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Chains, Whips, or Wifi? How to Motivate Your Digital Nomads
Although businesses face many of the same challenges motivating their digitally nomadic workforce as their regular office workers, the growing number of mobile tools and techniques offer clever businesses a wealth of motivational opportunities so they and their employees can benefit from a leaner, more effective, and more productive remote workforce.
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.
Motivate… Don’t Attempt to Control
Perhaps the most obvious set of individuals that work remotely are the sales force. Before technology, sales managers have had to manage remote workforces – and ensure their productivity.
The key to managing any remote workforce, as I blog on all the time at QuotaCrush, is to design the proper compensation plan. Whatever you try to do in terms of technology that will control and track your employees, the bottom line is if what you really want is higher productivity, then you need to align the goals and tasks of the remote workforce to the goals and tasks of the corporation. The best way to do this, is to design a compensation structure that drives the tasks that you as an organization want done.
While I blog on how this relates to salespeople, in reality regardless of what your remote workforce is doing, you can significantly increase their performance by giving them more freedom and relying on them to drive their own tasks. A properly designed compensation plan will easily drive their activities to the activities that you want them to perform.
Of course, you need to provide the right tools to make their jobs easier. This may include time tracking tools, and other mobile devices, but if you try to drive productivity by controlling what tasks they do at what time, you will get the exact opposite reaction to what you want. You will drive resentment and distrust, rather than drive independace and productivity. You need to trust your remote workforce to be able to control their own schedules, and if you can’t then you need to decide if you have the correct remote workforce.
Compensation packages should be designed to reward over-achievers, they should be achievable but tough, and they should be transparent. If everyone knows the performance of everyone else, it will drive competition that will benefit everyone.
While in a technology age, it seems like we should be able to use technology to solve this problem of productivity, but the reality is that we are talking about an issue that is not of the technology age. It is a problem that has existed for as long as there have been remote workforces, and the solution should always be to drive increased productivity by designing fair but challenging compensation packages that align with the business goals. When you treat people like professionals and give them clear goals, in general, you will be thrilled with the results you receive.
Beyond Office Productivity
Spatial Freedom Motivates High-End IT Talent
For the professional IT administrator, be it system, database, network, or security, the ability to work wherever and whenever is an incredible perk for the professional and the client. Most system-level administration positions require immediate expertise to quickly troubleshoot and solve problems, and there is often many lulls between breif periods of intense activity. By unleashing your personnel from a specific geographic location, you can provide just-in-time service to many clients at many locations, really getting the best ROI out of a single asset, while enabling them to maintain a positive work-life balance.
For a good manager, freeing your personnel from a specific location is a management tool unto itself. It is an incredible aid to get the most from your best, inherently preventing many common personnel problems:
- Lack of Challenge – Your best talent is constantly striving to sharpen their skills, and looking for new challenges. Providing several simultaneous clients and challenges provides for an environment where telented individuals can grow and thrive.
- Scheduling Issues – The flexibility gained by the Digital Nomad’s workstyle allows your personnel to gracefully schedule and execute maintenance events during times outside of normal business hours.  Your personnel will be able to perform their work at the times of the day when they are at the top of their game, and allow them to take care of personal issues without affecting their productivity – Work can be accomplished anywhere at any time of day! When problems arise, you can expect your team to be where you need them, as soon as you need them.
- Commuting – Hundreds of potential work-hours are lost every day through the simple ritual of commuting to the workplace. For those personnel with especially challenging commutes, managers are often at risk of losing key people who simply want to work closer to home. Eliminating this contributes to a more energized professional who is seeing more value for their time.  Mobile workers save on fuel costs, vehicle maintenance, and the hazards associated with inclimate weather!  For workers temporarily working at an alternate location, managers will reap enormous savings in airfare, temporary lodging, and per diem.
As any good manager knows, the path to success lies in knowing your people. People who enjoy a fixed routine, or serial activities are best suited for a static office environment. People who enjoy a dynamic workplace, who multitask well, and have solid time-management skills are well-suited candidates for a roaming workplace. Of course, communication is key – Short, purposeful, and efficient daily meetings are key to maintaining your personnel, workload planning, and assessing workforce impact.
