You know the scene …

You: Boss – I could really use a work-from-home day next friday, we’ve got some builders coming round. I don’t want them knocking the wrong wall down, so I want to meet them.


Boss: (looks furtively at a spreadsheet that has lines and numbers but no information of any use). Huh?


You: Work from home – next Friday – me!


Boss: Oh that. It’s too difficult. IT have said no.


You: They did say no, that’s true, but then I showed them this Yuuguu thing, remember? Last team meeting? Just works across our firewall out of the box?


Boss: Hmmm, Oh. Yeah. It did, didn’t it. But … errr … it’s too expensive.


You: Unlike your two iPads I see you’ve got there. Anyway … the free trial I talked about?… and did you actually check that pricing page I sent you?


Boss: Oh .. that … ah. Yes. Well. I … well it’s just not that simple, you wouldn’t understand.


You: ( ! )


Boss: I .. errr … The Company … errr …. ‘we’ need to make sure that we could contact you, you know, if anything errr, anything err comes up, unexpectedly.


You: Tada!

---

And you pull out this handy Cut out and Keep Desk Sign we are giving you AT NO COST!


Simply:

• Download this cut out and keep desk sign PDF
• Print out an A4 paper
• Fill in the blanks
• Fold along the dotted lines
• Affix using a dash of sticky tape

And leave on your desk, where everyone can see it. The perfect marriage of low tech and high. The perfect compromise between remote work and availability.

At last – the final barrier to remote work at your office removed.

Until next week, At your service pulling down tiresome arguments against remote work -

Al

It has come to the attention of Yuuguu Central that the Future of Work is even brighter than we first thought.

Yes, it’s greener. Yes, it’s cheaper. Yes it’s more flexible. This much we know. But the real scoop?

Lunch.

We identified lunch as a ‘High Level Hazard’ for the office bound employee. It’s a jungle out there. There are the social norms – who sits with who? Who dares break rank from the pecking order of the canteen queue? The IT security issues: Did you really remember to lock your PC? Or will you spend this afternoon apologising for all the fake emails sent from ‘you’ by the IT interns? And there are even moral dilemmas thrown into the mix. Do you endure the hard road of sticking to your diet and exercise regime? Or succumb to the comforting easy pleasure of the pub lunch (again)?

Our Risk Analysis Spreadsheet never looked so grim.

Or so we thought. Until we looked at the upside. And like most upsides, we found it by simply looking at the greatest hazard through creative eyes.

The most difficult water that the hungry office worker has to navigate is choosing what to eat. A simple thing? By no means. Dare you eat what you like – but risk breaking the binding social contract of Maximum Permitted Office Stench? Or do you simply follow the herd – play safe, and become consigned to a life of sweetcorn and mayo salad (no onions)?

We realised immediately that we had a Future of Work winner on our hands. There is pure joy in being freed from office politics to be able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want it. So for your delight and delectation:

Team Yuuguu’s Top Five Remote Worker Lunches

• 1. Curry
  
  Oh yes. A long time favourite of Team Yuuguu, something like a Chicken Pathia is sure to fire up the imagination in the afternoon. And possibly other areas. As a remote worker, the office-clearing properties of the garlic and chilli laden curry need only concern yourself. Result!
• 2. Beetroot
  
  Our very own CTO Chris suggested Beetroot; that innocuous looking vegetable, with juice capable of rendering any office white shirt into something resembling the latest Saw movie. And yet all is well in the land of the remote worker. Your own, personal washroom facility and change of clothes is but a moment away.

And yes, we did ask: Beetroot? What – raw? The man must be an animal! Chris declined to expound further …

• 3. Raw Onions
  
  Ah yes. Perhaps mild onions may be the edgiest thing you may dare to ask for on your salad whilst office-bound. Experience true freedom all the way up the onion scale! From freshly chopped strong onions all the way up to that slightly nauseous feeling found only on coaches on hot days where everyone took beef paste and onion sandwiches for lunch.

• 4. Garlic German Sausage
  
  ‘Ist keine problem’ for the teleworker.
  
