Components of a Virtual Team What are the components of a team?? Wha

Prepared by:

James Ware

Charles Grantham

The Work Design Collaborative, LLC

www.thefutureofwork.net

Managing a Remote Workforce: Proven Practices from Successful Leaders

© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

Managing a Remote Workforce: Proven Practices from Successful Leaders

A Citrix© GoToMeeting© White Paper Prepared by James Ware and Charles Grantham

Executive Summary

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, books, blogs, and Websites filled with advice about how to manage remote workers (or telecommuters, or workshifters, or distributed teams1

While those slogans do point in the right direction, they tend to be stated as universal truths even though the real world is full of complexity and varying contexts. Worse, they don’t begin to deal with why and how companies choose to embrace workforce mobility. And an organization’s motivations and experiences make a huge difference in what works and what doesn’t.

). However, most of that advice amounts to broad generalizations or “bumper-sticker”-like slogans that are well-meant but rather shallow: “Pay attention to your staff’s personal life,” “Measure what they produce, not how much time they spend,” “Hold regular conference calls,” “Check in with your subordinates on a regular basis.”

Therefore, with Citrix Online’s support and encouragement, we set out to produce a different kind of understanding about the challenges surrounding the management of remote workers. Most importantly, we studied the real-world experiences of leading- edge organizations in order to identify what really works, and under what conditions.

This summary of our research addresses three fundamental management questions:

1. Why do organizations launch distributed work programs in the first place?

2. What practices and tools do successful organizations rely on to manage remote staff effectively?

1 We tend to use those terms interchangeably, though there are certainly subtle distinctions among

them. However, our current interest and focus is on best practices in managing people who are in locations at some distance from their boss. In our judgment, what matters is the distance between manager and subordinate, not what label someone has put on the job category.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

3. What critical advice do successful leaders of distributed teams have for organizations that are just getting started?

In the course of conducting this research we interviewed half a dozen “experts” (authors, academics, consultants, and leading practitioners) and spoke with even more actual managers and change agents who have designed and implemented distributed work programs. This analysis of corporate best practices is their story.

Drawing on those conversations we have compiled a set of basic principles and guidelines that we believe goes much deeper than anything we’ve seen elsewhere. We have included specific quotes and organizational attributions wherever we could. However, in some instances we were asked to allow the interviewees to remain anonymous.

Why Do Organizations Launch Distributed Work Programs?

Almost all organizations today are already practicing some kind of distributed work management. In most cases, however, there is either no formal policy, or it’s being done ad hoc and in a highly inconsistent manner.

Typically, some employees in some departments are working out of the office once in a while because it’s more convenient for them, or an emergency at home has made it temporarily necessary, or they just needed a quiet place to get a special report completed.

We’ve come to call this kind of informal/implicit program “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” because it’s unofficial, is often not known about in other parts of the company, or is tolerated for certain individuals primarily because they’re highly competent and have threatened to leave the company if they can’t work flexibly.

However, these kinds of ad hoc efforts often get out of control. Either they grow too large without any thought to their consequences, or other employees get jealous and even resentful at being unable to take advantage of what they see as a highly desirable “perk.”

Thus, the organizations we’ve spoken with that have moved beyond DADT and ad hoc distributed work have usually done so for one or more of these reasons:

Liability Mitigation

Informal programs and ad hoc arrangements leave companies open to legal liability for workmen’s compensation, and for potential violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Employees who are denied the opportunity to work remotely might become resentful of the perceived inequity and file a claim under the provisions of the FLSA.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

One human resource professional we interviewed pointed out that these liabilities may even extend to the selection and hiring process. Although we are not aware of any case law at this time (and we are not legal experts), it is not inconceivable that a disgruntled employee might file suit for not being allowed to participate in an alternative work program. Maintaining a transparent process and appropriate documentation is an important way to minimize the potential of expensive litigation.

Employee Attraction/Retention

Companies in urban areas with long, difficult commutes have found that offering part – time work from home can tip the scales in their favor, particularly in a competitive hiring environment.

According to Phil Montero of The Anywhere Office, 72% of U.S. employees say that flexible work arrangements would cause them to choose one job over another.2

One client organization based in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area launched significant work-from-home program primarily because it was having genuine difficulty attracting and retaining talent. Six months into the program we asked several of the remote employees what they would do if the company directed them to come to the corporate office full-time. Their answer was simple: “I’d start looking for another job tomorrow.”

Just as importantly, an effective distributed work program can also enable companies to hire talent in remote locations that is unwilling to relocate to the areas where the company already has facilities. Similarly, organizations are able to retain key individuals by allowing them to relocate away from the central office while remaining employed.

