How to Manage Employees in Remote Locations

Put Technology to Work

Goal: Find tools that fit both the job and the people who
use them.

When it comes to technology, there’s only one clear-cut
prescriptive: Let the work dictate the tool. Don’t invest in the
latest whiz-bang technology and then try to figure out how it will be
useful. Phone, email, instant messaging, a company intranet, and a broadband
connection are a good starting point. You can add collaboration software later
and unify your communications if the investment seems worthwhile. For the
low-down on new and popular business technology, see href="http://www.bnet.com/2403-13059_23-166425.html">Ten Tools for Remote Teams. Below are a few
guidelines for making the most of your existing equipment:

Be tech savvy. Beyond the platforms and software your
company uses, you need to continually research the newest tools for the sake of
efficiency and collaboration — often to keep up with what your
savvier team members are already using. Maybe they use IM all day long and you
like the phone. Yes, you call the shots, but ask yourself what will make your people
most productive and satisfied. Maybe it’s time you started using IM,
too. Ask your peers what they like and what they don’t. You can go
online to test drive some tools, like Microsoft’s SharePoint
collaboration software.

Get creative with basic technology. Louisville,
Kentucky-based PR firm Corecubed records conference-call brainstorming sessions
so that participants can truly free-flow their thoughts. “No one’s
taking notes, everyone’s being creative, so it’s great to
have that follow-up,” says Corecubed managing director Merrily Orsini.
She paid $150 at Radio Shack for a digital voice recorder that connects to her
handset. Her admin downloads the recordings to Corecubed’s intranet
site, then transcribes them. Employees refer back to the sessions to refresh their
memories on a topic or check who’s responsible for which tasks.

Set up support systems. Know who will take responsibility
for technical problems on the remote end. This applies particularly to
home-based employees and contractors. At Alpine Access, a Denver-based virtual
call center, technical help has been streamlined for its home-based agents. “We
have a technical support desk that’s able to fix 90 to 95 percent of
computer problems over the Internet,” says CEO Chris Carrington. For
problems that can’t be fixed virtually, Alpine will FedEx a new
thin-client computer to the agent’s home. Carrington says he’d
rather retain the best workers than require, as some companies do, that their
remote workers live within a short drive of company headquarters.

Master the Art of Communication

Goal: Keep you and your employees connected in a
meaningful way.

Lack of communication and the frequency of misinterpretation are
perpetual sore subjects in most workplaces. Add in distance and the challenges
are only amplified. Communicating well encompasses much more than the tools you
use. It’s about how often you use them, what you say, and how you say
it. Here’s how to be deliberate in communicating with the troops.

Start with Standard Ops

Decide what five or so communications guidelines are most
important for your type of work, drive those home, and let the little stuff go.
For example, most managers want to hear about a sensitive or complex issue over
the phone, instead of email, to avoid misunderstandings.

Doc Parghi, senior vice president of sales at software-testing
firm App Labs, works in the company’s Philadelphia headquarters and
has eight direct reports in Utah, India, and the United Kingdom. “In
email, one of the things we’ve never
tolerated is the one-line response,” he says. Company guidelines dictate
that in each email message, the subject line needs to specify the topic and the
primary recipients need to be addressed in the greeting, so that people who are
CC’ed know that they do not need to take any action.

Establish a Routine

It may feel unnatural or overly prescribed, but meeting agendas
and weekly update emails can save you lots of grief when it comes to
communicating with remote teams. Slye of Autodesk says that when one employee admitted
she found their weekly one-on-one phone meetings confusing, the two created a
structure to help their conversations stay on topic. They now spend a half hour
on tactical items, like roles and responsibilities, deadlines, or problems with
a current marketing effort. “Then we close our laptops and go into
brainstorming mode,” Slye says. “In an office environment,
you see someone’s face switching from something general to specific.
There are cues we take from body language.” That’s not the
case when all you have is a voice. Slye and her employee now divide any
correspondence that way, including email and face-to-face meetings.

Allow for Personal Preferences

When people work from afar, the greatest risk you run is that
they won’t reach out to you enough, leaving you out of the loop. As
the manager, you need to encourage them to communicate in the way that’s
most effective and comfortable for them. For example, if you want details from
an employee who’s a slow typist, call her. By contrast, you may use
email more often with a shy employee who would rather type than talk.

