These are some of my personal notes from the first annual Telework Summit, held November 10-11, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. You can also download my entire collection of notes as a PDF. If you do, please share them with a friend!
Thriving in the Virtual Workplace
Kate North, e-Work.com
Telework’s single biggest barrier is people. People create the barrier to successful telework when there’s a weakness in the following areas:
- Soft skills
- Management trust
- Information sharing
- Performance expectations
These areas are weakest when people are doing virtual work without training.
Employers are setting new job prerequisites:
- Virtual recruiting
- Remote Employee assessment
Ways to stay “visible” and connected:
- Initiative, contribute, social network, peer to peer discussion, know when to visit office.
- Maintaining credibility
- Managing accountability
- Tracking and reporting
- Manage availability
- Enhancing performance
- Goal setting
- Communicate expectations
- Checking in
- Distribute rewards and recognition
- Effective communication (establish a sense of community with informal talk)
- Effective listening
- Clear expectations
- Telework agreement
- Virtual Meetings
- Promoting/fostering virtual community
- Virtual happy hour, anyone?
Telework is really about distributed work-all workers including in-office.
e-work.com frequently works with corporate real estate personnel to help initiate telework programs within a corporation.
- Utilization of office space = 35%
- gauged by infrared tagging
Answering “Who can Telework?”
- Look process re-engineering opportunities in each role.
- Where can you eliminate physical aspects of the responsibility? (ie. punching time cards, etc.)
View physical reductions as an asset.
