Managing People You Can't See

As you may be aware, I sit on several corporate boards. In most cases, the businesses involved are "virtual" - ie. they don't have offices of their own and use borrowed meeting rooms whenever face-to-face meetings are required. In some cases, that is working well. In others, less so. What I have learned (am learning!) is that managing and/or collaborating with people you can't see is a highly relevant topic in this day and age, no matter the size or physical footprint of your business, and that while it is perfectly doable, it requires deliberate adjustments to the way we work.

Two decades ago (or even more recently), the conventional wisdom was that collaboration was best done face-to-face. These days, that bias is subsiding (aided by generation X & Y workers, who have grown up with the internet), and both companies and individuals are seeing the virtues of collaborating across space and time - it can improve productivity, save money, and enable more efficient use of global resources.

In the absence of visual cues, however, communication must be turned up a notch. Clear expectations must be set around why the work is being undertaken, what the deadline is, what success looks like, etc. Feedback must be more consistent, for example, through the use of "flash reports" (quick weekly emails, cc'd to everyone in the group, outlining the most important things you accomplished in the last week and the most important things on your agenda for next week) and the like. The ad hoc meetings that would have taken place around the water cooler or in the hall need another place to exist, like group bulletin boards or chat rooms. And non-work conversation, too, needs a time and place to occur. Some companies reserve chat room times for social gatherings and, as odd as it might sound, they work - depending on how many beers are involved, I suppose.

There are numerous technological tools out there that are extremely helpful for virtual collaboration. In the autumn, Equilibrant will host a seminar to go through some of them, so that you can try them out - if you are interested in that, please comment below.

Some of my favourites are:

www.doodle.com (for finding availability amongst a group of people for a meeting)
www.skype.com (at this point everyone is probably aware of Skype!)
www.dimdim.com (excellent - and free - for sharing presentations/desktops in real time)
www.linkedin.com (you can create secure sub-groups for your company)
www.yammer.com (bulletin boards for communication within your organisation)

Email, as handy as it is, is not necessarily the most efficient tool for remote work - and we have all had first hand experience in how emails can be misinterpreted in the absence of aural tone, body language, and/or good spelling.

Remote work is the way of the future - there's no denying it. Making changes to how we communicate in order to make remote work succeed isn't that difficult, but it does take a bit of focus and buy-in not only from remote workers, but from those who are spending most of their time in the office. The good news is that, with these small changes, everyone wins.