Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

The Case for Telecommuting

Generally speaking, the business world is moving toward offering workers greater flexibility and embracing remote work. There are a number of reasons why.

The ban on allowing Yahoo employees to work from home has garnered a lot of attention, most of it negative. For many individuals who have had the experience of working from home, and for many businesses that have made more flexible options available to workers, the move looks like a big step back. When a large-scale tech company in an industry that values being on the cutting edge moves in the opposite direction of progress, people will definitely have loud opinions on the subject.

Marissa Mayer isn’t the only person who associates working from home with lower productivity, but for many it’s a snap judgement based on bias rather than evidence.

Telecommuting has a wide variety of benefits that make it a good tool for attracting talent, keeping workers happy, and, often, getting better work out of people. Here’s why:

1. It shows you trust the people working for you.

When you send the signal in a workplace environment that you don’t feel the people working for you can be trusted to do their jobs without supervision and micromanagement, you’re insulting them. In many cases, people will behave the way they’re expected to. If a business doesn’t show respect and trust to its workers, there’s a good chance they’ll care less about the work they do.

2. It’s good for the environment.

This pretty well speaks for itself. The less people driving long distances or sitting in traffic every day, the better for all of us.

3. Time saved increases productivity.

Someone who saves, say, half an hour each day or more by skipping the commute is able to choose a more productive way to spend that time. Whether that means getting started on work earlier, or doing some exercise (which will help improve energy levels), the result is likely to be an improvement for both the business and the individual.

4. It’s just as easy to procrastinate in an office as it is at home.

The distractions may differ, but they’re still there. Whether it’s chatting with co-workers, attending to the needs of family, or browsing the web, there will always be something to distract from a full 8-hour day of work. The fact is, where you’re located has little to do with how likely you are to procrastinate.

5. Spending more hours “working” in an office isn’t necessarily more productive.

There’s clear evidence that longer workweeks don’t mean more work gets done – they just leave people more tired. If part of the concern about allowing people to work from home is that they’ll spend less time doing work, who cares? If an individual’s productivity drops, talk to that individual to figure out the cause. It’s lazy to blame it on a system that works well for many.

6. You can choose the best talent.

If you’re open to hiring people regardless of where they live, you can pick the best of the best. If you’re only open to working with people within driving distance of your offices, or willing to move for the position, you lose out on a lot of good potential candidates.

7. It’s easier to take less sick and vacation days.

It’s a lot easier to get a little work in when you’re not feeling well, in between naps and bowls of soup, if you’re able to sit a computer on your lap in bed. It’s also easier to make trips to spend needed time with out-of-town friends and family without leaving all of your work behind. The lines between work time and personal time blur a bit when you have more choice in which is which. For some, that wouldn’t be seen as a benefit, but it makes it easier to work during the times you know you’re most productive, and take off the times you’re not, which equals greater efficiency overall.

8. The technology’s available to make communication as easy as it needs to be.

Skype is free. Google + Hangouts are free. It’s easy to check email and take phone calls anywhere you need to. A lack of communication is no longer the excuse it once was, there are businesses that are 100% virtual with no problem.

9. When you treat people like responsible adults, they tend to act like it.

If you give people reasons to care about their job, they’ll be inclined to do it well. Somebody who works best from home and appreciates the added benefits it affords has a good incentive to do good work in order to keep up the lifestyle they enjoy. Someone who’s unhappy in their job, or stressed out by a lack of work-life balance, isn’t likely to put in the same level of effort.

Working from home isn’t for everybody, but allowing it as an option for those it does work well for can benefit all involved.

Google + and the “End of Search”

Who likes hyperbole! Well, people who like provocative headlines, for one. Wired has a current article on “The End of Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It.” The gist of the article is that the way we interact with the internet is changing, moving away from static pages and individual searches, and more towards streams of steady information. The author calls this the “lifestream.”

“This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines…All the information on the internet will soon be a time-based structure”

You may or may not find the article’s argument convincing, but it does seem to tie in to an issue I’ve been hearing and thinking about quite a bit about recently – the recent rise of Google +.

When Google + first surfaced, it seemed primarily designed to compete with Facebook. It aroused plenty of curiosity and a good number of people gave it a try, but when it came down to it, it couldn’t compete with the main thing Facebook had going for it as a social media platform: people. Everyone was already there, and failed to feel a mass compulsion to switch it out for something new.

Now Google + is embracing a new identity. By linking Google + usage with your authority in terms of how Google determines ranking, Google + is quickly becoming a content distribution platform, with a strong influence on SEO. Or, another way of seeing it, via Copyblogger:

“Google+ is less social media platform and more backplane social layer that transformed all Google products into features of Google+.”

In other words, Google is aiming to leverage Google + into the frame through which all our internet activity is experienced. Potentially moving people away from the traditional search experience, and into a more customized version of the web – perhaps in a way that resembles the “lifestreams” described above.

Who knows if internet usage will move in this direction as predicted, but it’s inevitable that time, the evolution of technology, and people’s ideas of how technology can be used mean our relationship to the internet is bound to change. It’s important that businesses and marketers keep an eye on those changes as they occur and adapt marketing efforts to accommodate consumer behavior.

Content Marketing in 2013

That content marketing is a growing force is no surprise to anyone who follows trends in marketing. Blog posts and articles citing the benefits quality content has on branding, SEO and customer loyalty abound.