In retrospect, matching the right people with the right working environment is less of a managerial challenge, but more of a tool – A productivity advantage to be gained by the tech-saavy leader.
Getting Through The Data Smog
We’ve got plenty of collaborative technologies to empower remote teams. Some of these technologies function as beefed-up intranets while others offer more targeted functionality. While I’m not a luddite, I do think that in the case of keeping digital nomads connected, we have an abundance of technology. The most pressing issue is preparing our teams to effectively communicate. We’ve moved beyond empowering communications; we’re overwhelmed with email, twits, facebooks. We need protocols to help us sort out our pressing tasks and prioritize our responses to clients and peers. We also need to consolidate and keep focused.
I’m not a purist — while in a best case scenario, technology should merely service the needs of its users but in the case of digital nomads, we frequently need to work around the technologies and optimize our processes via the software because we lack the resources and time to develop these tools from the ground up.
Choking on communication volume
Trying to manage all my various communication channels has become an impossible task. My team’s messages get lost in the flood of everything else I’m receiving. Here are a couple of field-proven techniques we use to help sort out the clutter.
- Use a separate email address to communicate with your team than you use on social networks/twitter/etc. This ensures that important work messages don’t get swallowed up in the sheer volume of total pings we receive.
- Be precise with subject lines in email. If things are urgent, make sure that that’s know to the recipient of the email right away. Being concise and targeted with email subject lines is kind to your team and allows for easier searching through emails for retrieval purposes.
- If things are really important, pick up the phone. It may sound obvious but emails get lost, ignored or just swallowed up. Nuances get misread via email. The tone of a short email blasted off a BlackBerry may sound overly curt. Pressing or personal issues can be cleared up quicker and easier over the phone. Teams frequently fall back on an overuse of email and issues fester or aren’t sufficiently addressed.
Hosted Apps
I’ve used Salesforce.com frequently on small sales/marketing teams and it’s extremely powerful and cost effective. For a small team of reps, though, I’ve stopped using it. It’s overkill — it may sound ridiculous but for a variety of vertical applications, we’ve backed out of using such hosted software and have cut down on the headache of merely managing the software.
- It may sound silly but shared Google Apps like Spreadsheet and Docs work really well in certain cases. For a sales team, instead of collaborating over Salesforce and getting sucked in, we input data into our shared, hosted spreadsheet and collaborate on that document. You can easily see revised versions of the doc to see first derivative-type info.
- While we’ve opted out of most other hosted apps (save Google Docs), I like much of what 37Signals is doing. From Basecamp to Highrise, the software is so simple to use that it’s been a winner for keeping track of projects or contacts for the team or just chatting. Google Chat has been a winner for us to communicate over chat. Make sure you have the “Save chat history” function turned on. It allows you to store chat transcripts in the Gmail GUI which makes retrieving an old conversation a snap. We stopped using Skype which has a very nice conference function on chat but the software proved to be to big and clunky to use with everything else we’re working on.
Face Time is underated (sometimes)
It’s great to be untethered most of the time. I’ve worked with people for years whom I’ve never met. In fact, I’d describe these people as friends. Close ones, too. There is no substitute, though, for some good face time. If teams are local, get together over lunch once a month. If teams are scattered, try to get together once a year. It builds morale and lowers barriers and puts a face behing the chat window.
Summary
While the software industry continues to churn out very useable and affordable software to help empower teamwork for digital nomads, virtual teams still struggle with implementing work processes to enable them to truly use such software. In turn, the software isn’t fully implemented and frequently becomes “just another” thing to manage. Future teams must figure out how best to communicate working either via or around existing technology packages. We’ll figure it out but ultimately, nothing truly changes. Pick up the phone once in a while.
Planning and Structure For Mobile Productivity
Working independently requires a variety of tricks and techniques to stay productive and on time. As a college student, I was a competitive swimmer and always did better in classes when in season. That was fine since it ran from September to February. However, when not in season I struggled with not having a structure. I had too much time, and didn’t have practice or meets to fill large blocks of it which had the effect of forcing my studying into the other available slots.
Thankfully, I’ve improved since then. Staying productive while working independently requires structuring projects as well as my schedule. Each project has a number of elements that aid me in staying on task and productive.