We believe that over the next three years the shortage of skilled workers in key industries like health care, education, and local government will be an important driver leading to significant growth in formal distributed work programs. And even though talent shortages are hard to imagine in the current economic climate, we know they will occur.

Geographic Diversification and Globalization

It’s not a new phenomenon, but as an organization opens new facilities in remote locations, it has a de-facto distributed workforce even if everyone is in a corporate facility every day. Historically, a distributed business coped by increasing its travel

2 As reported in his recent white paper and post on the workshifting.com blog, “Work Unchained: The

Competitive Edge of the Anywhere Office.” Primary source of data: The Edge Report – Robert Half International Survey, 2008.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

budget and by burning up the long-distance telephone lines. Today, however, with the proliferation of low-cost conference calling and Internet Web conferencing, it’s not just about staying in touch with remote individuals; distributed project teams have become far more common.

We have been working with one high-technology financial services organization that, while predominantly based in the United States, is owned by a British corporation and also has significant operations in South America. Without any formal planning or managerial training, the U.S. company now finds itself with dozens of local managers spending half of every day (or more) on conference calls with their project teams, who are sometimes spread out over as many as nine time zones. It is now stepping up to the realization that effective team-building and staff development under these dispersed conditions is a much bigger challenge than when everyone was co-located in one place.

Note also that once an organization has a formal distributed work program and policy, geographic expansion becomes far easier to plan and manage. One natural consequence of managing distributed work effectively is that many jobs and business processes become essentially “location-neutral,” which simplifies by orders of magnitude the process of opening new remote facilities.

In fact, SCAN Health, a Medicare Advantage company based in Long Beach, California, has begun to incorporate its alternative work program into its strategic business development planning. SCAN’s strategic planning executive commented, “This program (alternative work) has fundamentally changed the way we look at doing business. We are no longer constrained by the location of talent, or by the need to reproduce all our business functions in every new geographic area.”

As another example, after completing several acquisitions, one large U.S. company found itself dealing with several distinctively different organizational cultures and work practices in the acquired organizations—and a highly distributed and mobile organization that had been made even more so by the mergers.

A senior executive who took on the complex task of integrating four predecessor company telecommuting programs, recalls:

We went through a brief period when some managers were asking their remote employees to come back into the office as they began the challenging task of merging these newly formed organizations. In many ways their central task was getting to know new team members and building camaraderie and unity within the teams, but they also had to integrate our operations into one coherent company. The outside world thought we were backing away from telecommuting and flexible work options. But actually we just needed

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

some time to blend the cultures and business processes of these teams, and we needed time to merge and formalize the flexible work policies.3

We now have a comprehensive telecommuting policy with arrangements for our employees for whom it makes the most sense.. Today, we remain a highly distributed and mobile organization, with work teams spread out across the United States.

Currently, we have several thousand employees who work from home one or more days each week through a formal telecommuting agreement, and many more who have been enabled with mobile and remote access technologies that allow them to work at a variety of on- and off-site locations.

Cost Reduction

Many organizations, especially in the current economic climate, are actively seeking ways to reduce operating costs. Distributed work programs are one of the most effective ways of achieving badly-needed operational savings.

Enabling employees to work remotely makes it possible to reduce the corporate real estate portfolio by as much as 40% – 50% by offering employees an opportunity to work from home full- or part-time in return for giving up an assigned private workspace in the corporate facility.

One of the most impressive examples of cost reduction/productivity improvement that we know of took place at SCAN Health from about 2007 to 2010.

The focus of SCAN’s distributed work program was to (1) reduce the cost of occupancy; (2) improve employee satisfaction with the work environment; and (3) provide a more agile workplace to accommodate future needs.

The project deployed three strategies simultaneously. First, the development of a “work at home” program enabled the company to consolidate the real estate portfolio and enable greater density in the re-designed space. Second, the remaining space was re-designed by shrinking and—in many cases—eliminating private offices, concentrating storage space, and providing standardized “neighborhood”-based work areas.

The results of the transformation project were measured over an 18-month period; they included the following:

3 Research interview, June 2010.

SCAN Health has reduced the cost of workforce support by 38% as a result of its distributed work program.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

♦ 40% return on investment for program development and deployment; ♦ 38% reduction in cost of workplace support; ♦ 18% increase in productivity; ♦ reduction in provisioning time from 12 weeks to 3 days; and ♦ decrease in travel to work by 20% for program employees.4

The potential savings if everyone were to follow SCAN’s lead are absolutely astounding. Kate Lister of the Telework Research Network recently estimated that employers could save up to $10,000 a year in operating cost per employee. Multiplied out across the U.S. economy (for the 40% of the workforce who could function remotely), “workshifting” (a term coined by Citrix Online, which also funded Lister’s research) could save employers over $650 Billion per year.