  

• 5. Yesterday’s Blue Cheese and Tuna salad
  
  Blue cheese and tuna can leave an aroma that can test even the brave. Yet, prepared in the right hands, it can be a delight to eat (you probably want @phillColeman, and not @almellor on that job). We’re not quite sure if Mike’s suggestion of “yesterday’s” salad was borne from personal experience or not. But just when we thought we had covered all the benefits of remote work, in crashes another winner: You don’t even need to clean the kitchen if you don’t want to!

And as a bonus, perhaps the most intriguing suggestion:

6. Naked Lunch Friday

One of our staff, who shall remain nameless (@phillcoleman, whoops, slipped out, my backspace key seems to be broken…) suggested this gem. We’re not sure what’s more worrying, really. The sight of Phill eating his curry in one of his normal football shirts … or this. But either way, as a remote worker, even this ultimate option is available to you.

Do switch your video conferencing off, first, though.

Til next time –
Happy Unregulated Eating!

Al

Have you ever felt that work was driving you up the wall? Well, it did for us the other day. Literally!

Together with the team from PowWowNow we ventured to a bouldering place at London Bridge. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you see it) yours truly had a compact camera about his person that could take the odd video clip. So, for your delight and delectation:

Free business advice: Trust that foot!

And here’s some great and free life/work advice I picked up that day from our trainer: ‘trust that foot’.

There was a very specific moment when I needed to put all my weight on my right foot without having quite enough handgrips to keep me on the wall. It felt simply like I would fall off. I made a few half-hearted attempts to keep hold of the grips I had, and was never really able to move. But there was a small handhold a bit higher. The trick was to simply go for it. Put all your weight on that foot, push yourself up with it, and simply balance during the movement. The next handhold would become in reach before you fell off: ‘Trust that foot’.

It felt great to achieve that little thing. It struck me at the time though just how powerful both fear and encouragement actually are. Just those few words helped me override what my sensible – fearful – mind was saying, and do something that seemed impossible.

It never was. It just needed me to trust that foot.

Amazing what you can do when you will take a risk.

Have fun til next week -
Al ‘Man of Adventure’ Mellor

According to Britain’s Hot Talent 2010 (check page 84. That will be us)

As the tears artificially well up in my eyes, and I finish thanking my producer, writer, director and mom, it’s nice to note that whilst awards and nominations are feelgood-fun, our business is about you; our dear user.

Like all tools, Yuuguu doesn’t actually do anything in and of itself. It’s some computers on the internet, some clever software for Mac, PC and Linux, and a whole bunch of ones and zeros flying across airwaves and copper.

Except that it isn’t. That picture changes completely when we add you.


Yuuguu helps you book your dream holiday – with confidence.

Yuuguu gets your architect talking to the site foreman, improving your new-build dream home.

Yuuguu gets you help from experts in your field around the globe when you are stuck.

Yuuguu helps you get your new business idea off the ground with low cost, personal sales.

Yuuguu lets your training expertise be heard worldwide. As it should be.

Yuuguu involves your clients in your design, so that they love what you deliver.


So while it’s nice Friday news to be recognised as a company of ‘Hot Talent’, I think the award belongs to you.

Take a bow.

Till next week – have a good one
Al

New look website

We have a lot of sympathy for the Chilean miners, who were so wonderfully rescued unharmed this week. It must feel utterly amazing to see light again, walk free again, smell fresh air again. One of those things that, plainly, if you weren’t there, you don’t know.

Our far lesser experience here at Yuuguu in the comparatively sunny suburbs of Manchester, UK has also resulted in something emerging: a brand new look and feel for both the Yuuguu website and the Yuuguu Desktop Client. We’re pretty pleased with it. And it does feel like being released from being trapped in a coding-monkey-mineshaft for a good long while.

It’s not all just pretty new graphics, though. We’ve simplified the way you get started using Yuuguu. You now create your account from the Yuuguu website, rather than the desktop client. It’s a subtle change, but it feels better. More people expect to sign up on websites these days, a tribute to how interactive the web has become. Once you download the desktop client, you can now get started straight away with it, as you already have your account.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to explain what it’s all about a bit more clearly. Yuuguu is about web conferencing and collaboration. And we’ve created a snappy little video to show what you see when you use it.

New look Desktop App

Well, be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

We’ve got a whole series of improvements to the desktop app planned, of which this is the first. After listening ( on twitter, and getsatisfaction ) to customers wanting a ‘less clunky’ and more appealing looking interface, we set to work.

