4.6%) and 31 of 148 (20.9%) of farm workers. MRSA-positive pigs and people were clustered in four conventional swine farms in Iowa and Illinois. Based on genotyping, spa type t034, a common livestock associated variant, was predominant among both human and swine isolates. These results confirm the presence of LA-MRSA in pigs and swine farm workers in the USA, but the prevalence found is relatively low compared with European studies.

As I mentioned in my last post, that staph or MRSA would be found in farm workers is not unusual: roughly one-third of the population carries staph in their nostrils at any time, without experiencing an infection, and about 4 percent of the population carries MRSA, drug-resistant staph. The question has been, how common is MRSA ST398, a strain of drug-resistant staph that can be linked back to farm drug use by its specific resistance signature? The answer is important, not just because it reveals a specific potential human health risk, but also because it helps to fill in the still-disputed question of how much farm-drug use contributes to the increase in antibiotic resistance overall. The table to the right, from Smith’s paper, answers the question for the group of farm workers they took samples from: Out of 31 people in the group who carried some strain of MRSA, 21 were carrying the livestock strain.

Those workers were in Iowa and Illinois, and one was in Ohio; and the previous work Smith and colleagues did found livestock MRSA in Iowa as well. That makes North Carolina, discussed in my last post, the fourth state in which livestock MRSA has been found in farm workers. Livestock MRSA has now been found in pigs in those states, and Minnesota, South Dakota and Connecticut.

As I mentioned, livestock MRSA has a specific genetic signature — resistance to tetracycline — that has been interpreted to be the result of tetracycline use in swine-raising. (Tetracycline resistance is unusual in human MRSA because tetracycline isn’t commonly prescribed for the infection. When it appears, it may be because the gene for tetracycline resistance has traveled into the bacterium as part of a set of genes conferring resistance to several antibiotics at once.) There is an interesting discussion in Smith’s paper of whether on-farm antibiotic use is in fact responsible, or whether other factors are influencing the staph strains; but it is complex enough to leave for another post.

Meanwhile: that antibiotic use on farms causes the emergence of antibiotic resistance is supposed to be settled science at this point. On the basis of that assumption, governments in Europe have banned the use of certain drug types and formulas in farming, and for decades, researchers in the US have been pressing this government to do the same. (Unsuccessfully, so far — which is why Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York keeps introducing PAMTA, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.)

But a piece in the new BMJ captures that for many people, notably in agriculture and veterinary pharma, the question isn’t settled at all. The colloquy between physician David Wallinga and veterinarian David G.S. Burch, titled “Does adding routine antibiotics to animal feed pose a serious risk to human health?” does a great job of capturing how far apart the two sides remain. The colloquy is open access and I urge you to read it. Quick excerpts that capture the two authors’ points of view:

Wallinga: “Routine antibiotics are not necessary for animal health. Pasture based production was the norm before antibiotics. Industrial style meat production, in which animals are confined in close quarters and fattened on soy and maize based feeds, also is possible without routine antibiotics… Almost every European and North American public health authority agrees: routine antibiotic use in animal food production likely worsens the epidemic of resistance.”
Burch: “Given that the critical antimicrobials in human medicine are not used in animal feed, that regulatory authorities conduct thorough assessments of the risk of resistance from use of antimicrobial substances, and that the environmental effect and the effects of residues in edible tissues are also assessed, it is highly unlikely that adding antibiotics to feed poses a serious risk to humans, especially compared with the extensive use of antibiotics directly in humans.”

Bangladesh Collapse: The Garment Workers Who Survived

The gap between the buildings is where the Rana Plaza stood until a few months ago. More than 1,000 people were killed when the building collapsed April 24. It was the worst disaster in the garment industry's history.

It's been 2 1/2 months since the Rana Plaza collapsed on garment workers in Bangladesh, exposing abysmal safety conditions in the country's factories.