Nonetheless, it’s nice to be able to match some numbers to all the talk. Business Bolts performed a survey of 265 individuals, a mix of small business owners and marketing professionals, in order to gain a sense of how businesses are approaching content marketing in 2013.

You can find the full report on their findings here.

Most of the results aren’t especially surprising, but serve to back up arguments copywriters, marketers and SEO professionals have been making for some time:
content marketing trends

  • Content marketing is good for SEO

77% of respondents said content marketing helped increase web traffic, and 71% said it helped them achieve higher rankings

  • Content marketing is good for ROI

Although there are challenges in many cases to tracking the relationship between content marketing and sales, 59% said they believed that content marketing helped them up their sales numbers.

  • Content marketing strengthens brand awareness

70% reported this benefit, another that’s hard to track, but crucial for small business success.

The good news for freelance writers and content developers: many respondents expressed a desire to find good content producers.

The bad news: few have made content production a high budget item. Most (61%) reported still doing the majority of their content development in house, but of those that worked with freelancers the amount they’re paying is piddling. 14% spend less than $15 for 1,000 words, and 17% spend between $16 and $25.

It’s clear that businesses have a growing awareness of the benefit good content provides. Hopefully, their willingness to value those helping them reap that benefit will increase in time as well.

How to be a lifelong student – and profit from it

I loved being a student. During the years that my primary job was to study and learn new things, I thrived. While a life in academia may have suited me just fine, the debt I finished off my undergrad with, and the level of competition for academic jobs, steered me towards a search for other professional options.

It took me a little while, but I finally landed on a way to translate the experience of being a student into a profitable career outside of academia. Much of being a good student boils down to the responsibility to learn, and to successfully communicate what you’ve learned to others. Working as a freelance writer drops that same experience into a new context.

It turns out, there are varied opportunities where by researching and effectively communicating knowledge to a wide audience online (and occasionally in print) is of value. I graduated amidst a slew of articles about the end of journalism and a growing skepticism at the possibility of making a career as a writer. While many magazines and newspapers have managed to stay around in spite of the apocalyptic predictions, they’re just a tiny portion of the work opportunities available to writers.

Businesses have always needed content, but it’s becoming a more important line item in their budgets than ever. With the dominance that search engines – or really just the one, Google –  practice over how people consume and make decisions, businesses must do what it takes to curry favor with the mysterious Google gods (e.g. the increasingly complicated algorithm that determines rankings). Google favors websites with quality content, and writers gain a more crucial position in the success of businesses.

While freelance writing differs from academic pursuits in that I can’t pick something specific I’m passionate about to focus my learning efforts on, it nudges me out of my comfort zone and requires that I delve into new subjects. Every new project or client comes with new knowledge. As a professional student of such a wide variety of subjects, my understanding of the world gets broader all the time.

Want to be a Better Writer and Thinker? Learn Another Language


Learning another language is hard. For native English speakers living in a world full of people making an effort to learn English, it can seem like a waste of effort. Counterintuitively, the comfortable position of speaking the world’s dominant language puts English speakers at a disadvantage too few realize. Because we don’t bother trying to learn new languages, we lose the fringe benefits that come with the process.

A recent post on the Radiolab blog takes a look at just what some of those fringe benefits are.

Dr. Ellen Bialystock studies the cognitive effects of learning a second language, specifically during childhood. Her findings:

 Look, I will never say that bilingual kids are smarter…What we can say is that some of the cognitive processes that are part of intelligence are more developed in bilinguals.

On the neurological side of things, there’s actual, literal growth in the part of the brain devoted to vocabulary.

In practical, applicable terms:

  • Learning new, different ways to say things opens up the mind to different ways of thinking. It might not change what thoughts you’re able to have (as was formerly thought), but it does give you different ways of approaching and expressing those thoughts. For those in the business of communicating effectively, it lets you practice and play with methods of wording and structure you may not have considered before.
  • A friend of mine who was raised bilingual once told me she argued with an elementary school teacher who insisted there was one right answer to a question: in her world, every question had at least two viable, correct answers. Bilingualism makes it possible to better process ideas that don’t fit easily together, a valuable thinking tool in a complicated world.
  • Bialystock’s studies show the bilingual are better at tuning out distractions, an increasingly handy skill in the internet age.
  • Her research also suggests bilingualism could help with memory in old age — diminishing the effects of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
  • Most people who have studied a second language at the most basic level are quick to comment that it forces you to learn the grammar of your own language better. In order to learn different tenses and parts of speech, you must gain a refresher in how to talk about grammar, something many of us have forgotten by adulthood, if we ever learned it well at all.

Bialystock’s research mostly focuses on bilingual children, and most of us missed the boat on learning another language as a child, when it’s much easier to gain fluency. Many of the neurological benefits do require fluency to begin taking effect, a state that’s extremely challenging to get to as an adult.

While only so many adults are capable and willing to take on the challenge of linguistic immersion often required to gain fluency, there’s still plenty to be gained by learning what you can. Learning another language tends to go along with learning about another culture as well. Even without reaching fluency, you’ll gain new words, new ideas about grammar, and a greater understanding of the ways other people think and live. It’s hard not to see how that will make you both a stronger writer, and a better thinker.