Know Your Limits

Workplace consultant Ben Dattner will tell you that most
dispersed teams are not involved in the kind of work that requires constant
collaboration. Creative teams that spend the day brainstorming and building on
each other’s ideas, for example, typically still work inside the same
four walls. Understand what kind of tasks can be done remotely, and what is
still best accomplished by a localized team. For example, ideas can be
generated on a chat room or other collaboration tool, but refining or improving
upon them may require the kind of give and take that only happens in a live
meeting.

Build a Sense of “We”

Goal: Establish strong relationships to fuel
motivation, collaboration, and productivity.

Recent research from the Gallup Organization’s Tom
Rath shows that people with strong friendships at work are more motivated,
loyal, collaborative, and productive. In a typical office, those relationships
form naturally. Across remote locations, you need to foster not just your
connection to your employees, but their connections to each other.

Face Time

To build relationships, there’s no substitute for meeting
face to face. In person, your employees are more likely to tell you about what’s
not working. You’ll better understand their work style, too —
how they make decisions and which types of tasks they’re best suited
for. There’s no set equation for how often to meet, but twice a year
is a good rule of thumb. Many remote managers schedule one-on-ones around
hiring and performance reviews. Team meetings should be scheduled around
planning and decision-making. LaBrosse of Cheetah Learning says her teams meet
in person to kick off a project and again when the project is finished.

Teambuilding gets mixed reviews in the corporate world, but it
takes on greater meaning for people who rarely see one another. Each year the
Corecubed staff converges at Orsini’s home in Louisville, Kentucky, for Derby weekend. “People stay at each other’s
houses, so they get to know them better,” she says. “You see
pictures of the kids and you get to meet the dog. It reinforces our need to
make certain that each of us succeeds.” If you plan a
team gathering, make the time count. Find something everyone will appreciate, schedule
it at a time that won’t impact people getting their work done, and if
someone doesn’t want to participate in social events, don’t
force it.

Rewards and Recognition

The pats on the back that happen informally around the office don’t
come as easily in the virtual world. Remote colleagues need to make greater
effort to recognize each other’s accomplishments, LaBrosse says. Her
employees at Cheetah Learning can hand out 2,000 “Cheetah Points”
to each other every month. When one co-worker helps another solve a difficult
problem, the first may give the second 200 points. At the end of the month,
LaBrosse gives away $500, $300, and $200 worth of gift certificates to the
three people with the most points. “People are happier,” she
says. “We have virtually no turnover.”

Turnover is also low for Alpine Access, which outsources
call-center services using a workforce of entirely home-based agents. A ticker
runs at the bottom of every agent’s computer screen, carrying
messages specific to their team or the client they serve, like J. Crew or 1-800-Flowers.
Team supervisors listen in on calls and immediately transmit messages such as, “Tina
just had a huge sale!” across the network. Then congratulations pile
in from other agents, says Carrington. “You transfer that excitement
to the other agents,” he says. “That can be an immediate
energy pick-me-up. People think. ‘I can do that, too.’”

Manage by Results

Goal: Focus on the quality of your employees’
work, not their style of doing it.

The nuances of how people work, and when, become more pronounced
when you’re remote, but they’re not a good basis for
performance evaluation. Forget points of style — how long it takes an
employee to reply to emails, for example — and focus on the results:
both tangible and intangible. Tangible results might include the proposal an
employee submits for next quarter’s operating plan and whether it’s
comprehensive, on target, and on time. The intangibles are just as important:
whether she collaborates well, makes decisions on her own, delivers what she
promises, anticipates problems before they happen, generates ideas,
communicates clearly, takes responsibility for her work, and goes beyond the
call of duty, say to help a new co-worker get up to speed on a client.

Set goals and expectations. Set and revisit expectations
and goals, and put them in writing. Lay out requirements for the job and the
relative importance to you and the company of meeting deadlines versus
producing quality work, or giving a client what he wants versus the cost to
your organization of giving it to him.

Take notes. Jot quick anecdotes about each employee’s
performance, positive and negative, every few weeks. Your notes become a
starting point for the next performance review.

Require reports. When work has a lot of variables
(clients, contact with the media, etc.), reports give you a glimpse of how
workers are spending their time. Orsini of Corecubed doesn’t
expect people to be at their desks 9 to 5, but since her company bills clients
for time, she asks employees to track their hours and estimate percentages of
time spent on types of tasks.

Ask detailed questions. The more you talk to everyone, the better
sense you’ll get for whether each person on the team is playing the
role they need to. Don’t ask Eric if Andrea is doing her job well.
That puts him on the spot. Ask specific questions about the project they’re
both working on — which tasks he and she are working on this week, and
what challenges they’re having — to get clues about her
role.