This post is a first in a series of posts on what we(*) consider to be the main challenges for the nomadic worker (or the Web Worker, as Om Malik from Web Worker Daily calls them). This nomadic worker is someone who reaches out beyond the office, cubicle, home workspace, train or wifi café to connect to and collaborate with others doing the same things.Entrepreneurs, freelancers and employees can be nomadic workers: what matters most is the nomadic worker attitude: being authentic, social, active and open. Typically, nomadic workers have a bursty working style, work whenever and wherever fits both the task and their own preferences, and collaborate with people from their personal and professional networks with whom they share passions. Actually, the distinction between work and private is blurring for many nomadic workers, as these aspects of life get intertwined.

Based on our experiences, we consider the following three aspects of work (and life) to be the main challenges for nomadic workers:

• Being in sync with the people you work with: knowing what the people you are working with are doing, where your input is needed and what that input should look like. Being in sync helps to be effective as a team.
• Being in touch with your personal and professional network: the affective component of being in sync. It is the sense of “being connected” both with strong relational ties as well as with weak ties.
• Being in flow, which is needed to get work done for which deep understanding or concentration are needed. Yet this concentration is easily lost in an always-connected world.

The following blog posts will go into more detail of these different aspects.
Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 1: In Sync
Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 2: In Touch
Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 3: In Flow

(*) This is work is the result of collaborative thinking by Joost Broekens, Ruud Janssen, Marcel Bijlsma, Maurice Markslag and Robert Slagter in the context of the Future Workspaces programme.

Tags: in flow, in sync, in touch

This entry was posted by Robert Slagter on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 13:38 and is filed under EN, knowledge base, research results, team blog. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.