Facetime in traditional work settings

I define “facetime” as the unproductive time spent in the office trying to present oneself as being productive.  Whether working on Wall Street or in a software startup, much of traditional business is spent demonstrating one’s commitment to his job and his firm.  Many times, this commitment is measured in hours spent at the office, regardless of actual production.

Productivity — real productivity — is no longer being held up to paradigm of the iron-man employee, working close to 60+ hours a week in the face of a personal life in shambles.  Hours spent at the office is no longer indicative of the real contribution an employee provides to the enterprise.  Just check out how much time is spent at work on non-work, non-productive activities.

Redefining productivity

I propose we define productivity in the post-facetime, digital nomad world as such:

Productivity = amount of completed work + impetus to complete future work

Modern businesses recognize that knowledge workers work best when stimulated by their work balanced with productive lives outside of work (family, community, whatever).

Digital nomads have the best of both worlds.  No longer tethered to our desks, we face the ultimate challenge of defining our work and life spaces completely under our control.  While we’ve moved beyond the time-honored facetime required to progress in traditional business settings, though, we’re faced with the prospect of completely losing ourselves to our work.  If our home is our office, our struggle is working too much, not too little, as the lines between work and life are blurred.

How to avoid burnout on the work front

When facing a work day that has no beginning or end, a common digital nomad maladay is burnout.  Here are a few tips gleaned from web workers to stay fresh and productive.

• create a work schedule: without one, workers tend to work all day.  By scheduling work time and personal time into a hectic day, digital nomads maintain healthy boundaries.

• taking vacation time: digital nomads tend to thrive on worker hard and worker long hours.  There has to be some way to completely (or close to it) unplug.  Downtime is necessary for future productivity.

• convene team/group meetings: getting together in person with other team members helps to bring untethered workers back from work nevernever land.  It helps centers workers and put work into a social context.

• Google workers can appropriate some of their work time to work on projects that interest them personally.  Nomads should learn from the great GOOG.

How to avoid sacrificing your personal life on the altar of digital nomadism

While much ink is spilled over keeping productive on the work front, if we believe that a balanced life brings more productivity for the mobile worker, keeping a healthy personal life is just as important.

• all the previous points above help create delineation between work and life

• finding hobbies unrelated to work: many digital nomads take to hobbies that are quai-related to their day jobs, like blogging or podcasting.  While these pursuits are certainly admirable and fun, they are too contextually related to one’s day job to perform separation and recharge.

• exercise: you can’t work when you’re profusely sweating and breathing heavily.

• have kids (lots of ‘em): kids keep you young.  kids keep you (extremely) busy.  Kids also help keep you centered and focused on what’s really important.

Bringing it all together

Balance is key.  Digital nomads are prone to sacrifice future productivity for current work.  Balancing work and life is essential in finding a groove for workers on the go.  Being able to define our working lives around our personal lives is a tremendous opportunity and challenge, but we really can have our cake and eat it too.  We just need to make sure we can pull ourselves away from work to really be able to enjoy it.

Buzzword Clarification

First, I want to clarify some of the buzz words relevant to this discussion.  ‘In-house’ means that they work for you, but not necessarily in your building.  ‘In-house’ contrasts with ‘outsourcing’.  ‘On-site’ means they work physically with you in your building.  ‘On-site’ contrasts with a ‘remote employee’ — both may be in-house, or one or the other may be outsourced.  An example of on-site outsourcing is the common on-site contract employee.  An example of an in-house remote would be me — I work as a full-time employee of a company that also employs my manager full-time at a different location hundreds of miles away.

Fundamental Lack of Structure?

The context of the question presupposes a biased answer — that being a remote employee somehow implies an inescapable lack of structure compared with working on-site.  I have years of experience on remote teams, and I see no evidence of a fundamental difference in the structure of work required when working remote vs. working in an office.  I have noticed that some managers are good at getting results from employees and others are not, regardless of where the employees are located.

Mangement By Walking Around

I will concede that some management techniques for on-site employees will not work for remote employees.  However, I argue that this subset of management styles is not particularly effective and will inevitably be either replaced or supplemented with a more effective technique that would work for either remote or on-site employees.  For example, if the only management style used at an organization is ‘management by walking around’, how much more effective would that become if the manager followed up new tasks or updates with emails?  Since those emails would be just as effective for remote employees, I conclude that the email follow-up is actually doing the bulk of the work, while the ‘walking around’ is more of a morale boost for the high-context employees.  Unfortunately, the ‘walking around’ style condones the retention of chronic underperformers as described below.

Chronic Underperformance

On the topic of chronic underperformance, I don’t buy that location and performance are as interrelated as the question implies.  Either an employee wants to and is capable of getting the job done or they don’t want to/aren’t capable.  Consider the employee that requires physical babysitting, in person, in order to get the job done.  Without email follow up, there is no way to demonstrate that what was tasked was understood, requiring yet more ‘walking around’ management.  Over time, this employee may decide that the only things that are important are the ones that management decides to stop in and tell him or her about.  This employee may resign to being unproductive anytime management is away — thus, they are absorbing management time and money constantly, regardless of their location.  As soon as I discovered I had an employee like that on staff, I would no longer be interested in retaining their services.  I don’t care what discount I’m getting to have a warm body in the building, if they are not productive without constant supervision, they are wasting my time and money.  However, I can prove their effectiveness by following up with a consistent and verifiable communication strategy.  There can never be an argument over an email follow-up such as: “we discussed XYZ, let me know if you have any reasons this wouldn’t work, otherwise i will assume you can get it done by the date and time specified, and in the manner specified.”*

Working Remote Optionally

I believe this strategy works especially well when employees have the option to work remotely.  This option helps because high-context workers will gravitate towards working on-site, while low-context workers will graviatate towards working remotely.  Low-context workers may be especially irritated by ‘walking around’ management, while workers from high-context cultures will likely thrive from the extra direct attention.  By providing these options, situations where low-context workers or high-context workers were not happy in their existing situation would be diffused, and both types of people would become more productive.  Finally, once this option is allowed, no longer will the chronic underperformers be masked by unhappy low-context workers — underperformers should have no further management process-related excuses.