Project Plan: Each project starts with a good project plan which identifies the various elements. These allow me to keep track of the large picture while working through the details of a project. More than this though, it also allows me to triage my attention when other projects are competing for attention or new problems arise.
- In scope and out of scope elements: Its just as important to know what you’re not responsible for doing as what you are. It helps you stay focused on the project at hand and not get burned out by irrelevant, out of scope, tasks.
- Milestones: What’s the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Knowing what steps I’ll achieve on the way to completing a project helps me stay focused and not get overwhelmed by the entire project.
- Deliverables: Knowing the end point means having a clear goal and understanding what the milestones amount to. Whether its an item or a recommendation or achieving certain metrics, identify what the goal is.
Supervision: Supervision is a bi-weekly check in to review progress, set short term goals, review any barriers and get feedback. Whether in person, by phone or video conferencing, supervision time is a chance to get project support and stay on top of project tasks.
Create Structure: Controlling your schedule can be a major element in remaining productive on the road.
- Scheudule time for paperwork or work on a particular project and stick to it. Barring an emergency, don’t let other projects steal this time. Ignore the phone and e-mail and use this time to focus on the project at hand. You’re still serving your customer by not answering the phone.
- Schedule appointments with customers and colleagues in blocks. Don’t intersperse appointments and meetings between paperwork or screen time. There’s plenty of lost time traveling to, waiting for, and wrapping up meetings. Clustering appointments allows you to minimize this lost time
Triage Attention: For as useful as e-mail, text messages, phone can be, they can also be time enormous drain on your time. Minimize their disruption of your work by waiting to respond until you’ve finished what you’re working on or changing focus. It will help you better focus on your task at hand and be better prepared and focused when you respond to those waiting e-mails.
Preparation: Ensure you have all of the materials and information you need to work from the road. There’s nothing like lost time due to missing materials or phone numbers.
Location: Where you work can be a key component to how productive you’re able to be. Coffee shops, home offices, the car, shared office spaces can all be viable road alternatives for the digital nomad. Like your morning coffe but easily distracted? Get it to go. Love your home office but have a 2 year old at home? Hit the road. Pick a location that matches your work style.
Staying productive on the road requires more than one strategy. It is about planning, monitoring and creating a structure. Doing each of these will ensure you’re meeting your goals and targets while leading the nomadic lifestyle
Start With What You Know
Measuring ROI on something like a digital workforce begins with good benchmarks. Put simply, you will never know the return on an investment unless you already have good insight into measurable quantities that characterize your workforce, both mobile and fixed.
For instance, you could measure the ROI of having a dispersed workforce by measuring any or all of the following qualities:
- Productivity: Is your business creating more or less widgets per employee per year?
- Job satisfaction: Are your people more or less happy that they’re working for you?
- Employee retention: Are your skilled employees sticking around longer, or are they reading want ads and jumping ship to your competitor?
- Creativity: Are your mobile workers — freed from the stultifying environs of a cubicle — being more innovative?
- Cost: Is it rising or falling per unit of work?
Staying Motivated
One of my themes throughout these Digital Nomad discussions has been that the rules are not drastically different just because we work from home and coffee shops, and not a cubicle. That does not change with this subject. That said, there are certainly specific actions that I take to help me stay focused on work when I’m sitting in my home office with the windows open and it’s 72 degrees outside.
I have found that I need a morning routine that is very similar to what I would do if I went into the office. I know digital nomads that work half a day before they shower and shave. I can’t do that. I get up at a set time, shower, have breakfast, brew a cup of tea, and then head upstairs to my home office. Likewise, I can not drink during the workday. I know some people that do and I don’t know how they do it. The last thing I want to think about after the proverbial two martini lunch is work! Also, I have found that I can not work from the deck or front porch. When home, staying in the home office helps foster a productive focus on work. It all comes back to personal discipline.
As a digital nomad in a sales position, I am subjected to all the usual measurements of sales productivity that apply regardless of what you sell or where you sell it. Revenue quotas and activity quotas certainly help to keep me productive. This really should not change based on your office situation. In sales, your job is to sell, and if you are doing that it really should not matter if you do it from a cubicle or the bridge of your boat! The digital nomad lifestyle actually helps me be more productive. Not spending 2-3 hours commuting makes it easier for me to be flexible to my client’s scheduling needs. I have clients nationwide and a 7 PM EST software demo with a prospect on the West Coast is much easier after I’ve had dinner with my family, as opposed to coming at the end of an exceptionally long day with the drive home still to come.