On a recent trip to Bangladesh, I sought out the survivors of what was the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry. An overwhelming number are women many in their early 20s.

A visit to one of the hospitals provided a glimpse into the sort of injuries they sustained while sandwiched between floors as Rana Plaza buckled: giant metal screws protrude from arms and legs literally holding limbs together.

Rebecca Khatun, a worker at Rana Plaza, lies in a hospital bed. She lost her left leg and right foot in the collapse, which also killed five members of her family. Khatun received $120 and free medical care for her loss â?? compensation she says won't be enough for what she's been through.

Rebecca Khatun wasn't so lucky. The petite 22-year-old, her raven-hair plaited in a thick braid, is splayed across a hospital bed in a ward lined with rows of victims. Mosquito netting covers her amputated leg. A stump bandaged just below her hip is all that remains. Cockroaches swarm the railing of her metal bed, just one more indignity in the calamity that has claimed five members of her family.

"My mother, grandmother and two cousins were all working inside the factory that day. But there is no trace of them. How can that be," she asks incredulously.

Only the body parts of a fifth relative were found.

"I lost my left leg and right foot," she says, gently weeping. "But it's even more painful that my mother is lost from my life."

The mother-daughter team worked side-by-side at the Ether Tex garment factory operating on the fifth floor. Her mother came to her and said, "let's have breakfast and then start working." Khatun was already sewing and told her, "You go and I'll catch up." It was the last time they spoke.

On the morning of the collapse, Khatun says, "We didn't want to enter the building because of the huge cracks" detected the day before. "But the manager told us unless you go in, you won't get paid and you'll lose your job. So, we entered, but I vowed then that I would collect that month's salary and quit."

She lay crushed beneath a beam all day and all night until rescuers discovered her the next day.

Khatun received $120 in compensation and free medical care. She's awaiting an additional 1 million taka — or $12,000 — that the government promised for the grievously injured. It's a considerable amount in one of the poorest countries in Asia, but Khatun's doleful eyes flash with anger as she considers the sum.

"Seven members of my family worked there. Just two of us are alive. I've lost my limbs," she says. "How can $12,000 ever be enough?"

In a bed nearby, 23-year-old Rojina Akter's right leg weeps with wounds. She recalls on the morning of the disaster that the power failed.

"As soon as the power generators switched on, the building collapsed," Akter says.

It's believed that vibrations from the huge rooftop generators contributed to the chain of events.

Rojina Akter was also hurt in the collapse. The 23-year-old earned $65 a month as a sewer's assistant. "We are poor," she says. "We work to live." She says the government should have overseen the construction of the building.
Julie McCarthy/NPR Rojina Akter was also hurt in the collapse. The 23-year-old earned $65 a month as a sewer's assistant. "We are poor," she says. "We work to live." She says the government should have overseen the construction of the building.

Akter says she was one of 16 workers who were trapped in a tiny space as beams began falling all around them. A male colleague found a hole in the rubble, and "we made a rope tying their scarves together ... I was numb with pain, but I cried out with joy after seeing the sky. I thanked Allah. I was so thankful to be alive."

Akter earned $65 a month as a sewer's assistant; the minimum wage for Bangladesh's garment workers is $37 a month.

"We are poor. We work to live," she says. "We entered the factory because we needed to be paid. But the government should have overseen the construction of Rana Plaza: It was built on marshy land."

And, she says, the top three floors were added illegally.

The titans of the garment industry like to brag that the factories have liberated women in the conservative culture of Bangladesh by getting them out of the house to earn money.

Workers' rights activists look to Western retailers and consumers to use their economic leverage to press for greater wages and safer working conditions for Bangladesh's 4 million garment workers. Some 70 retailers, mostly European, signed an agreement this week to conduct independent inspections of factories and to finance fire and safety upgrades.