A Consistent Communication Strategy is Paramount

Many underperforming employees will complain about a lack of communication, for example that they are waiting for responses in order to continue working.  Thus, it is up to management to set the ground rules for responsiveness by email, voice, internet, etc. on project updates, and management must adhere to those updates themselves.  Underperforming employees may have a valid point in arguing that a lack of two-way communication is the cause of their apparent lack of productivity, so I believe that underperforming managers would be as much to blame in a situation of apparent low output (remote or on-site) as an underperfoming employee.  The manager must communicate upstream in situations where projects are stalled because of lack of communication.  As long as enough trackable communication is happening, there should be no unjustifiable delays.

* This email must be worded appropriately for workers depending on the context of their culture.  For more information, I recommend posting a question on the difference in email communication styles between employees from high-context cultures vs. low-context cultures. ]]> http://whitepaper.digitalnomads.com/2009/01/remote-management/feed/ http://whitepaper.digitalnomads.com/2009/01/communicate-communicate-communicate/ http://whitepaper.digitalnomads.com/2009/01/communicate-communicate-communicate/#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:07:42 +0000 Brent Lamphier http://whitepaper.digitalnomads.com/?p=496 ]]>

Managing the internet generation, or the ‘I can work from a coffee shop in Paris’ 30 somethings doesn’t require constant diligence or even much management… instead, the manager of a digital workforce simply must INVOLVE the digital nomad the same way they involve employees sitting in the office next to them.

COMMUNICATE the day to day triumphs and challenges.  Nomads typically prefer the road to the desk life, but the still need to feel an active part of the business.  A quick email about a new biz dev deal or an exciting bug fix is well worth the 3 minutes it takes to write.

COMMUNICATE how the employee will be evaluated.  From the beginning, you must explain how, when, and against what metrics, quota, or production the digital nomad will be evaluated.  People can’t break goals if they don’t know what the goals are.

COMMUNICATE on the nomad’s terms.  A person who has renounced the office life typically has the quirks, and their own form of communication.  Whether it’s via email, phone, skype, IM, twitter, text, or facebook messaging, adapt to their medium, don’t expect them to adapt to yours.

Finally, spend a day with them how they work (unless of course they really are in Paris) if you can afford it, as you’ll gain new appreciation for the lifestyle, and a better understanding of your employee.

Ask almost anyone if it’s important for them to stay in touch with their coworkers and they’ll say “of course!” Digital nomads will respond the same way, and at surface level there are a variety of services available to keep in touch with peers. But before listing off a variety of trendy new web sites to visit with the latest twist on sending text and media to each other, it’s important to stop for a moment to think about why people stay connected with their teammates in the first place.

Why should digital nomads stay connected with their team?

• Team members can point out new problems they’re encountering in the field with customers or business processes and share it with the greater group.
• For leadership, it’s important to regularly communicate with the team on what initiatives are the highest priorities, and share any changes to the strategic direction. It helps everyone continue to focus on what benefits the overall success of the company instead of tunneling into pet projects.
• Whenever a team member shares a story about how they screwed up with a customer and what they did afterward, it’s an immense payload for any company. People are drawn to problems, they’re curious about situations that don’t look squeaky clean and perfect. They’re more likely to take the time to read a post about a problem, and if there isn’t already a happy ending they may assist with working toward a good solution. In the end team members are learning from their peers’ mistakes.
  • Sometimes it can also be effective to hear from customers directly and collaborate on solutions. Get Satisfaction does that very well, in a fun way.
• Logistically, communicating helps to organize events like product launches, conferences and networking opportunities. It keeps schedules in sync.
  • There are a variety of solutions, but Google Calendar works well (installing Google Apps is even better). Backpack is another good option with lots of collaboration and project tracking built in.
• Brainstorming is always the most effective with multiple people. For digital nomads that’s difficult without an easy-to-use digital communication medium.
  • A great way to share ideas online is through digital whiteboards. That allows digital nomads to quickly sketch out ideas for discussion. Skrbl is a great example.
• The web is big on mob wisdom right now, and it’s no different for teams inside a company. Whenever a problem surfaces, exposing it to many viewpoints all at once will usually result in a pretty smart suggestion or decision.
  • Yahoo Answers, Digg, and Mixx are all examples of sites that use mob wisdom effectively.

Even with all of those advantages, there are times when it makes the most sense for digital nomads to work independently. Help point them toward effective communication tools but don’t create an expectation of hyperconnectedness. That will add stress and detract from productivity.

Why is it important to preserve independence for digital nomads?

• Sometimes people need space to experiment without fear of judgment. Working independently creates space to work with different ideas without the pressure of delivering an instant, ideal solution.
• Independent exploration frequently yields more diverse idea sets. After creating those ideas digital nomads will be looking for ways to share and grow them with peers.
• Too much collaboration can distract from individual goals.

Beyond the services listed above, a combination of phone, e-mail, instant messaging and a little Twittering usually takes care of the essential communications.