Again, the change is a little bit more than just nicer graphics and new colours. Whilst at this point we have only made some minor tweaks to the workflow, we think you’ll like them. One change we have made is to drop the ‘Web Share’ wording completely. Nobody understood it – whereas everyone seems to get ‘web conferencing’. We’ve made that function easier by simply calling the button ‘Start’.

A nice workflow change I think is the tabs for Recent Chats rather than the old style ‘push-down panel’. The tab is at the bottom of the view. This just seems more obvious, and a bit cleaner visually in how it works. It also frees up vertical space.

Currently, the new client is only available to those creating new accounts (from today).

Hope you like it!  Whatever your thoughts – good, bad, indifferent – you know where to find us. And if you don’t, the information is now clearly on our new home page!

Till next time -

Take care from Al

According to site Sharenator, Yuuguu is more popular than Lichtenstein.

Well, okay. I’ve taken a bit of artistic license there. Well, a lot, actually.

The site says that according to Alexa traffic stats – estimates – then the Yuuguu web site has more visitors per day than Lichtenstein has people living in it.

This is not exactly the same thing as saying ‘more people come to Yuuguu-land for their holidays as it is such a nice place’. And it turns out Lichtenstein is a nice place. It would appear to contain a picture-perfect Disneyesque castle:

So it’s neither particularly accurate, nor particularly official. And it’s comparing apples with oranges, so to speak. But it did catch my eye as being quite interesting!


The rather splendid photo is courtesy of WikiMedia commons user Andreas Tille. More thanks to Yuuguu’s very own @phillColeman for finding the article.

It’s always great to meet up with people who are using Yuuguu as a key part of their business. Better still if it is quite an interesting, high-profile business. And if you get to spend a day at an exciting place, with great people, in front of a camera – fantastic!

This is yours truly spending a day with PrivateFly.

Based in St. Albans, PrivateFly link up people who need to fly on private jets with private jets who need to fly people on them. Result. Owners Adam Twidell and Carol Cork explain what they do, and the part Yuuguu plays in their high flying world (sorry – didn’t spot the dreadful pun until I’d typed it. But left it in. Double sorry).

Yuuguu meets Private Fly produced by Greek Bloke Productions.

Hard to believe it, but a whole decade of my life has raced past … never to return … and I’m looking at finding a secondary school for my big girl.

I’m confronted with the dispiriting facts that (a) my local council choice form counts for very little, and (b) schools, great as they are, never fully prepare you for your life ahead anyway.

Yet how could they? The stuff I get paid to do these days hadn’t been invented when I was at school. And before @phillcoleman gets all ‘That was “Fire” and “The Wheel”, Al’, I’m talking about the PC, mobile, and this t’interweb thing I am typing on. I rather hope to get big girl a school like the fantastic one I went to, that taught you ‘stuff’, but also tried to teach you how to learn, and experiment, and have some confidence.

And that led me to thinking about this blog’s title: ‘the Future of Work’. What actually will be the future of work for my big girl?

It’s unlikely to be manufacturing if she remains in the UK. And a good deal of our services sector has had the wind knocked out of its sails as well. Profitable banks? Anyone remember those?

Looking at her primary school education to date, Eco issues are set to become hugely important to this particular generation of millenials. Whilst it has been news to this Gen-X’er that we are trashing the planet quicker than it can sustain being trashed, big girl has been practically brought up with that message.

Obligatory plug for Yuuguu ‘Were already doing our bit to cut travel’ aside, I wonder if this generation will be the one to finally reach that tipping point as described so well by Mr Gladwell. That, ok, so we never used to do remote working all that much, because … well, we never had, but now there are some more pressing matters at hand.

• Would I do my old commute to work 8 miles to Manchester town centre each way, each day if petrol cost 25 pounds a litre?
• Would I park my car in the City Centre if the projected 9 billion worldwide populous had made city centre real estate so scarce and expensive that parking contracts were five figures a year?

Using remote tools like screen sharing, telephone conferencing and instant messages is certainly a way of reducing the carbon footprint of transporting people in metal boxes. It cuts it to that of making the electricity needed to power the computers and internet. And things might well get more interesting here in big girl’s working life; I will not be surprised to see much more creative, local solutions to generating small amounts of electricity -just enough to power a mobile internet browser on a phone, or a notebook. Potentially, this could be done by completely clean sources, depending on local conditions: solar, wind, water, thermal.

