David Bolchover, author of The Living Dead: The Truth about Office Life, writing for the UK Times Newspaper in “Sickness at work: the big story” asks the big question: Why do smaller companies have fewer absences? And what can the big corporations do?

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Is knowledge-worker outsourcing to low-cost economies the unavoidable natural evolution of virtual teams?

Europe and the US are running scared of the outsourcing of 'knowledge work' to places like India and China. Outsourcing of manufacturing is now normal practice. Outsourcing of white-collar work, with its off-shore call-centres and operations centres, has now been happening for the last 5-10 years. A new phase of outsourcing has started - it focuses on those types of 'knowledge work' where there is minimal need for face-to-face customer interaction.

Heike Philp, CEO of Let's talk online, will be hosting a virtual panel discussion with Nancy White, Ted Kahn, Robin Good and myself on the topic ‘From Virtual Teams to Global Work Teams’ on Wednesday, 15th of February, 4pm (GMT +1) Worldtime. You can join free from home or from work, from the States or from Europe. For more details.

BBC News reports in Workforce suffers afternoon apathy on new research by ICM that more than 40% of the total UK workforce are said to be suffering from "afternoon apathy" which is costing the British economy at least £3.9 billion a year.