We set up base in a rented trailer, and I learned a lot of tricks about coping with the mobile lifestyle. Rule #1: Everyone carries a cell phone. For redundancy, when people left the trailer, they also carried a short-range two-way radio. The important people even carried pagers. The truth is there’s already plenty of ways to keep in constant communication. What’s needed is a commitment to using them.

A lot of the work was done “in the field,” usually abandoned buildings that dated to World War II. But our mobile workers were expected to maintain daily communication with their offices back home. The IT department kept their laptops up-to-date, making sure they had dial-up lines that were always secure to connect to the corporate network. From there they’d download their email, and important files were often circulated as email attachments but each region also had a file directory on the corporate network, where each worker received a subdirectory. This made it even easier to swap files from one desktop to another. (For bulkier hard copies, we’d still use Federal Express, but with our corporate network, it was easier to copy the file into a remote directory and let them print out their own copy!)

But best of all, when workers logged into the corporate network, the messaging application also detected their presence and updated their online status. People with questions would know when to seize the opportunity for a conversation — and messaging allowed several real-time conversations at the same time. Needless to say, everyone also took their phone lists very seriously, and the secretaries were very diligent in keeping them up-to-date (including a date on the phone list to make sure no one had the old contact information). Email actually became a second choice, when messaging wasn’t an option or a real-time response wasn’t required. Again, it’s a case where the technology exists for everyone to communicate, and what makes it work is a commitment from the workers in the field.

And all our workers were very serious about keeping their batteries charged…

But our on-site manager always tried to maintain a “human” connection, and scheduled a regular conference call every week. (Even if there was nothing to discuss, remote managers would dial-in so that everyone would receive the same status updates.) My next employer took this one step further, with web-based chat rooms. Using “presenter” software, they could share their screen view with everyone else in a conference call. (Messages could also be typed in a chat room below the window, but this was superfluous since we already had a voice connection). This was surprisingly useful, since the meeting “moderator” didn’t need to prepare a full presentation. Since we were working on building web sites, they’d simply lead everyone through a “walkthrough” of the past and current pages while describing the key features that needed to be discussed. One worker even pointed a webcam at himself, creating a cheap and effective one-way teleconference!

The tools exists. All that’s needed is a commitment to using them.

If you manage enough different people, in enough different jobs, you get to realize there is one universal truth about how to get the best from people: that there are no universal truths about how to get the best from people. People come in many shapes, colors and sizes, whether you look at them from the outside, or are trying to get inside their head. Some people are more motivated by what is in their compensation package. Others are driven by the prospect of promotion. Whilst high-achievers tend to get the most management attention, not every job is, or should be, ideal for high-achievers. Every team, even a team of nomads, will have some jobs that are better suited to the less ambitious. The goal of a good manager is to maximize motivation and productivity overall. This requires a mix of pragmatism, amateur psychology, listening skills and trial and error. There are lots of motivational techniques, just like there are lots of different people. You would not motivate an artist the way you would motivate a salesman. To some extent, you can infer what motivates people just from their choice of job. To take a simple example, gregarious people typically seek jobs that give them social contact, and will often be motivated by the praise, esteem, or signs of status given to them by managers and peers. It is a manager’s job to look for the best ways to get his team motivated and productive. Inevitably, this will involve a regular striving to find the best approach for the individuals in the team. This will involve a mixture of tried and tested techniques, and new ideas to avoid the feeling that the team or manager has become stale.

I managed to get a whole paragraph into this answer before I mentioned technology. Why am I not starting by talking about the digital aspect of digital nomads? There are two reasons. First, people who make, supply or work with technological products and services are equally as likely to have chosen a career that suits their personality. That will influence their opinion on what a remote worker needs, but there are lots of digital nomads who have no interest in the technology itself, and only use it as a means to an ends. It is worth remembering that when trying to make the leap of imagination from what the technologist offers to what the user really wants and needs. Even that last sentence does the user is a disservice, as if one user was just like the next. Each user is an individual. That axiom is the starting point for good management of people. Being wary of the potential bias of technologists (and of the would-be business gurus that surround them) is doubly important, because the user may not always know, or be able to express, what they really want and need from technology. However, they can usually tell what does not work, once they start to use it. The evidence for that can be found lying dusty in desk drawers, in the form of expensive gadgets that failed to live up to expectations. What is more, for every surprisingly successful innovation, there will be another supposed sure-fire winner that turns into a flop. Of course, the disappointed technologist may wonder what is wrong with people, whenever they fail to appreciate his product. We might as well ask why people behave differently to the way we expect them to. It is probably at then that we remember there may have been factors that motivated their behavior, but which we had not considered.

The second reason for not mentioning technology in the opening paragraph is that technology involves the art of what is possible. Just because something is possible, does not mean it is desirable. Just as importantly, what is desirable to one person may not be desirable to the next. Technological straightjackets may fit some people perfectly, but leave others very uncomfortable. Freedom suits some, but is a burden to others who prefer structure and order. Freedom also carries a burden of responsibility, and may be open to abuse. By the same token, staff that crave freedom may, consciously or otherwise, use it to evade important tasks which then have to be taken on by other team members. A good manager seeks the right balance of skills and motivation in his team, and also the right range of tools that they can utilize. Digital technology is a tool, which can be used to enable remote working. This analysis is about the relationship between people and the technology that enables them to work on the move. The technology defines what is possible for remote and distributed workers. To understand motivation for mobile workers, and what they need and want from technology and management, first we need to identify what kinds of work there are, and how they determine the manager’s goals.

