Almost 50 per cent of today’s Millennials are freelancers, giving rise to an increase in remote work. To make this workforce model productive, however, managers need to maintain their company culture, in particular, making remote workers feel “part of the team”. Managers are advised to maintain frequent crossover points during the day and even give remote workers “buddies”.

In addition, tools can aid productivity enormously, from RosyBoa’s collaborative framework to video messaging and remote desktops.

Large organisations such as the Department of Transport are now recruiting for “location neutral” roles.
According to a 2015 YouGov poll, 30 per cent of UK workers felt their productivity increased when they were away from the office, while 70 per cent felt it was important for managers to offer flexible working.

Prior to 2014, only UK workers with children were offered the chance to work remotely. The government extended this with the implementation of the Flexible Working Regulations Act 2014, giving all employees who have worked at a firm for more than 26 weeks the right to ask for flexible hours.
Workers must write a formal letter to the company to request flexible working, which managers must respond to in a “reasonable manner”, making changes within 28 days. Employers can present a business case for denying flexible working, and must remember to be compliant with foreign laws if their employees work overseas.

BNY Mellon has cited protecting women as its reason for U-turning on a controversial decision to ban working from home. On 4^th March 2019, the banking giant announced a ban on its flexible working from home policy, saying it was necessary for better collaboration between workers. However, the move was met with criticism, with many HR professionals noting how the changes would affect women. BNY Mellon have since published a memo admitting they “didn’t appreciate the impact this would have on employees with existing arrangements”.

The Bank of New York Mellon was not the first company to make this bold move. In 2013, while Yahoo! was still led by pioneering female CEO Marissa Mayer, employees were banned from working remotely, and told they must relocate or quit. Mayer, who resigned in 2017, claimed that some of the best decisions were “made in the hallway or cafeteria”.

The team at Forbes are championing the notion that remote working encourages diversity among employees. By relying on technology to drive our work, we are not judging employees by their age, race, gender or sexual orientation, says careers contributor Laurel Farrer. Result-based tracking models were used to test the productivity of remote workers, and found that when teams were not bound by 9-5 schedules, they were far more effective at work. Similarly, remote working was found to be more effective for a wider range of personalities – particularly introverts, who may have had trouble expressing themselves in the workplace. Flexible working was also noted to be more considerate of salaries regardless of employees’ locations.

Freelance workers will make up 50 per cent of the workforce by 2027, according to current trends. In 2017, freelancers in the US hit an all-time high, climbing from 53 million in 2014 to 57.3 million. Meanwhile, in the UK, the number of freelancers hit an all-time high in 2018, accounting for 15 per cent of the population. According to the National Office of Statistics, freelancer numbers grew from 3.3 million in 2001 to 4.8 million in 2017.

Female freelancers have increased in number by 55 per cent since 2008, marking a global shift towards more flexible working

the biggest increase was in women and young people, while the number of freelancers born between the 80s and 90s has shot up by 66 per cent since 2008.

Among the fastest growing freelance careers were healthcare, creative roles, and health and fitness.

Using just three screens, RosyBoa is a brain-centric framework that divides projects into overviews, key actions and conversations. It allows users to dip in and out of a project without ever losing information or getting caught up in needless “noise”.

Ideal for managing small and large projects, the tool uses just three screens. The overview screen is a virtual dashboard outlining all projects currently in progress, while the key actions screen allows users to see all team members and outline each member’s assigned tasks. Finally, the conversations screen allows users to open any action and follow a single streamlined discussion, dividing them into three progress markers: “to do”, “in motion”, and “done”.

This ensures that no user misses any information, and helps to streamline processes. RosyBoa is compatible with other project management processes such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban or OKR, but truly, it is a standalone system in its own right. Ideal for remote teams, fast-growing teams, cross-functional teams, innovative teams and freelancers,it can be used for long-term assignments or projects with short deadlines.

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Using the Visual Aggregation Method, RosyBoa helps users’ brains to process information using the fastest paths possible. The VAM, otherwise known as the Visual Aggregation Method for Ordered Sequences, is a patent-pending technology from RosyBoa that enables users to have richer conversations, faster iterations and better information processing.

This method allows collaborators to process and categorise information most efficiently to power the next steps of a project. It also eliminates needless steps such as email chains and endless chatrooms, thereby allowing users to zoom in and out of projects easily. There is no need to repeat conversations, scroll through old messages or retype information for new users.

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