The development of a measurably greener alternative to business travel might just be the push needed to drag remote working fully into the mainstream.

What do you think?

I really liked one of the mornings earlier this week.

Fresh coffee and bacon sandwich in hand, I went upstairs to my office, ready to switch the computer on for another day’s work. I took up my little lad with me – mostly to give mum a break for a few minutes before I started work!

He promptly grabbed my headset, and proceeded to pretend to be dad at work. Good lad!

I thought that this is a really nice thing for me personally that yuuguu gives me. I’m a remote worker, so I get to not only claw back my commute time (typically one to one and a half hours each way in my previous tech jobs), but my little boy gets to see me from time to time during the day. He sees me at work. Quite a bit of that is done talking with colleagues using the headset. I tend to be involved in pair programming and aspects of marketing/customer support. And the boy has obviously picked up on this.

It’s nice to not only be able to spend a bit more time with him, but nice that he gets to see what I do for a living; as Dad, I definitely want to set him the example that the world does not owe you a living, you have to earn your way by providing value to others. It’s really nice that he can see some of that at home, as well as just the purely family stuff.

Not sure about the advice he is giving down the headset though. But then again, if you were to ask @phillcoleman, he might just say that little Jakey was making more sense than I normally do

Have a good weekend, all!

Until next time …

We’ve worked as a virtual company since 2006 at Yuuguu.  It is different working as a virtual team as compared to working in an office – but we’ve learned how to adapt.

Here are five tips that I’ve observed have been useful in keeping the team running well.

1. Keeping moving with Show and Tell

It’s important for projects to keep moving forward. We do this by holding show and tell meetings. The whole team holds a web conference, and using Yuuguu technology, each of us will share our computer screens and show off the latest feature – or problem – to the group.

Doing this creates a sense of urgency and forward motion. It ties in well with our project management approach of setting small, achievable milestones. It’s also invaluable for rapid feedback, support and advice from the people we work with.

2. Hold a regular meeting

I would normally discourage this in an office: for goodness’ sake, there are enough dull, pointless meetings in the world without holding more. The conventional wisdom would be to only meet when there is something to discuss that requires some outcome: ACID – Action, Clarification, Information or Decision.

But working virtually, there is always a point in having a regular meeting – and that is simply to get that human contact, and build that team spirit. Whether it is a project-critical ‘acid’ type meeting, or more of a watercooler chat, we find that meeting once a week on yuuguu keeps us moving together.

3. The Virtual Pint

I must do a full post on this one day. Basically, we use yuuguu at the end of a week to socialise. If your team doesn’t socialise reasonably well, it isn’t going to work particularly well. And the added alone-ness that can come from working in a home office will only amplify that in a negative way. So socialise. Build that right in to the fabric of running your virtual team – it is actually essential for the running of your business!

4. Have an ‘Open Messenger’ policy

We run yuuguu at all times as we work together. If one of us is particularly busy, we use the ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature to let the team know about that. Otherwise, the ‘open messenger’ policy is the equivalent of an ‘open door’ office policy. We encourage each other to ask questions, ask for help, offer help – just get involved.

Often, I can ask Mike a PHP question, or Neil a marketing question and get an answer faster than I could google it. And of course, the answer comes through the filters of their practical experience, making the most of the wisdom in our team.

It’s all about creating a culture where helping one another is encouraged, and knowledge is shared. Again, that is all about minimising the sense of isolation that can arise in a virtual team.

5. Enjoy the flexibility

I’ve read a lot of articles on managing virtual teams that essentially suggests using time tracking and monitoring tools. I think that’s a load of rubbish, borne out of a lack of experience – and fear.

What you are after is *getting stuff done* not *getting hours clocked*. By using the four tips above, you get the visibility – in a collaborative, empowering way – that you need to succeed. So knowing precisely where staffer X was at 16:13 last tuesday is neither here nor there – the real question is ‘can we ship that work item?’.

Virtual work is really good at empowering people to get stuff done AND create flexibility during the day. Enjoy it! It certainly makes for a better working environment, a better team, and better end results. With employee loyalty increased as a free bonus.


What tips would you share from your virtual teams?