Necessary Mobility vs. Freedom and Flexibility

It is possible to forget that there were mobile workers long before there were mobile computers or mobile phones. Some jobs require people to be on the road, whether it be a salesman, home decorator, or business consultant. With jobs like these, mobile productivity is about helping the worker to be more efficient, by enabling them to do things that would otherwise require a return to base, or by simplifying the communications that take place between them and their colleagues. One good but striking example of how mobile technology can help nomadic workers would be firefighters who use camera phones to relay images of the injured people they rescue, so a hospital can be prepared for the kinds of treatment needed. Another example is sending constantly updated work schedules to domestic plumbers, so they avoid wasting time on cancelled appointments.
In contrast, improvements in technology have permitted many jobs to become mobile like never before. The freedom to work from home or on business trips (whether they are frequent or infrequent) can be motivational in itself, as well as a providing a way to improve productivity. Staff and managers in this situation will already tend to have established methods and protocols for monitoring productivity and motivation. The challenge is to translate them to a format that continues to be successful when the worker is away from the office. The benefit is that the worker makes better use of their time, which allows productivity and motivation to rise. Balanced against this, the manager must find ways of monitoring results as a substitute for face-to-face discussions.

Productivity of the Individual vs. Productivity of the Group

For remote workers, digital technology may play a part in improving productivity, maintaining motivation, or both. The degree of mobile interaction needed will vary greatly from job to job. Some jobs need people to be able to be in regular contact, be it with other people or with computers. Others do not. The right technology solutions can have a positive impact, whether or not connectivity is continuous, frequent, rare, or never needed. What makes for the right technology will depend on how much contact is needed. Ease of communication may be vital. Ease of communication may also be counter-productive, if it only serves to increase distractions. For example, an employee that spends the whole day on email may not just be wasting their own time; they may also be wasting the time of others. They may also demotivate their colleagues. Correctly scoping the digital solutions to be appropriate for the task will make a big difference. Connectivity needs to be designed to fit the tasks being performed. What kind and degree of connectivity is needed will be influenced by whether productivity is most easily measured and understood in terms of the individual, or in terms of the team.

Location, Location, Location

The style of interaction can be heavily influenced by how often people come into contact with each other. If two people often work together in person, their interactions when apart will typically be different to two people who rarely or never meet. When dealing with another person, we all subconsciously pick up information about how to interpret each other’s meanings and behavior. This learning activity is augmented when we can combine all the cues of body language and vocal intonation with the content of what is being said. There is a greater risk of a misunderstanding between two people who have only ever spoken over the telephone or sent each other emails. There are also fewer social moderators, meaning people who have never met may be more likely to express irrational and unpleasant levels of anger towards each other. The right approach to productivity and motivation will partly depend on the frequency and ease of arranging face-to-face meetings. There may will also be a cultural context to understand, especially when working relationships span international borders.

When long distances make personal contact rare or impractical, care is needed to design tools and processes to avoid the potential for confusion. This might come down to something as simple as selecting a carrier based on the quality of the audio and giving staff good handsets and headsets to make it easier for them to hear each other clearly. At the other extreme, it might manifest as adopting structured forms of communication, where both sides follow a pre-defined workflow. Similarly, when personal contact is rare, there is value in formally scheduling activities to help people to get to know each other. A simple example would be to ask members of a distributed team to take turns talking about their life outside of work, at some point in a regular team call. Of course, where distances mean that personal get-togethers are feasible, it is worth pursuing both formal and informal avenues that will help staff to get to know each other.

The Nuts and Bolts of Motivating Nomads

Frederick Herzberg’s two factor theory of job satisfaction can give a manager a useful method for understanding the needs of his own team. For example, Herzberg’s split of work characteristics into those that promote satisfaction, and those that promote dissatisfaction, suggests that the ability to make contact, if contact is needed to perform work efficiently, will be an aspect of ‘hygiene’. This means the worker will become dissatisfied if contact is not possible or is inordinately difficult, but the worker will not become satisfied just because there are no problems with connectivity. In short, the first concern for any manager is that his team can connect with the people and machines they need to connect with, when they want and need to connect with them. This will be a lot less problematic for people who work as separate individuals. It is also a relative straightforward issue for people who work primarily with machines, such as a DBA. Their hygiene needs come down to the machines being on and being accessible, and there being a working and uninterrupted connection between them and the machine. In contrast, for people who work with other people, the hygiene needs of nomads may be much more complicated. If the people they need to liaise with are in a different time zone, or are out of contact for unpredictable periods, this might become a source of frustration. The manager may need to reign in the freedoms of some team members in order to find a workable compromise with others. For people who are outside of the control of the manager, such as customers, care will be needed to set and communicate expectations that are reasonable for both the customer and staff.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, social motivators come above more basic physical needs and the desires for safety and security. Physical needs largely fall outside of the concerns of a manager, but the most extreme examples of workplaces where communication devices are ‘always on’ will ultimately impact the physical wellbeing of a member of staff. Differences in timezones and the expectation that staff are always contactable can ultimately interfere with the basic individual needs to find time to eat, rest and sleep. Again, managers may permit a high degree of autonomy to staff who do not deal with customers and largely work solo. Where human connections are important, some boundaries must be in place to ensure staff do not feel that their most basic human requirements can be infringed upon by work. In terms of safety and security, staff also need to feel that their nomadic tendencies does not increase the risk to them. This can involve basic measures like not expecting staff to visibly carry expensive equipment in dangerous neighborhoods, and trying to provide staff with simple ways to ensure data and communications are protected from eavesdropping or theft. In other words, staff should not feel that their remote connection is a pipeline to be spied upon, there must be a distinction between communications that are for the business and those that are private, and techniques like encryption and data backup, which are designed to safeguard company assets, should be realized with minimal fuss or burden to the user. At the top end of Maslow’s hierarchy, some nomads will feel that they miss out on the social needs that would be satisfied in a traditional workplace. Managers need to understand this, and try to offer alternatives as far as possible. This may involve making special arrangements for occasional social events and team-building, or may just mean that the manager places an emphasis on regular or daily conversations between fellow members of the team. In the latter case, the manager should probably avoid the temptation to terminate communications as soon as the business is completed, because in a face-to-face meeting there will often be some informal chit-chat as the meeting gathers and winds down. It makes sense to try to recreate this even when workers are remote.
The biggest challenge for remote working will involve tasks that are highly collaborative. Managers may need to take a more technological approach to enabling these tasks to be performed effectively when people are not in the same room. At the low end of the spectrum, conference calls can be augmented with on-line chat rooms and whiteboards, permitting people to use multiple channels to get their point across without interrupting the headline messages. In very structured activities, such as formal processes for approval of large expenditures, or collaborative technical design work, an automated or semi-automated workflow may be increasingly important to keep work progressing rapidly and correctly if workers are remote from each other. For less structured activities, easily accessible and extendable reference sources like wikis can be adopted by teams which need to work with a lot of information but do not have a fixed process to follow. Distributed teams often benefit from having a collective ‘memory’, like a wiki or documents which permit easy tracking of changes, which everyone can access and add to as they go along.