5

Continuity Planning

In recent years most large organizations have beefed up their business continuity plans in light of external risks such as natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes), terrorist attacks, or pandemics like swine flu. A formal distributed work program dramatically lowers the risk of operational disruption.

For example, the federal government promotes pilot programs as a way to test disaster policies. During the extreme bad weather in the winter of 2009/10 a number of federal agencies on the east coast found that their telework programs allowed them to continue functioning with minimal interruption. However, managers reported some surprise that “it actually worked,” and most agencies returned to requiring employees to be on-site as soon as the weather cleared.6

Environmental Impact

Flexible work programs can also have a powerful and very positive effect on an organization’s carbon output as well as its economic, environmental, and social contributions to its local communities. When employees are not traveling to a central

4 For a more detailed description of SCAN’s program and its outcomes, see Chapter 5 of Cut It Out! Save

for Today, Build for Tomorrow, IFMA Foundation Press, 2009. 5 See “Workshifting Benefits: The Bottom Line,” available free from Citrix Online or the Telework

Research Network. 6 Nevertheless, the bad weather experiences of 2010 convinced both the Senate and the House of

Representatives to pass legislation mandating that federal agencies establish remote work programs. See “Telework Improvements Act Gets Second Chance,” by Kate Lister, posted on Workshifting.com on July 16, 2010.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

office they are not burning gasoline, and they’re not clogging the highways (or taking up space on the local commuter train).

As an example, the U.S. federal government is mandating a 28% total reduction in carbon emissions from its facilities by 2020— a goal that explicitly includes the impact of reduced commute times and decreased use of Federal real estate facilities.7

And according to another telecommuting manager in a large global organization:

Our telecommuting program is delivering significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In 2009, a study of our telecommuting population, revealed that our telecommuters avoided over 100 million commute miles per year, with annual fuel savings of at least five million gallons and a net reduction of 50.000+ metric tons of CO2-equivalents (CO2e) emissions per year.

Core Best Practices

Regardless of how or why organizations develop formal distributed work programs, those that do it successfully invariably follow five basic principles:

1. They do it strategically. That is, the program is formal, explicit, and sponsored by senior management. Everyone knows why the program has been launched and what specific business outcomes it is intended to help achieve.

2. The organization and its members learn to work differently over time. In most respects employees continue to do the same basic work even though they are in different places. However, “going mobile” requires some fundamental changes in how they get that work done. More importantly, it almost always includes redesigning core business processes, employing different technologies, and adjusting the way managers operate and communicate. And distributed work essentially forces organizations to measure and reward work outcomes instead of just monitoring employees’ activities through “management by walking around.”

3. Training is a central part of the program. And the training programs include both managers of remote workers and the remote individual contributors.

4. The effective deployment and use of collaboration technologies is central to making distributed work “work.” And we are not referring just to the basics like email, conference calling, and instant messages. Successful organizations

7 Executive Order 13514, October, 2009

(https://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/regulations/eo13514.html)

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

today make a wide variety of collaboration tools available to their distributed workforce. More importantly, they use those tools both routinely and aggressively.

5. Success depends on planning thoughtfully and implementing aggressively. It’s an old idea, but an important one: plan the work, and work the plan. Distributed work programs aren’t just about redesigning facilities and letting people move about the country; they almost always include significant organizational and cultural change, and must be treated as such.

Do it Strategically

Simply put, programs that are developed for clear business reasons, with executive-level sponsorship, are far more likely to succeed than hit-or-miss, it-seems-like-a-good-thing- to-do efforts. When there is an explicit business case that is supported by management and communicated across the organization it’s much easier to overcome the many natural objections to change that inevitably crop up.

More significantly, strategic programs receive time and attention from both executive sponsors and the middle-management designers and implementers who make them work. They are also more comprehensive in scope, including a wider range of functional perspectives, and they therefore address more of the issues that make a difference.

When SCAN Health decided to launch a work-from-home pilot program the organization established a cross-functional steering committee that included representatives from HR, IT, corporate real estate, facilities management, risk management, project management, finance, and corporate communications. The Steering Committee met weekly for over six months before committing to a pilot program, confronting and resolving a wide variety of economic, technology, and legal issues well before they became critical.

SCAN took far longer than most organizations do just to plan a pilot program for only 50 employees, yet once the program was launched it went very smoothly and was fully supported by the participating front-line managers as well as the Executive Committee.

