Marina Domínguez

⏰ Monday 06:00 a.m. Alarm clock goes off. Time to get back to the office after the weekend. This pre-pandemic habit that most of us workers had so internalised returns to us with the “new normal” and it is estimated that, currently, there are only 10% of people who still do not go to their workplace physically any day of the week. Can we say then that working from home has been a fad with an expiry date? Yes and no. You probably thought that this innovative model of relocating workers and letting them carry out their tasks a few kilometres away from the office is totally modern and disruptive: well, I’m sorry to say that you are wrong. Jack Nilles as the originator of the term “Remote working” If we consult Wikipedia (if you are a millennial) or even simply ask a guru today, ChatGPT, it will tell us that this way of work without limitation in space dates back to a few decades before the pandemic, with much more “limited” means but with the same purpose: to provide a solution to a problem. And it will give us the name of Jack Nilles as the “father of remote work”. In 1973, this American NASA engineer coined the term ”remote work” (telecommuting) in an attempt to solve a major problem in the USA. The so-called oil crisis had created a fuel shortage due to the embargo of barrels decreed by Arab exporters to the defenders of Israel, which would create major problems for the country’s industry. He argued that “if one in seven workers did not have to commute to work, the United States would not need to import oil”, which would, to a large extent, solve the consequences of the crisis. Jack Nilles began to think of ways to optimise resources and also to reduce pollution, congestion and mobility problems. To this end, his first big idea was to bring work to the worker instead of doing it the other way round in the traditional way, and he implemented the hybrid remote work model by connecting his colleagues’ keyboards and screens to remote stations close to the company’s headquarters. In this bizarre way, they could continue to work as if they were there without being there, mixing days working in the office with days working remotely. All this, let’s not forget, in a time without Internet, laptops, mobile phones, Microsoft Teams. Such was the success of his idea that in 1980 Jack Nilles left all his jobs as an engineer and founded JALA International, a consulting company in the field of remote work and with which he continues to collaborate today, at the age of 89. Several Centuries before Nilles: from Enlightened Despotism to Geosocial Networks 3.0 But that’s not all: at Telefónica Tech we are not satisfied with ChatGPT’s answer and we have found what we can define as the true father of remote work and we are going to introduce him to you. In the middle of the 18th century, in the middle of the Enlightened Despotism, and long before Nilles worked at NASA and from space it was possible to create detailed maps of any part of the planet, King Carlos III and his successor Carlos IV commissioned the feat of making an atlas of all of Spain and Portugal, motivated by the fear of a possible French invasion. Image: Freepik This was no easy task considering that they were at a time when there was a lack of photography, satellites, etc. Tomás López (1730-1802), a Spanish geographer and cartographer trained in the French school under d’Anville, was entrusted with such a task. And the only way he could do it personally would be to travel all over the Iberian Peninsula and draw every corner by hand, a Herculean feat he was not prepared to undertake due to lack of time and resources. So, what did he do? From the comfort of his office in Madrid, he decided to look for “remote workers” scattered all over the country who would send him pieces of atlases for him to compile. But as it was difficult to find great trained draughtsmen who could read and write and who would do a thorough job throughout the length and breadth of Spain, he opted to send letters to the more than 1,000 parish priests with the request for the drawing and the answers to a questionnaire of 15 questions about the geography around him, asking him about villages, cities, towns, villages, farms, chapels, rivers, mountains, roads, hills… The atlas by Tomás López can be viewed in its entirety at the Hispanic Digital Library (BNE). After 33 years of arduous work of compilation and persecution of the presbyters (what they called the “memory of the natural” of the area) and with much power of imagination (and the help of other old atlases), in 1810, a few years after his death, his sons published the Geographical Atlas of Spain, which includes the general map of the Peninsula, all the particularities of our provinces and of the Kingdom of Portugal, which is now in the National Library of Spain, together with the manuscript “geographical relations” that were sent to him. Taking into account that Tomás López composed his atlas without traveling even one kilometer from his home, the result was remarkable. As you can imagine, we cannot say that the result was a faithful reflection of today’s reality, but, bearing in mind that he did it without having to travel a single kilometre working from home, the result is more than remarkable and served as a reference until the end of the 19th Century. This way of remote working devised by Tomás López would be exported to Europe and America and would be used to make navigation charts and atlases of other territories and would be rescued and renamed today as Geosocial