Not Forgetting Cost and Availability…

Availability, especially for communication, is a vital ingredient in getting the best motivation and productivity. Like Goldilocks, you do not want too much or too little, but to get it just right. Availability often links to cost, because increased availability tends to encourage increased use. Managing cost is not just an aspect of negotiation with a service provider, but also with employees. Many businesses make the mistake of failing to set clear expectations about the degree they expect their remote workers to communicate with each other. This may be because they are unsure of how much is needed, or have performed no analysis of historic records. In the worst cases, an employee may be very seriously demotivated if they feel, on one hand, that they are being forced to work extended hours because they must always be available, but, on the other hand, they are being reprimanded or treated suspiciously because of the costs incurred by their high levels of usage.

Levels of availability may be too low because of technical or human reasons. On a technical level, a communications solution may be unreliable, too slow at certain times of day, or frequently be unavailable because network coverage does not match where the user is. On a human level, people may simply be switching off their devices. A track record of technical causes for interruptions in communication increases the likelihood that people will use that excuse when deliberately making themselves uncontactable.
Levels of availability may also be too high. The rise of Blackberry has made this more apparent. Even if people feel like they are working all the time, they may be unproductive. Everybody needs downtime. The ability to contact people in an emergency may easily get abused and end up becoming a substitute for the proper planning and scheduling of work. Sometimes snap decisions are vital, but other times they reflect a failure to properly plan the decision-making process itself. The problem of extending the hours for work can be greatly exacerbated when people are also expected to communicate with customers, colleagues or suppliers in different time zones.

Excessive use of digital technology may harm more than an employee’s mental well-being. There may also be physical symptoms. Responsible employers need to be wary of excessive use, even if the member of staff appears happy with their work. The media may have exaggerated the risk of ‘Blackberry thumb’, a risk most prominently identified by Alan Hedge, PhD, Director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics research group at Cornell University, but repetitive strain, eyesight problems and headaches are recognized symptoms of excessive use of information technology. Devices designed to be mobile, because they typically are smaller in size, may further exacerbate this problem if staff use them all the time. On the other hand, employers also need to keep the load of their staff by purchasing equipment that is light to carry. If staff exhibit physical symptoms on a regular basis, prompt action should be taken. This may involve changing or augmenting the equipment, or it may involve a change of behavior. Either way, prevention is better than cure, and ailing workers are unproductive workers.

It is useful to establish some ground rules and expectations for when it is appropriate, and when it is not appropriate, to make contact. Managers should identify and tell their teams which hours they expect people to be available for their core work, which hours they may be available for “special” reasons, and which hours they should be considered out of contact. Alongside this, people benefit from guidance as to what really is special exception, and what is just a sign of over-zealousness, or sloppy time management. Rules of thumb like this will help to focus attention on what really needs to be done during the working day, and also encourages people to be realistic about the time taken for every task. On the flipside, it makes it easier to identify and handle those remote workers suspected of shirking their duties. In some cases, suspected slackers will see the situation very differently, and genuinely believe they are just finding a balance with those occasions where they have worked long or anti-social hours. Increased flexibility can be very appealing, but it greatly complicates the task of monitoring the balance and stress of workloads. Rigid rules may be unworkable in practice, but rules of thumb will help both managers and their staff to maintain an accurate view of work levels. This in turn will help everyone to ensure that temporary deviations from normal working routines really are just temporary.