U.S. retailers such as Gap and Walmart refused to sign on. Walmart corporate affairs told NPR in an email that the company will unveil its own "broader safety plan with an alliance of brands and retailers" and that Walmart "is paying for in-depth safety audits" at "every factory directly producing products" for it. But Walmart would not say whether the audits were independent or whether the plan is binding.

Khatun, who lost her leg and members of her family, says if there had been a union at Rana Plaza "this accident would not have happened because we would have had a stronger voice" to bargain with the managers and the factory owners.

Only a tiny fraction of the country's 5,000 garment factories have unions.

Akter is more skeptical about unions, and says frequently the union leaders are co-opted by the owners who single them out for a raise so "they cease their protests." Nor does she think that raising the cost of clothes for Western consumers will help the workers.

"Even if the consumers pay double," she says "the factory owners will not pass along that increase to us."

As Akter talks, her mother dabs medicine on her daughter's wounded leg. The 23-year-old is not only traumatized physically but mentally, as well. She suffers nightmares that the hospital is caving in. But the disaster has not diminished her dreams.

"I'm planning to buy a plot of land to farm with the money I received from generous donors," she says. "One man gave me a sewing machine and told me, 'Get well and don't ever go back to a factory.'

"I won't," she says.

But Akter is anxious to get back home to her simple corrugated tin shed where, at least, she says, "it's safe."

Bits: Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young)

Peter Dasilva/European Pressphoto Agency An employee at Box, an online data storage company founded in 2005. Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, according to Payscale.
It’s well known that technology is a young man’s game. Still, it is surprising to see just how young (and how male).

PayScale, a company based in Seattle, has determined that the median age of workers at many of the most successful companies in the technology industry, along with information on gender and years of experience.

Just six of the 32 companies it looked at had a median age greater than 35 years old. Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger. Women were generally less than 30 percent of the work force, and in fields like semiconductors, represented much less than that.

While the results may affirm a widely held hunch, they are nonetheless striking: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett – Packard, came in at 41 years.

The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).

The seven companies with the youngest workers, ranked from youngest to highest in median age, were Epic Games (26); Facebook (28); Zynga (28); Google (29); and AOL, Blizzard Entertainment, InfoSys, and Monster.com (all 30). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only shoe stores and restaurants have workers with a median age less than 30.

Median age means that an equal number of workers are above and below the figure. In large populations, the number is considered representative. PayScale, which surveys many industries, says it covers 3 percent of the American work force, an amount that could yield meaningful results. In this survey, some 21,700 company employees submitted information.

Not surprisingly, the companies with older workers tend to be older companies, because some people still stay with one employer for many years, and over time a company may accumulate more of these people. Cisco Systems has a median worker age of 35, and both Samsung and Microsoft come in at 34. These companies also tend to have workers with a lot more experience.

Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, which is partly an effect of being new and hiring intensively in recent years. Facebook’s median worker has been with the company just 1.1 years, while Intel, I.B.M., Oracle and others come in around six years.

Other factors are also in play, however. “The firms that are growing or innovating around new areas tend to have younger workers,” said Katie Bardaro, the lead economist at PayScale. “Older companies that aren’t changing with the times get older workers.”

One reason for this, she said, was a function of skills. “Baby Boomers and Gen Xers tend to know C# and SQL,” she said. C# is a software language, while SQL is a database technology. She added, “Gen Y knows Python, social media, and Hadoop,” which are newer versions of those things.

Amazon.com, notably, has a median stay with the company of just one year, a figure Ms. Bardaro ascribed to the intense pace of work there. (The study did not include workers in Amazon’s warehouses, where skills and turnover are different.) “We’re based in Seattle, and know a lot of people at Amazon,” she said. “The consensus is that you are run through a gamut there, make money, burn out and leave.”

The survey was derived from information PayScale gets from individuals who come to PayScale seeking employment information, and volunteer their data to share information from others. PayScale, which works with LinkedIn, sells its data to human resources departments. Ms. Bardaro said her company had also backed up the information with third-party data, to confirm the numbers.

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