The Venice Experiment

Five Unexpected Tips for Carefree Travel

Here are some simple ideas for improving your quality of life while on the road. Those of us who travel every week know them well:

Preprogram phone numbers of hotels and restaurants in your cell phone before leaving. When you want to change or make a reservation at the last minute, you will avoid the frustration of searching for that phone number. And if you arrive in town late, you can call your hotel to be sure they don’t give away that room you guaranteed with your credit card.

Pack snacks in your carry-on bag. When your airplane is sitting on the tarmac for hours, or you are stuck in a late meeting, that candy bar or bag of nuts will look mighty appealing.

Preset your hotels and other destinations in your GPS. Arriving tired, late at night at the rental car kiosk, while others are trying to find that piece of paper with the address of their destination, you, having thought ahead, will already be on your way.

Bring printed directions from Google maps. GPS doesn’t always work. Have a backup set of directions on paper.

On vacation, pack those old shirts, socks, and undergarments you have been meaning to get rid of. Wear them one last time, then toss them at the end of each day, making room in your bag for souvenirs.

A Boss’s Point of View: How Telecommuting Works
By Sara Fell, CEO of Flexjobs

On March 5-9 2012, the second annual National Telework Week will begin and companies across the country will participate by allowing their employees to work from home. This is a fantastic opportunity for employees and employers to give telecommuting a trial run! In my own business, my entire staff works from home across the United States and, similar to Barry’s experience working for a U.S. based company from abroad, I also have an employee working from Europe. Here's my advice on starting a telecommuting program at your company.

So how does telecommuting work?

For starters, communication is key. With regular staff and department meetings weekly, we stay on the same page and constantly strategize for goals. Using JoinMe's webinar program, our staff logs in at the designated time and we can all view my screen together from the comfort of each of our homes… or coffee shops… or other favorite location.

In addition, we have “watercooler” talk using a site called Yammer, similar to Facebook where we wish one another happy birthday or announce the birth of a child… or maybe just talk about how bad the snow is in Colorado while it’s perfectly sunny for someone that same day in San Diego!

Obviously email is key and of course I am available for phone calls if an employee needs to speak with me. Also, we track projects using Pivotal Tracker so we can keep one another in the loop on the progress of our goals.

What’s interesting to note is most office based jobs implement the same tools! A boss is often behind a closed door and “face time” can be limited to meetings while relying on communication tools similar to the ones I named above. In fact, many office workers already “telecommute" in a sense, but from their cubes.

How Can YOU Work from Home?

With National Telework Week fast approaching now may be the time to suggest to your boss a trial run of working from home. To get started:

1. Ask for a trial run, perhaps during Telework Week or on your own schedule. Showing how well the flexible or telecommuting arrangement will benefit your employer is the most compelling argument you can make. During the trial run, show that you will work diligently from home and can stay in touch with colleagues in the office.

2. Take baby steps. Ask to telecommute part-time (e.g., one day a week) to start out with, even if you would eventually like to work virtually full-time.

3. Before you even start to telecommute, suggest web-based tools and resources that your team can use to communicate, manage files, and share schedule information. Test them out even if you are all working in the office together. Get used to communicating in ways other than face to face conversations (make note of how much time you save!).

But What About Employers?

What many employers who hesitate to allow the option to work from home haven’t realized is the cost savings to them! Having employees telecommute can cut back on real estate costs and increase revenue with increased employee productivity. The results of 2010's Telework Week included, “nearly 40,000 pledged, saving $2,730,229 on commuting costs, gaining back 148,692 hours into their day, and removing 1,818 tons of pollutants from the air, while refraining from driving 3,764,001 miles.”

Companies can jump on board to take advantage of these astonishing benefits by assessing the following:

1. Have employees analyze what components of their job are performed primarily on a computer, the internet, or email, and ask them to estimate how much time that represents per day, week, or month. These are the potential tasks that could be done remotely.

2. Ask employees if they’d be interested in trying a telecommute option plan. By starting your plan with the people who are genuinely interested, they’ll be more committed to making it work and providing useful feedback.

3. Look at the overall information on what tasks could be remotely for any trends (for example, project management, customer service, research, etc.), and evaluate which positions you would feel most comfortable trying out for remote work.

4. Ask managers how they measure productivity in the areas you’d like to try, and find out if those tools or processes would be successful in managing the productivity of someone working off-site.

5. Check with your IT team and ask them their thoughts, concerns, or ideas. IT people are generally very accustomed to working remotely, and will be helpful in foreseeing any issues, suggesting products to help, and supporting those telecommuting.

But What If a Position Isn’t a Traditional Fit?

What often surprises me on FlexJobs is the variety of job listings we come across! In the past, I have seen telecommuting opportunities for CEOs, Neurosurgeons, Golf Instructors, K-12 Teachers and many more. If a position doesn’t seem like a conventional home based job, re-think the process of your day and it just may be a fit!

Good luck with your efforts and I hope you will, like me, be able to enjoy the many benefits telecommuting can offer both as an employee and an employer!

If you think you have a pretty sweet deal because you're allowed to work from home one or two days a week, consider the arrangement Barry Frangipane managed to make with his employer.

He worked for 13 months telecommuting from Venice, Italy.

And Frangipane says his was a work arrangement that many can emulate.

He argues that if you can telecommute 5 or 25 miles from your office, why can't you telecommute from another part of the world?

Click here to read the rest of the story on USAToday.com.

I didn’t hate my job. The work itself was actually enjoyable. I just wished that the window on the other side of my desk had a different view. My clients were scattered across the United States and Canada. Many of them had been my clients for over twenty years, but most I had never met face to face. Then one day, I realized I could look out a different window, and it wouldn’t change their view of me at all.

I toyed with the idea in my head for a while. My wife Debbie was stuck in a “normal” desk job and hated the rat race. We had visited Europe on the cheap many times, staying in hostels and bed and breakfasts. We had even casually discussed living in France or Italy, but never made any real plans. I began making serious preparations. Once I felt ready, I unleashed my plan on Debbie. She was ecstatic. Venice would be our new home.

Click here to read the rest of the story on Forbes.com.

Daytime TV's host Cyndi Edwards inverviews author Barry Frangipane about his experience living in Venice, and his new book, The Venice Experiment. See what surprising item they missed most while living abroad for their one year experiment.