Availability and use may also be linked with cost. Businesses may find it is best to negotiate flat-rate deals as far as possible, where the price paid is not linked to the level of service usage. Eat all you want deals may sometimes work out slightly more expensive for the real levels of usage needed by the firm, but it is worth factoring in the management time freed up instead of spent on chasing pennies. There are limits to what can be negotiated, though, especially for businesses where staff travel across borders. The most common forms of control are to set a budget which gets reviewed on a monthly basis, or expecting staff to pay costs and submit explain claims with justifications. Neither approach is ideal. Budgets can to be misused, being set too low initially and then making the worker justify why it should be set higher. This approach focuses on the measurables rather than reason why you have workers. Discouraging them from communicating may ultimately serve to discourage them from doing the work they should be doing. Expense procedures also help to keep costs down, and ensure they are justifiable, but even good justifications will usually be nebulous and subjective. For example, one customer may enjoy a lot of tangential conversation with a supplier, whilst another may prefer to keep conversations short and business-like. If communication is an integral to a job, it should be possible to offer some guidance as to the amount of time a worker should allocate to it. If it is hard to define expectations, then a degree of trust is needed. In this case, managers can measure the individual based on the important metrics relating to the results they are meant to deliver, and if the communication levels are not wildly out of line, or the itemization does not highlight lots of personal use, then they must trust that the member of staff is making appropriate use of the communications services provided for work. When workers travel abroad, managers need to judge by the level of use, and not by the total cost, as a member of staff may exert some control over how much they use a service, but are not in control of the different rates that apply in different countries. In general managers will get better results if they avoid creating a conflict in the mind of their staff, by looking at numbers on a spreadsheet for the costs of telecommunications, and looking at numbers on a spreadsheet or project plan when assessing the revenues earned or progress made. It is better that manager tries to understand the relationship between the two. So long as they are in line with each other, further instruction to staff to work more whilst keeping costs down will probably only cause confusion and demotivate the team.

… And Remembering the Personal Cost

Monitoring cost and use of connectivity is useful, both to manage costs and as a metric relating to the work being done. This monitoring needs to be done by line managers close to the specifics of the job being performed, and to the specifics of the individual. This also relates to the appropriateness of personal use. Again, when it comes to personal use, one size does not fit all, though it will be hard for any business to state this openly. Workers who spend a long time on the road have different motivational issues to office workers who occasionally work from home. Remote working takes staff away from their loved ones. Different people will cope with this differently, but communicating with friends and family is one important mechanism. Drawing a sharp distinction between personal and business use may not be in the best interests of the business, if it leads to unhappy workers. I know of one business that sacked a salesman because of his expensive cellphone bills, incurred whilst driving around the country. He was also their best salesman. Even if his bills had been out of line with the revenues he generated, a debatable point at best, he was generating revenues that made it worth suffering those bills. The salesman’s attitude was that he was calling his clients, and building good relationships. His employer’s attitude was that there were too many personal calls. Either way, the employer might have been wiser to focus on the overall results - good revenues and a happy employee - than looking at the costs in isolation. Had they changed the salesman’s behaviour, and discouraged his personal use, it may only have had a negative impact on motivation and productivity. What is striking about this example is that sales is a function where measuring productivity is very straightforward, and still this business focused on costs rather than productivity. If costs really were an issue, a better approach would have been to negotiate an allowance for personal calls as part of the salesman’s remuneration. Discouraging abuse of corporate resources is important, but it also helps to apply common sense and look to see if the emotional needs of digital nomads are also being taken care of.

Concluding Thoughts

Like so many things, motivating digital nomads, and getting the best productivity from them involves compromise. Look for the technology that fits the task as well as the people. That can mean selecting solutions that are very specialized or even bespoked for the particular needs of the job. It may also mean knowing what you do not need, and what could end up being a distraction. Be prepared for to learn something new about your team’s social dynamics and what motivates the individuals that comprise it, as well as learning about the technology. Monitoring use is vital, but needs to treat individuals as individuals, not automatons. What works well for one member of staff may not work so well for another. Management needs to be brave, not just when rolling in technology and ways of working, but also when it comes time to realize something is not working and needs to be rolled back again. Cheap and basic technology can be more productive than the latest tech-wizardry, if people know how to use it and it actually fits the needs of the job. Greater sophistication, and greater capability, also spells more risk. Mitigate those risks by really thinking through what the members of the team actually do, and ensure the tools supplied actually help them to do that. Be conscious of how the staff actually work and how being remote alters all of their interactions.

Managers need to maintain a clear distinction in their minds about what they are trying to achieve with mobility. It could be that they are trying to make essentially mobile jobs more productive, or it could be that they are transforming jobs that do not need to be mobile, by allowing staff to be more productive when away from their base. In the former case, the same management rules as always applied, so the manager needs to be on the lookout for ways to get more from his team by giving them better technology. In the latter situation, the manager needs to manage the transition, with a view to showing, rather than assuming, that his team enjoy higher satisfaction levels and increased productivity as a result of the tools they have for mobile working. If not, there may always be a need to revert to a more traditional workplace-oriented dynamic.

Mobile working places a burden on the individual to find alternative ways to manage their own time and avoid distractions. The manager can give advice, but ultimately it is up to the individual to find what works for them. When gauging the benefits that might be expected from mobility, it is worth observing that the amount of time and trouble people will expend on finding a more efficient way to perform a task will be correlated to how often they perform that task. As such, constant and regular nomads will make more effort to tackle the particular burdens and issues of remote working than will the occasional traveller.

Managers must also fit their approach to the degree of teamwork and inter-connectedness needed from their people. To begin, the manager must assess whether a particular role involves a lot of teamwork or inter-dependencies with other people’s work, or if it mostly involves work that is stand-alone. This will determine the right ways to monitor and assess performance of nomads. To help nomads, managers should be active in the selection and, if necessary, tailoring of the remote working tools. They should also listen to staff, whilst remembering that what people think and say does not always perfectly match what they do in practice. If work involves structured communication or workflows, a manager should consider the benefits of implementing additional technology to support them when workers are remote from each other. In contrast, flexibility can be appealing and be a strong motivational aid to the right person in a suitable job. Managers need to be simultaneously aware of the pitfalls of workers being distracted or needing to reinvent processes if the tools they use whilst working remotely, and the conventions for use that surround them, are too flexible. Finally, managers should remember that motivation and productivity ultimately has a link to the employee’s well-being. A caring manager, who clearly communicates expectations, will tend to foster a loyal, hard-working and appreciative team. Managers that treat individuals as individuals, no matter where they are, will always win more respect.