Networks with OpenStreetMap or Mapcesible promoted by Fundación Telefónica, among other examples of collaborative maps 3.0. * * * If you have to go back to the office: tips to cope with the return Coming back to the present day, having contextualised our theory on the origin of teleworking, if you find yourself, like the Gauls in Asterix, among those 10% who still enjoyed working in your pyjamas and you finally have to return to the office after a long period away from it, take heart. Here are a few tips to make your return to work less of a hardship: Image: Freepik Avoid negative thoughts. Be positive, going back is not always a bad thing. Think about those things around your workplace that you have missed when you have been separated from your work environment (coffee with your colleagues, talking face to face with your clients or superiors, visiting the restaurant across the street at lunchtime, those colleagues from other areas that you pass in the corridor…). Prioritise face-to-face meetings. If you are in the office, take the opportunity to have face-to-face meetings whenever you can. There is no longer any excuse for not wearing a camera because you have to travel long distances or wear a tracksuit. There is nothing better than a good face-to-face chat to prioritise tasks or unravel problems and work efficiently across the board. Get to know each other. You probably have colleagues you haven’t met in person yet, or if you have, you haven’t been able to work with them side by side from the same desk. This is the time to build relationships, to take advantage of synergies and to give and receive feedback. It is also the time for coffees and afterworks. Plan your travel. Perhaps one of the main problems of returning to the office is “finding yourself” in the morning traffic jam or on the way out. Traffic jams may have changed to when you used to go or may have been brought forward or delayed. As much as possible, try to adapt to these changes so that you don’t feel like you are wasting time on your commute. Take breaks. As in remote work, breaks are necessary and it is quite normal that being in the office, with all the hustle and bustle of work, colleagues, meetings, commitments, you can’t stop, and you end up exhausted and frustrated when it’s time to leave. Respect the timetable and leave your work at the office. The great advantage of going back is to take advantage of the digital disconnection (as far as possible) that comes with having your personal and work environments separate. Try to respect the timetables for entering and leaving the office and don’t take your work home with you. Mens Sana in Corpore Sano. Eat properly and at regular times and make time for exercise. A good practice on your way home from work is to change your heels or shoes for trainers and take a walk to clear your head. Take advantage of these moments of “leisure” to take stock of the day and plan for the next day and disconnect. Finally, and most importantly, be yourself, smile and make the most of your time. Think positive. Featured image: Freepik.

Every business relationship begins with a "match". Since the foundation of any business, no matter how small it may be, one of its main objectives is to make itself known to the world and create a two-way communication link with it that hyper-connects and builds loyalty. We constantly receive calls from companies that want to offer us services. Or even we are the ones who contact them ourselves, requesting information or carrying out increasingly complex procedures, from any place and at any time of the day. No one would believe that what may seem modern and even futuristic in some cases, with the use of Artificial Intelligence and bots serving customers anywhere on the planet, dates back to nothing less than a Berlin bakery at the end of the 19th century. Apple pies In 1881, Alfred Kranler, the young German son of the official pastry chef of the Prussian Empire and heir to his bakery in the capital, was desperate. After the death of his father, coupled with the inclement weather that plagued the harsh Berlin winters, visits to his bakery had dropped considerably and so had his sales. Phot: Patrick Fore / Unsplash Before going bankrupt, in a desperate attempt to maintain the legacy his father had left him, Kranler came up with a brilliant idea based on the famous "If Mohammed does not go to the mountain...": he would publicize his cakes throughout the city by taking them to the neighborhoods so that the locals could get to know and taste them, thus reaching a wider audience. The problem was that his ambitious project was expensive, and he didn't have the money to hire anyone to go around selling his cakes while he was still in the workshop serving his usual clientele and making his cakes. So, he opted to buy a phone book and called the 186 telephone subscribers that the city had registered at that time to offer them his famous apfelstrudel, freshly made and warm, with the promise that he would take it home when he closed the store in the evenings. Success was not long in coming Kranler's cakes went viral and in a short time he tripled his sales. People lined up at the door of the bakery in the cold winter and his business endured over time. So much so that, even today, his famous hot apple pie can still be enjoyed in the café of the same name that remains open in the German capital. Alfred Kranler and his cakes can therefore be credited with the first telephone marketing campaign in history. And this was just the beginning. A few