Our sales team is comprised of 5 people, of which only two regularly works from the corporate office. (Both of them are free to work from home as needed too). I have found that staying connected to what is going on with my fellow sales executives helps foster my productivity. Within our team, we blind copy each other on virtually every email that we send. This usually exceeds over 100 per day. I filter them to a folder and skim the subject lines when I have a spare minute while on hold or during a particularly boring conference call. Seeing what my coworkers are working on, what deals they are winning or losing, what objections they are hearing, and just seeing the general flow of their work helps keep me in the loop and motivated. In a way, the blind carbon copies are a surprisingly effective substitute for the water cooler chatter that might happen in the office. I’m in tune with what the rest of the sales team is doing without wasting a lot of time in the process.
In summary, staying productive as a digital nomad really isn’t any different than it is for my office bound coworkers.
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Know what is expected of you and act accordingly. Of course, this does require clear communication of those expectations.
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Stay connected and in the loop to what is going on in the company.
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Act like a professional, even if you are wearing a bathrobe while you are on a conference call.
The Wiki-Connected Workforce
The most valuable asset many companies have is their workforce. They attract the best knowledge workers with higher salaries, amenities, and flexible working conditions, and expect them to travel and excel in front of customers. But there is one more thing they expect – contribution to the group knowledge base so everyone can share.
The key to encourage sharing of knowledge is to remove barriers and demonstrate value. Most content management and collaboration systems are somewhat difficult to use and access, especially for remote users, so they end up with low levels of participation. Happily, the Internet has a demonstrated successful solution to the problem of group-created shared knowledge: The wiki!
Hello, Wiki
Wikipedia is the most familiar example, a global encyclopedia created and maintained entirely by volunteer users. Anyone viewing an article is free to edit it, and users can also add new pages. In this way, Wikipedia has been able to harness the vast knowledge of literally millions of people, each contributing a tiny amount to an encyclopedic whole.
Under the covers, the wiki software provides critical support without being intrusive. It maintains a revision history, so other visitors can track and even revert unwanted changes. It also simplifies the creation of links between articles so users don’t have to copy or type long addresses. The presentation of information is simplified as well, with easy markup replacing complex HTML code for formatting. Finally, the wiki software manages the organization of articles, creating an index, search, and categorization scheme as articles and links are added.
The Business End
When businesspeople think about wikis, they often jump to conclusions based on their experience with Wikipedia, however:
- They may assume that wikis have to be anonymous, even though most wikis encourage or require users to create named accounts.
- They could also jump to the conclusion that anything added to a business wiki would be open to the whole internet, though it is simple to control access to some or all of the pages of a wiki.
- Finally, they might think a wiki is not suitable for rich content like tables, multimedia files, and documents, even though Wikipedia’s companion Commons contains a massive multimedia database.
Business wikis do not have to be anything like Wikipedia or the other wikis scattered throughout the Internet. They normally include user accounts and passwords to control access, and may be placed behind VPNs on corporate intranets for added security. Some even disguise their wiki underpinnings, appearing to the casual user as standard web sites. And wikis manage documents and multimedia files as objects, maintaining revision histories and simplifying linking and updates just like a content management system.
Leverage Openness
Business wikis exist primarily to leverage the same effects that built Wikipedia: Low barriers to contribution, simple markup, easy access, solid content control, and flexible organization and linking. And the nature of a wiki suits knowledge-based workforces since there is always a single latest revision of the whole that incorporates all of the latest thinking.
Although the Mediawiki software used by Wikipedia is free and open source, there are many other wiki packages to choose from. Some are more suited to businesses, with links to corporate authentication and access control systems and integration with email and calendaring software. These are also offered as pay-as-you-go managed services with corporate support contracts and services to get the whole thing started.
Regardless of which software is used, a corporate wiki can yield tremendous benefits, enabling collaboration and contribution of knowledge.