Disclosure like this feels strange. At first. And then something unusual happens. We get used to it. It starts to feel familiar. Like being in an open plan office where you overhear smalltalk, see people come and go. Or having a break room where you catch up with people a little bit here and there.

And then presence becomes useful.

People use our signals. Strangers decide if they should introduce themselves. Colleagues decide when they should interrupt, and for what. And that makes your life better, because the people around you are making better choices about when and how to engage with you.

We use many tools to broadcast our presence. Twitter, blogs, public calendars, job sites, project status systems, IM mood messages. Even simple things like IM and email. So long as the people in your world can easily see and update, which tools don’t matter too much.

Because presence is a social interaction. You share yours. You consume others’. And through this, you get to know each other in ways that may be more intimate and current than if you were in the same physical office.

Collective presence is what it sounds like. A stream or a place where you can see what a group of people are doing. Where you aggregate your group’s presence signals.

Collective presence is a mix of informal, unstructured, casual talk and structured messages. The Europeans in our team are coming online now. The programmers are working through a pre-release checklist. Someone’s dealing with a problem today.

Members of a team experience this collective presence through group chats, like IRC’s or Skype’s persistent chat rooms, or a listserv. At Skype Journal, we augment group chats with RSS aggregators and other software that pull in team member blogs, twitter updates, public calendars, public bookmarks, new photos and illustrations. So all through the day we keep in touch.

So I have a few lessons to share.

First, social media and presence tools sustain bonds that help a team know and trust each other.

Second, collective presence cultivates situational awareness. So people make better choices about what is important, what is urgent and what needs resources.

Third, collective presence means you are not alone. When those feelings of isolation kick in, it’s easy to drop into the group chat and see what everyone’s been up to.

The essence of productivity is choosing the right things to do and doing them. Collective presence makes remote team productivity easier and more immediate.

My toolkit:

• Skype public chats, Skype contact groups
• iGoogle and Google Reader (aggregating news and blog feeds)
• twitter, TwitterBar (so I can post from Firefox), TweetDeck (aggregating tweets), Twype (putting my latest twitter into my Skype mood),
• Yahoo!’s flickr (images), delicious (bookmarks), upcoming (events)
• Google Groups for email lists

A happy nomad is a productive nomad. Happiness is measured on three dimensions:

1.  The right tools
2.  The right time
3.  The right place

The right tools are self evident, in order to do a good job the nomad must be armed with both the right tool, be it email, connectivity or development tools.  Equally important is an actionable IT policy and local administration rights that allow the nomad to install any additional tactical tools that they need to be productive.  Typically nomads are your more experiened staff with a proven worth and allowing them to roam is a decision taken to retain them.  However out of sight, out of mind is all too easy for managers who manage through proximity.  Don’t forget that what makes your nomad useful is their skill, they do need to be able to keep their skills up to date and aligned to the business and re-skill when required.

The right time is the second dimension that keeps nomads productive.  In the age of the knowledge worker and the global business there are as many personal reasons for a nomadic lifestyle being attarctive as there are business models.  Long commutes, distances from the head office, satellite operations and a global customer base all create influences on staff that make remote working compelling.  Family is a key facet that makes people consider becoming a nomad.  Being able to work first thing in the morning, then have breakfast with the kids before walking them to school. Coming back to work and then sharing dinner with the family before finishing up for the day.  This kind of flexibility cannot typically be offered by an office based business model but giving a worker this opportunity could be the differetiator for retention. When a worker wants to work is when they will their most productive.

The right place will vary depending on role but it main idea is it is what the nomad sees as right and not what is dictated by a cookie cutter approach to office design.  Where many companies could benefit is by bringing some of the place thinking inside the company environment.  The move to hotdesking and roaming has led to an inpersonal, sterile work place that does not lend itself to productivity. For some it’s music, others photos whatever it is that makes the worker feel comfortable should be considered.

Manager Centric:

For many managers what you can’t see you can’t control.  This makes nomads an unknown entity that many managers don’t or can’t trust.  The reality is that the benefits a nomad gets from being remote, their happiness, usually means they actually work harder than their office bound colleagues.  It is just as easy to dodge work sitting at a desk in the office but proximity is still king.

Nomads can be found in the office place, they face the same challenges as “real nomads” but you might not see them.  The worker that comes in early to bypass the traffic gets more work done in the first two hours of the day before the rest of the staff arrive.  They often work without the standard support structures (IT, HR, admin staff).  How many of these workers aren’t treated the same as their colleagues because they are seen leaving the office at 4pm?

The other nomads amongst us are those that have managers working in a different office (often in a different country).  Even though they are in the office they still have to sell trust to their distant manager that they are working and pulling their weight.  These semi-nomads are accepted so why shouldn’t we learn from their examples and apply to full-nomads?

Many managers still want to know for sure that the nomad is working.  This is a problem that has been solved by at home call centre providers and freelance for hire type businesses.  Arise provides call centre agents that work from home.  Freelance sources oDesk offers coders and writers for hire from their home (or working location).  The trust is given by the buyer (read manager) being able to track how the worker is working.  Measuring key strokes and taking hourly screenshots provides evidence that the nomad is being productive.  In the case of oDesk this information is used to form the basis of the billable charges.

Such technology could be used to check up on your nomads.  However many would reject it as too big brother.  A good compromise could be to use it as part of a probation period to help the nomad sell the proof that they can be productive when away.

