How to Stay Connected When You Work Away From the OfficeSeveral experts in telecommuting tell you the secrets.
It is getting more and more common for employees to work away from the home office. Many employees are even working from their homes. The challenge is how to stay connected to the company so that you can work effectively, and how to still feel a part of the company when you are not there day-to-day.
CYNTHIA KYRIAZIS
Regularly scheduled meetings using a teleconference or webcast approach helps the employee AND team still feel connected. Scheduling regularly held 'face to face' meetings for dinner, etc. is also extremely important. It allows people to share their triumphs and tribulations. Technology is great when it comes to effectively and efficiently running a business, but nothing takes the place of face-to-face, one-on-one discussion!
ANDY KAUFMAN
BARBARA GLANZ
Use voice mail a lot
more when any kind of an event occurs such as a big sale, a visit from
a special client, or if someone has a new baby. You can hear the excitement
through a voice that you can't get with an email. That adds to the human
connection. sThe CEO of the company can leave a Voice mail message for employees every week so that there is a human level connection with the voice. Set up a regular conference call with 3 or 4 employees at the beginning or the end of the day so that you can feel connected to what's going on at the office. Keep pictures of people from the office around you so that you are connected visually to your co-workers. It's also important when you are on the phone to make a human connection so look at a picture of the person you are talking to. If you don't have a picture, you can close your eyes and visualize the person to make a human connection. Even with the latest technology, workers still need to get together face-to-face every once in awhile share their triumphs, and their challenges, and employees who telecommute should be included in at least four company meetings or events a year, even if they have to fly them in from other parts of the country.
STUART NEEDEL This particular topic, telecommuting, in all its forms and variations, has been one of my specialties for my entire career and especially during the past several years. The answer to is web conferencing. It takes place on everybody's computer from anyone who has even a dial-up connection to the internet. You're viewing PowerPoint, using a white board, speakin, interacting, text chatting, and it's all LIVE. Even video is possible using web cam technology. Three major companies that provide the service. Centra, Webex, and PlaceWare. A virtual office is a reality. Web conferencing can be done anywhere and is affordable. Web conferencing has become the way to meet with people several times a week as if you are with them. You are a part of the organization. You just happen to work away from the office. Powerful. Major companies are using this throughout their organizations. Millions of workers all over the world keep connected This is not email - It is very interactive. People are together at the same time. There are buttons on the computer screen to indicate your approval or disapproval, amusement, applause, and it can be done while someone else is continuing to speak, just as you would in a "traditional" meeting or other event. Large companies have been pioneers. Universities use it for classes and entire programs. Non-profits use it for board meetings and strategy sessions. It allows people to do everything they would do in a meeting. Status meeting, project meetings, and trainings, It works best where the visual component of the speaker is not that important, but as said previously, video can easily be incorporated. Not video conferencing or conference calls, but web conferencing specifically. It's produced a breakthrough in how both telecommuters and road warriors can easily stay connected and participate in LIVE, interactive, multimedia events from anywhere. September 11th, and all of its associated developments, created even more demand and excitement. Companies who don't
know about this, let alone who aren't using it in some form, are at a
definite disadvantage compared to the millions of workers who never or
rarely "go to the office", yet who are productive, effective, and involved
despite their supposed absence from the workplace. JEFF ZBAR
In fact, a recent study from AT&T revealed that its teleworking employees reported a 10% gain in productivity on telework days - or roughly one more hour of work worth a combined $65 million a year. On the other hand, some 36% said they quit teleworking because they lacked in-home broadband. Those who were most productive were those who had company-paid broadband at home.
