Working outside a central office has been part of doing business in many industry sectors for years. Real estate agents, sales reps, and home healthcare personnel, for example, are on the move to sell houses, meet face-to-face with customers, and aid clients.
Technology, including that which has allowed outsourcing to another state or country, employee expectations for flexibility, and the modern-day realities of commuting times and costs are among the factors that are driving the expansion of the virtual workplace.
While many businesses consider the technological feasibility of allowing employees to do their jobs remotely, there are a number of other considerations to implementing virtual work procedures at your organization.
Erika Tedesco, manager of education and training at Hosparus, a regional hospice provider based in Louisville, Kentucky, emphasizes the need to engage virtual employees. Doing so, she says, requires some foresight and centers on four factors: trust, reward and recognition, relationships, and corporate culture.
“When attempting to build trust,” says Tedesco, “one thing is critical, though often discarded: You must do what you say you are going to do.” Follow-up emails can help confirm and solidify what was said during a virtual meeting. Logging tasks into a project management system can help to ensure that promises made are promises kept.
From an employee-manager relationship, developing a rapport can come down to something as simple as the choice of beverage. Tedesco explains, “knowing whether your employee drinks soda or coffee may not make him more efficient, but it does show the employee that his supervisor pays attention to his needs.”
To recognize remote employees, a manager could send virtual gift certificates to a local coffee shop, mention their performance in the company newsletter, or hold virtual town hall meetings to allow employees to ask questions or to note a successful project.
Members on the same team who don’t see each other on a regular basis don’t have the natural team-building opportunities that can occur over the copy machine, where bonds can develop when discussing the local sports team or children’s activities. Tedesco says that virtual colleagues do tend to have more professional relationships with their co-workers, but knowing some details about each other—such as a favorite place to grab a sandwich—is “actually important in creating roots for long-lasting employee retention and engagement.”
Making sure that everyone is on the same page with respect to corporate culture is often a challenge with remote employees, where it’s easier for signals to get crossed. Tedesco elaborates, “the annual goal may be to ‘increase customer satisfaction,’ but the remote employee may only see emails about cutting costs and managing the budget. That employee would, rightly, assume that the real focus of the organization is financials and not customer satisfaction.”
One suggestion Tedesco offers is to ask employees to describe the corporate culture, and see how their view does or does not align with that of leadership. To ensure that the mission of the organization reaches virtual employees, managers are urged to communicate that mission in email footers, on meeting agendas, and in other formats.
Erika Tedesco is the author of the December ASTD Infoline, “Managing the Virtual Workforce.” She is also the presenter of the Managing a Virtual Workforce webcast.
