Office Politics – Page 52

Telecommuters, raise your hands

According to the KJR Manifesto, relationships precede process (Guideline #4) — before employees can work together effectively they first have to establish trust.

That’s hard enough when employees work in the same locale. Such factors as working on different floors or for rival managers can be enough to prevent it.

It’s harder when there’s no face-to-face interaction, as is the case when some employees work remotely, or when the entire enterprise is virtual. While telepresence technologies have improved, web conferencing software like WebEx and GoToMeeting, Instant Messaging (a necessity, by the way), e-mail, shared files … even teleconferencing … aren’t remotely close

The virtues of a virtual workforce

“You started out with an interesting column, but now it’s just spam. Click.”

Usually I don’t even pick up calls with no caller id. At least it wasn’t a RoboDialer (now called, as I recently learned, “agent-less proactive contact”).

The call was, most likely, in response to my recent InfoWorld article, “10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting.” Everyone’s a critic. Not everyone is so succinct.

When InfoWorld asked me to write about telecommuting, my knowledge was superficial at best, so I asked KJR‘s subscribers to share their experience and insights. 350 replies later I’m officially an expert.

Starting with a realization many discussions don’t make clear, which is that telecommuters come in five distinct flavors (I doubt this is original, although I couldn’t find anything like this breakdown when researching the subject). They are: