Sophisticated online crowdsourcing platforms are making it ever simpler to manage and support distributed workers.
Despite the imperative, there has been a lack of theoretical and empirical efforts to investigate knowledge accessibility by distributed workers.
To improve workplace integration, my company experimented with several ways to bring our distributed workers together, including virtual coffees, book clubs, and executive-led webinars focused on values.
At least as important, online crowdsourcing platforms have become much more sophisticated, making it ever simpler to manage, support, and mediate among distributed workers.
Our results suggest that cross-functional, geographically distributed workers may rely on early impressions of perceived trustworthiness when evaluating how their distant partners are delivering on commitments, because reliable information about actual follow-through is lacking or difficult to interpret.
The entire process was overseen by software, not humans, and included everything from asking Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) to come up with the topic areas the entry should cover to having them fact-check the writing of previous workers to whom those topics had been assigned.
The idea behind the rollout is to enable distributed workers who may communicate with an enterprise but are contractors or other small-scale vendors to use the private encryption services without having to pay for them.
However, in Spark's cluster mode the result of the algorithms wasn't transmitted to the client, because of the difficulty of fetching the results from the distributed workers to the driver.
The upside for corporates is that they can use distributed workers where there is no middleman platform to pay and no management consultancy fees, and access a talent pool (data engineers, statisticians, domain experts), which is difficult to bring inside the firm.
For more insights on why and how organizations are making the transition to connect with and support their distributed workers, I spoke with Michael Affronti, VP of product, and Eric Hanson, VP of product marketing, for Fuze (previously ThinkingPhones), which provides communications and application-based services to connect and enable distributed workers.