This is the challenge facing todays mobile work force, so how do we enable an equivalent environment?

Many would say that the internet becomes the office, IM becomes the water cooler/kitchen or the quick discussion with a colleague, wikis become the filing cabinet or network drive.  These all work with varying degrees of success but some of the key elements for me are missing.

Where is the whiteboard where you can scratch out some ideas? how do we enable small team theory to work, how/when do we form –> storm –> norm –> perform?

There are lots of IM’s that enable many-to-many conversations (Yahoo, Skype IM, MSN).  For teams that are not yet standadrised Meebo is a valuable alterntaive that creates a bridge between the common IM’s (both SIP and Jabber based).  IM’s give one significant advantage, that of presence, that allows team to work more effectively by minimizing interruptions.  However they do not meet the basic requirement of personal discovery; the forming stage of team development.

Large group discussions are the foundation of good teams, an environment where the team gets to know each other on the individual level.  This is best done face-to-face but where geography doesn’t allow video conferences are the next best option.  A free service that allows multi-party video conferencing seems like a good solution.  The value of such a service is multiplied when this can be enabled from inside MSN and Skype combining a close facsimile to face-to-face with the bnefits of presence.

Forming is further aided by the use of LinkedIn.  This niche social networking site allows for a business profile of the team members that acts as a yellow pages of team members.  So often it’s not what the member knows but who that is the biggest asset to the distributed team.  This is the value add of LinkedIn as the three degrees of separation that the tool shows provides some sound insight on stakeholders.

The storming stage needs to be facilitated through organic growth and discussion.  Wiki sites and collaborative tools like Sharepoint are natural resources for this task.  The structure of these tools allows for a framework for discussion but can become an overhead to manage.  More versatile, disposable aggregators can be much more applicable to these early stages.  Idea generation needs to be an organic process where new branches can be added and the “bunny trails” closed down quickly.  Jeteye allows weblinks, video and IM messages (from Meebo) to be grouped into a shareable repository.  These are accessiblle from the cloud as no client tools are required, just an internet connection will suffice.  These Jetpacks can be public or controlled access, which ever best suits the teams.  The ability to easily make them available to a client is a real bonus.

Norming is wher the team starts to use common standards, best made tangible through templates and document standards.  The virtual filing cabinet both supports a common documentation set and collaborative review and editing features.  Online services such as GoogleDocs or Zoho are more preferable than Wikis as the output is more easily consumed by the client.

With the foundation in place performing should now be possible.  It is also good to know who is doing what and when so a shared calendar forms the core of the technology.  Again Google is a good fit as the price means that nomadic teams can quickly and cheaply form, collaborate and disperse with minimal transitional effort.  Other online services such as Basecamp and Lighthouse offer the same functionality but with more cost in terms of setup and portability.

Where does all of this converge into one virtual office.  Most of the tools mentioned thus far are competing and do not easily fit together into one platform.  With the rollout of LinkedIn applications Huddle seems to fill the platform gap in many ways.  The basic toolset includes calendar management, presence, file sharing, online whiteboards and member biographies.  The integration with LinkedIn gives you access to the team’s network.  One of the links on the member’s profile could also be the MeBeam video conference room.

Tools mentioned:

• Meebo
• Jeteye
• MeBeam
• Huddle
• LinkedIn
• Skype

1. Connectivity. A key element for effecitve digital nomads is “always on” connectivity, so you’ll want to make sure that your mobile teams have access pretty much whenever they need it and wherever they go. Laptop cards plus wifi plus smartphone shoud do the trick in all but very rural areas where at least for the next few years connectivity will continue to face challenges. Consider offering as a perk to your home workers free connectivity and equipment in exchange for reducing the burdens of providing additional office space and amenities. As with any workers you’ll want clear and easiy trackable productivity measurements and expectations managed in a way that keeps the lines of communication clear and unambiguous. There are many online tools for this that can integrate time management with your accounting systems, saving data entry time and helping to keep the digital nomad on track with their own time.

2. Gadgetry. The number of tools for the digital nomad has exploded over the past few years. I’d argue the most important in most cases is a wifi enabled small laptop. Although there have been excellent ultra mobiles for some time they tended to be expensive but after the debut of the ASUS eeePC a slew of high quality, very inexpensive small form PCs have hit the market. The cost of providing this equipment to your team is no longer prohibitive.

Smartphones like the Blackberry, Treo, and iPhone are also a powerful tool in your nomad’s arsenal although the costs here may actually be more prohibitive than small laptops due to the decreasing cost of Wifi in the face of the relativey high cost of smartphone data plans. In some cases a smartphone will be needed but also consider options where some of your workers make good use of a laptop for records and then use basic cell phone services for voice. Nokia’s N97, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, may bridget this gap as it offers computer functionality in a very powerful smartphone.

3. People. Ultimately technology in the workplace is all about empowering your workers to be as productive as they can while maintaining a healthy balance between the “always on” work cycle and their lives.  Businesses that recognize and provide for the needs of their employees are likely to be rewarded with higher productivity, greater loyalty and greater worker satisfaction.   Making sure your employees are comfortable with their technologies is a key part of this equation and thankfully easier than ever as most digital nomads are already well versed in many of the technologies you’ll want them to use to promote your business.   From smartphones to social networks, your nomads are likely to be familiar with the landscape and anxious to use it to business advantage.   Harnessing this enthusiasm can be as simple as providing moral support and a small budget to the nomadic workforce and then cutting them loose to innovate and invent  their own technological productivity solutions.