decades later, another moment of business crisis of a well-known brand sharpened the ingenuity of another visionary, Lee Iacocca, and led us to what we could call the First Communication Revolution: the emergence of the Call Center. Convertibles In 1918, John Ford, the president of the most important automobile company in the United States, agreed to run for senator for the state of Michigan and bequeathed the presidency of the company to his only son, Esdel Bryan Ford. Photo: Jorgen Hendriksen / Unsplash The latter, with great ambition and the need to prove to his father that he had left the company in good hands, launched the largest, most luxurious and expensive model to date and named it after him. But the experiment did not go as expected and the Esdel Ford turned out to be an unreliable vehicle that consumed a lot of fuel and had notable flaws in the design and safety, which ended up being a real failure and led the company almost to bankruptcy. Esdel died very young, and his father took back the reins of the company for a few years until he was able to leave it to his son, John Ford II. John inherited from his grandfather a complicated panorama at a time when the American financial crisis, together with his father's bad decisions, meant that the future of the corporation was in imminent danger. Desperate times call for desperate measures In a display of courage, John Ford II decided to surround himself with a young team to turn the company around, giving it a fresher and more popular image by targeting the boomers of the 1960s. An audience with a small budget but eager for freedom of movement. And the result was to invest the entire budget in the creation of the Ford Mustang, an affordable and cheeky sports car designed for that generation of young people. But it had to be made known so that it could "fall in love" with its future drivers. The task was entrusted to Lee Iacocca, whose challenge was to sell as many units as possible in the shortest possible time in order to return to profit and continue production. To this end, he launched an initiative in which he hired a team of telephone operators who would use the telephone to arrange visits to the dealership with as many potential customers as possible. The success was, once again, overwhelming: the campaign lasted two and a half years and they contacted 20 million potential buyers. Each of the company's 20,000 salespeople received more than two visits a day, day after day. Visits that would later make the Mustang in its first year its best-selling sports car of all those made up to then by the brand. This success led Iacocca to the presidency of the company in 1970, and also to go down in history as the "Father of the Call Center". Subsequently, this tactic was imitated by all the world's major corporations, which, together with the boom and deployment of telephony, made telemarketing one of the main pillars of sales revenue. Social Networks If we focus on Spain, the beginning of Call Centers was limited by the lack of telephones in homes until the seventies and eighties. That is why, until the 90s, coinciding with the boom of mobile telephony and the emergence of numerous operators, the companies that had a team of teleoperators for customer service were very limited. Photo: Adem Ay / Unsplash Pioneering examples were, for example, the banking sector with La Caixa in the late 80s. The telephone operators subsequently evolved their relationship with customers via telephone. They did not stop there but turned the Telephone Centers into Contact Centers where thousands of operators, in addition to answering calls, approached customers through other emerging channels such as mail, chat or SMS. This opened up a range of possibilities that would facilitate the task of reaching more people in less time. We would then be in the Second Communication Revolution, the rise of Contact Centers. All this meant that the technology that provided the link we mentioned at the beginning had to evolve rapidly, as well as providing it with security and immediacy. With the pandemic, the relocation of companies and digital transformation, once again changed the way we relate to much more open and disruptive digital channels. Those companies that had not already done so had to adapt quickly to non-conventional sales and service methods in order to continue serving their confined customers and not lose them. AI OF THINGS You are no longer just a company of products or services, you are a data company April 26, 2023 From multichannel to omnichannel Once again, this forced technology to evolve. Multiple channels began to appear in contact centers, such as video calls, WhatsApp, and social networks, which until then had hardly been considered for business relationships. The Third Revolution would also be found in the possibility of combining all these communication channels in such a way that the relationship with a customer could start with a message, continue with a call and end with an email without losing the traceability of all this information. This is what we would call omnichannel. All this brings us to the present day, when the communication paradigm is leading us to the door of what could be the Fourth Revolution: the metaverse and the use of Artificial Intelligence and predictive models to automate, expand and evolve communications as we understand them today thanks to the unstoppable advance of technology and networks. Will we therefore change our headsets for virtual reality glasses to talk to agents and “match”?