As Phil Montero of The Anywhere Office put it,

Too many organizations stumble into flexible work on an ad-hoc basis, and then adapt to it only when they realize that it’s happening. The transition is often gradual, and without premeditation. Their approach to working as dispersed, virtual teams is born of need, and typically they just make use of the tools available as their people are increasingly required to work together across greater time and distance. Successful organization make sure their managers are trained in how to lead remote employees and take a deliberate approach and strategy.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kate North, Vice President of Global Business Development for e-work.com, an online training program firm, made a similar point:

Today, the primary driver for many organizations adopting mobility strategies is cost reduction driven by a shrinking real estate portfolio. And as the implementation team launches, if they have not done their homework and properly prepared their mid-level managers on how to successfully lead a distributed team, their program could hit a wall.

This kind of resistance is valid and real. Very few of today’s managers have been mentored or exposed to global best practices for leading distributed teams; and while they may be able to operate a PDA, that doesn’t mean they can foster the type of virtual collaboration necessary for creating high performance teams.

In the past, managers picked up a tremendous amount of “visual queuing” when their teams were office-based. They were able to “see,” quickly and subconsciously, how their team was doing, what they were working on, and who was connecting with whom. When visual queuing is no longer available, a manager can feel quite vulnerable and frustrated.

The key to success is to demonstrate these global best practices and make them relevant and easy to access.

In addition, if individual employees sense that their manager has not cultivated these skills and doesn’t feel secure, they too may resist a mobility program—especially in today’s economy. On the flip side, when a manager has honed the necessary skills and continually demonstrates best practices, employees will begin to thrive in the virtual workplace by developing their own skills; and, needless to say, their engagement and productivity will soar.

The director of space planning for a large technology company added this perspective, based on his personal experience leading a global initiative to reduce the corporate real estate footprint by up to 50% (through basic redesign of existing office facilities and aggressively championing workforce mobility):

The absolutely essential foundation of this effort is sponsorship from the top. It’s the only thing that’s enabled us to be so bold. The executive mandate gives us the freedom to be very aggressive. We have a clear cost reduction goal and that’s the thing that is driving our boldness. Without it we’d get so much local resistance that it would never go anywhere.

And where we’ve already taken major steps, we’ve been able to reduce our per-employee occupancy cost by close to 70 percent in nine years—70%!—even though real estate costs per square foot have more than doubled in the same time frame.

Our point: clear goals, mandates from the top, and linkages to business imperatives go a very long way to clearing out the inevitable organizational resistance to change. And they provide clear performance goals that everyone can focus on.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

Learn to Work Differently

Allowing employees to work remotely isn’t just a matter of tossing people out of their assigned workspaces and having them do the same work from different places. When face-to-face interaction is restricted and replaced with less frequent electronic communication, not only do personal relationships undergo dramatic change, but core business processes themselves must be redesigned to reflect the new work environment.

As Glenn Dirks of Teletrips, Inc., describes it:

Setting up a distributed work program isn’t rocket science, but it’s not trivial either. In my experience, it’s really about building a high-performance organization. Working that way brings all the shortcoming of your basic business practices right up to the surface. It magnifies what you do and how you do it. Things become much more black and white, and you actually become far more dependent on your work practices.

When everyone’s in the same place, it’s easy to make up for process deficiencies or errors; people can walk across the hall, or convene an emergency meeting on a moment’s notice. Obviously, that just can’t happen when the workforce is dispersed all over the place.

One more thing: managing in itself doesn’t really change that much. Managers just have to accept their responsibilities for being a good manager—which for me means defining the work that has to be done, assigning the work to the right people, setting clear performance goals, and then holding people accountable for getting it done. Whether managers operate that way or not is much, much clearer in a distributed environment where they can’t intimidate folks by peering over their shoulders all day long.

In short, the more you go “virtual,” the more the quality of management matters.

We also discovered that most companies go through a rather typical learning curve, usually beginning to see productivity improvements only 15-18 months after they launch a new program.

More specifically, several new ways of working are correlated with successful programs. When we asked senior practitioners within the federal government and at a large financial institution to reflect on what made their experiences positive they identified five specific practices that, in hindsight, were critical.

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© Copyright 2010 by The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.

Five critical practices for a successful workshifting program

1. Going paperless. Committing to digital information flow and storage is the single most important thing you can do to enable efficient distributed work. People can be much more mobile when they don’t have to access paper documents that are by definition stored in only one location. The real magic of centrally stored digital information is that once it’s online it can be accessed and processed from almost anywhere. Most organizations already have formal “document retention” policies; they just need to learn to use them.8

2. Carrying the tools you need with you. One government agency we studied no longer has any desktop computers. Everything is portable, although all laptops have physical security devices and are assigned to individual employees. That makes it really, really simple for staff to “pick up and go.” This degree of technology mobility increases the likelihood that people will work wherever they are—because they can.

3. Making time to practice new tools such as job-specific software applications. Give employees time to learn how to use new collaborative

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