Managing a virtual workforce... Top Tips
Sara Gemmell, Director at Warren Partners, outlines her top tips for developing and leading a successful virtual working strategy
- Identify the perfect manager - More traditional managers can sometimes become frustrated by the difficulties associated with virtual working. These include the lack of ability to resolve issues face-to-face and perceived problems in maintaining accountability. Recruiting and retaining the right manager, with the correct blend of skills and experience to direct and motivate a virtual workforce, is imperative.
- Recruit the right staff - Offering virtual or remote working will only pay dividends for your business if there is a culture of trust within the organisation. If you find yourself doubting the ability of your staff to work productively without close monitoring, you may have employed the wrong people. Psychometric testing during the recruitment process will help to identify an individual's aptitude for self-motivation and independent working.
- Agree and establish ground rules - Those organisations that report the most successful results from remote workers do so because they have agreed strategies by which to measure individual and team output. Without defined targets against which to benchmark performance, unreal expectations can build up on both sides, causing doubts to creep in about the remote working practice as a whole. Methods such as timescales for responding to emails and communication regarding holidays or other 'unavailable' periods are also helpful.
- Implement an effective communications strategy - Networking and remote access technologies are vital to ensure smooth communication with clients when working away from the office. Equally important is the need to agree a schedule of communication with colleagues and managers, to ensure that everyone is regularly updated on progress and issues are flagged up as they arise. Individual accountabilities must be clearly identified and communicated, and care must be taken to ensure that there is an understanding of the ‘whole picture’ as well as individual elements. While it is difficult to develop the same kinds of personal relationships in cyberspace as those built through face-to-face contact, the use of ‘emoticons’ personalises and adds expression to plain text, and thus helps to encourage warmer working relationships.
- Increase the level of support - Physical separation of locations means that virtual workers are 'out of sight' of their managers and can, over time, become 'out of mind'. Regular face-to-face meetings, video conferencing facilities and a ‘no problem too small’ policy will ensure that virtual workers feel sufficiently supported and do not succumb to the urge to try and bury issues.
- Maintain staff morale - It is all too easy to neglect virtual workers when it comes to issuing praise and rewarding hard work and excellence, but an employee who feels valued is more likely to go that extra mile for the business than one who feels unappreciated. Make the effort to repay exceptional achievements and try to bring staff members together on a regular basis so that they form strong bonds with one another and feel part of a team.
4 January 2007
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