You cannot just throw employees out into the field as potential teleworkers without studying and investing in remote connectivity technologies. Keeping teleworkers connected when working remotely - whether from home, a client location, a hotel or other non-traditional workspace - is essential to any corporation realizing the true benefits and tangible gains associated with telework. Jeff Zbar, founder
of Chief Home Officer.com, and an author, columnist and speaker on home
business and teleworking. http://www.chiefhomeofficer.com BRIAN POMEROY Since my team has a number of virtual workers in a variety of situations, I thought I could offer some insights on keeping virtual workers connected. First, some background: I manage the technical arm of the team that develops Web initiatives at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). About 15 people report to me, most of those telecommute at least some of the time. Usually this is out of choice, but sometimes it has been out of necessity; a few of my people have had injuries and illnesses that have prevented them from coming into the office, but they remained productive while working from home. Although our main offices are in Philadelphia, one of my managers works out of Pittsburgh, which is several hundred miles away. He moved out there for personal reasons several years ago, and has been "permanently telecommuting" ever since. The arrangement has worked extremely well; he comes out to Philly every few months, but the rest of the time he's in Pittsburgh. I suppose there are some caveats involved in managing virtual workers. Clearly telecommuting is not for everyone; some people are not comfortable working form home and therefore choose not to do it. Others need the structure of arriving at and leaving an office at a set time. The kind of work we do lends itself nicely to telecommuting since you can do it anywhere that you can have a laptop and an Internet connection. The proper tools are
essential to having a productive telecommuting team. Everyone needs access
to a PC wherever they are (whether it be a laptop or a PC they use at
home), as well as Internet connectivity. We communicate primarily by e-mail,
IM and phone (call phones are a good idea as well). Teleconference bridges
are essential as well (we tried videoconferencing, but that didn't go
all that smoothly). But again, the nature of the team and the work will
make or break a telecommuting effort every time. IM is instant messaging (chatting), like the services provided by AOL, MSN and Yahoo. We use MSN amongst ourselves because it's feature-rich and reliable. A couple of advantages of IM are:
However, a lot of organizations are moving toward proprietary, in-house IM systems that are heavily secured and that can be monitored by IT support. Brian Pomeroy Personal webpage: http://www.voicenet.com/~lunar KEVIN O'CONNOR
Sooner or later, all of us will be managing and leading someone remotely. Even those in retail will need to master these skills. The better we communicate in person, in writing, or over the phone, the better we are perceived at the other end. Here are some skills to consider the next time you need to meet long distance. Understand who your
team is and what the members of the team are all about. I know three exceptional leaders of small teams (under 20 in number) who work long distance more than seventy five percent of the time. What makes them special leaders is not that they are great managers. In fact, each has given the team members themselves the responsibility inherent in self-directed work teams. These leaders instead focus on what the team needs to be successful. One manages the politics of the head office to protect her team and its resources. Another recently told me that he feels his #1 job is that of encourager and coach. Still the third has taken a decidedly consultative approach to his team, visiting, listening, suggesting, and affirming. By Kevin E. O'Connor,
CSP Email to:kevin@kevinoc.com SOL LEVINE At Telecommuting Jobs, all of the staff are TeleCommuters who stay connected via much phone conversation, placing projects online and discussing via phone, acrobat, email, and email file attachments. Social face to face happens frequently since we all live in the same region, but rarely is business discussed. One of our staff also works onsite for an electronics firm and has a few TeleCommuters working for him. He has found that the face to face ability of video teleconferencing helps them to better communicate with their home workers as well as their factory in China and gives workers a much stronger connection with the company. This is especially true when English is not the external worker's primary language. He uses ViaVideo cameras from Polycom to perform video teleconferencing. They run about $400-500 dollars a piece. ViaVideo hardware and software can provide between 15-30 frames per second of live video. The images are fairly large and appear to be of almost television quality. And the voice quality allows use of the same tone of conversation they would use if they were in the same room. He also uses Netmeeting, a free software package from Microsoft, which is compatible with the ViaVideo cameras to allow viewing another person's computer desktop while both users are on the Internet. When an engineer shows some details of his or her design during an online discussion, they all see the details of the design as if they were in the same room as the engineer. At Telecommuting Jobs, through email alone, we also feel very connected with our viewers even though they may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. The many we converse with every day all seem as close as our monitor. To keep connected (as close as possible to how connected an onsite employee is), we emphasize professional working environments for both our TeleCommuting workers -- and viewers. To help accomplish this, we have produced InSiteOffice. InSiteOffice puts the TeleCommuter's office right on the boss' computer. It helps eliminate some of the concern about not being able to walk down the hall and stop in a worker's office. All it takes is the click of the mouse -- to visit the TeleCommuter's office -- to see all the skills, training, education, equipment, and software the TeleCommuter has to bring to the job -- to know the various ways they have to collaborate -- to know the professional office environment the TeleCommuter works in. See how InSiteOffice
works to help connect TeleCommuters and employers at: Sol Levine DAN POYNTERTwo years ago, we
let our office manager/bookkeeper telecommute. We put icons on the
desktops of both our office and (traveling) notebook computers for quick
connections. As a speaker who is out of the office 3-4 days a week, I want to be able to get into my own desktop computer as well. I use pcAnywhere on my notebook computer. This is the same one with my PowerPoint presentations. I ordered another toll-free telephone line and pointed it to my office computer. Then I put an icon on the desktop of the notebook computer. Now, when I am on the road, I can click on the icon to get access to my office computer to do my Outlook email, etc. AND, because I have my own toll-free number, the hotels charge me for the connection (usually 75 cents) but not the call time (usually "at the ATT operator assisted rate"). So there is more than one way to use pcAnywhere. Dan Poynter: Author,
Publisher, Speaker.
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