In 1990, I started a publication that eventually employed more than 35 people, hiring writers, lab and art directors, publishing designers and editors from around the country. At the time it was a radical notion to get the best people to work for me by collaborating from remote locations.
Since then, teleworking has taken off. David Clemons is one of the co-authors of the book “Managing the Mobile Workforce: Leading, Building, and Sustaining Virtual Teams” and calculates that in 2011 there were more than one billion worldwide mobile workers. And nearly 75 percent of the U.S. workforce is also mobile, if not working remotely part of the time.
Even the US government has embraced what is now called teleworking, enacting legislation last year to support the effort across all federal agencies. And in the decades since I started Network Computing magazine, there is a large body of literature of best practices, guidelines, and case studies of what to do and what not to do in managing a remote group of technical people. Even though we have ubiquitous broadband and remote technology galore, what makes for successful remote workers has more to do with psychology and sociology than any particular technology. Here are some tips to better manage your teleworkers.
Think strategically, you are setting policy not just satisfying a particular individual or set of circumstances. The most successful teleworking situations come from the top, where the overall policy can be crafted and supported. This is what Brett Caine, the SVP and GM of Citrix Online, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2011. But changing your “management mindset” isn’t easy, and requires you to become a better leader. “Think about adjusting the way you lead. Setting clear, outcome-based goals, defining what needs to be done by whom and rewarding performance,” he says.
Supporting this position is a website from the US government with loads of resources on teleworking management. There are loads of practical suggestions and sample telework agreements that can be used as models for your own policies and employee contracts.
Teleworking can save office space and money too. Citrix calls its program “workshifting” to refer to both remote working and employees who share common office pods when they do come into their office buildings. As you might imagine the tech company who has several remote access products is a big booster of the concept. More than a quarter of their global 8,000 employees now work remotely at least three days per week, and another half participate at least one day a week. They have been able to increase the capacity of some of their offices by 50% and reduce each employee’s needs to less than 100 square feet. That is less than a third of what a typical company office space requirement would be.
Clemons cites the shift at Deloitte, a company with more than 90 percent of regular telecommuters and where each employee acts more like their own boss in determining the direction of their career. “There has been a flood in the last few years towards remote workers. It is absolutely ordinary these days for managers to be called in for a meeting at headquarters from a variety of off-site locations, but their workflow never gets interrupted.”
Close the trust gap. One of the biggest issues for managers is being able to deal with what Citrix’ Caine calls the “trust gap” where managers have to get over the issue of not having their staff nearby but are still working remotely. “Most of our staff is working harder than ever,” he says. “You need to establish the rules of engagement up front and over communicate with exceptional clarity.” Clemons says that trust “can make or break your ability to motivate your workers and to get things done.”
Also, realize that not everyone is a fit for remote working. “Think carefully about which roles within the organization are suited to virtual working and develop criteria for eligibility, such as whether performance can be measured remotely and whether responsibilities depend on daily face-to-face interactions with peers, clients and/ or managers,” said Caine. People who are covered by various regulatory requirements or who handle confidential data may not be the best fits for teleworking.
Hire smart. Perhaps the best advice is to start right from the beginning, during the hiring process when you are considering who should be the next member of your team. Bryan Cooley is the CEO of gaming site Yoero.com and a serial software entrepreneur. He has been managing more than 250 technical people remotely over the past four years, and right now has ten people working for him from different places around the world. He emailed me this week from Brazil, although he has lived in various parts of the US and Asia and Europe too. As you can imagine, Cooley’s biggest challenge is handling the various time zone differences.
“A lot comes down to the hiring process. By choosing the right people up front, you can avoid lots of headaches. I take great lengths to find the best people I can from the start and I try to never hire someone out of desperation. If I can’t find someone really good, I will even sometimes even let a project lapse or delay it and do something else instead.”
Part of smart hiring is being able to write job descriptions that “go beyond the scope of a specific task I need.” Cooley tests prospects with small tasks that require some careful thinking and decision-making. He tries to avoid staff that needs lots of daily handholding.
Are you managing a team of people in one remote location or folks who are scattered all over the place? How you mange remote workers depend on the answer to this question, because your strategy could be different if you have one remote office with several people working alongside each other. This is the situation that David Goodman found himself. Goodman is the CTO of the International Rescue Committee in New York City. He manages three IT staffers in an office in Nairobi, Kenya that in turn support other IRC users all over the world.
Goodman didn’t get any explicit training from his organization when he was hired, and has had to learn on the job how to handle his team in Kenya. One of the first things he did was set up a second clock in his office with Kenyan time to make their headquarters staff more sensitive to their schedule. “We also try to have meetings that intersect with their work day and ours, rather than in the middle of anyone’s night.” He also brought the head of the Nairobi team to New York City for several months last summer. “Communication is always a challenge and having him spend time with the other senior managers really helped to integrate the staffs between the two cities,” he said. “There is no substitute for face time, and it is hard to develop a team espirit de corps without going out for beers together or spending time in the same office.”
Goodman also recognized his own limitations and hired a direct report to be based in New York that now is responsible for working with the Nairobi team and others around the world. He looked for someone who had prior experience handling field offices.
Know when to cut your losses. More importantly than hiring your next teleworker is in knowing when someone isn’t working out. “I have had people who I thought could improve and invested lots of time in trying to train them to save the project. I should have just cut them loose and tried again with someone else,” says Cooley. Be sensitive to these failures, and don’t let them linger.
“Our global service desk manager moved to San Diego, and we tried to have her manage her team from there,” said the IRC’s Goodman. “But it wasn’t working out because her team were still in NYC and she couldn’t easily participate in other management strategy discussions remotely. Some of her job responsibilities also weren’t very clear, which wasn’t as big a deal when she was here but got more important when she started working remotely.” The employee resigned.
On telework.gov, there are suggestions on when to terminate a teleworker and under what conditions that are worth looking at to prepare for these sorts of situations.
David Clemons knows we have come a long way since those early days. “We used to think that managing a mobile workforce was so simple, but we know it is more than just tossing someone a laptop. It takes a great deal of work to do it right. It isn’t about technology, it is about how to handle the people in the organizations and build trust and motivation within the mobile team.”