While the world of employment has really had to change and evolve to accommodate some rather unique skill sets and job requirements, for the most part people are spending a lot more time working virtually than they ever have before. While we saw in the seventies, eighties and nineties, a sort of longing for a secure brick and mortar work place, things have really changed on the work front both for the employer and the employee.
We traditionally associated an office or fixed external office place to be the most prominent sign of job security but things have changed drastically.
Now we don’t place as much emphasis on the physical work space and we focus most of our energies on a more virtual work space.
What is a virtual workspace? Well, we’re seeing more and more employers creating and facilitating the ability to work from anywhere, be it at home, while on a business trip, while at a conference or even while at a dinner.
The entire workplace has gone online via the internet and the fixation to be in one place is pretty much out the door. Why have employers embraced this seemingly anti-establishment way of operating? For one thing, it is a lot more cost effective.
Not every company owns the office from which they operate so they may have to rent office space. This bill can meander in the high thousands every month and to network a company virtually costs much, much less. Another reason bosses have embraced the online workplace is that it actually stimulates higher levels of productivity.
There are many things that go into the everyday work-home process: you wake up, hustle to shower, hustle to prepare your family, sometimes you eat, sometimes you don’t, sit in hours of congestive traffic, fight for a parking space, sit in cramped quarters, maybe have an unhealthy lunch, maybe have no lunch at all, pick up the kids, drop off the kids, pick up the kids, maneuver thick, unrelenting, smoggish traffic, come home, rinse and repeat.
Years and years of this schedule with just a couple of weeks annually for vacation do not a happy worker make. We have bred and spawned a generation of angry, disgruntled, sick and unproductive workers who literally resent their jobs and lives every day. This is not healthy and this anger and resentment often gets passed onto innocent parties like our families and friends.
By embracing a more virtual way of operating, people have removed a lot of the pressures and trials of having to fit their work and life schedules into one and other. There is a greater sense of relaxation, more opportunities to realize accomplishment and overall, a greater sense of productivity and well being. With working online however, there are certain challenges that present themselves that have translated from the real world to the online world.
One such challenge is the ability to maintain an online reputation that is professional while still retaining your individuality. Luckily there are site like www.reputation.com that give you the opportunity to manage your online presences. Why is this so important? Because we spend so much time online, while we may have different monikers and separate emails, it is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to maintain privacy online.
Many sites relax their membership criteria to leverage popularity and this puts your content at risk – if your content is personalized, you may not necessarily want it to be so easily accessible. Reputation management sites help you retain the ability to have an online presence without having it mix with you professional online life.
Image Source: www.thinkstock.com