Many telecommuters like to come into the office occasionally to get a little bit of ‘face-time’ with their peers. But if you go into the office only to find your peers are all working from home that day, it can be a frustrating experience.

Companies that make it possible for many of their employees to telecommute are providing a great benefit to those employees, and also achieving the huge gains that I have written about in previous articles. However, when you find yourself in a team where more of your co-workers are working at home than at the office, it can be hard to find opportunities to get the face-time you’re looking for.

In a very diverse team where there are people working from home, or scattered geographically in different parts of the country or world, there will always be a few people who, for whatever reason, prefer to work in the office than at home. However, when these people come in day after day and find themselves sitting in a sea of empty cubicles, even these die-hard office workers will eventually throw their hands up and join the ranks of the telecommuter.

However, these are the people you count on seeing on the few days you are organized enough to get showered and dressed first thing in the morning (as opposed to at 3pm), fight the commute, and get yourself into the office for some face-time. Eventually you find that even the few people left have stopped coming in and now you’re the one sitting in that sea of empty cubicles.

This can be very frustrating as there truly is benefit to getting occasional direct contact with your team members. It helps strengthen relationships, provides opportunities to discuss work-related topics in a more spur-of-the-moment style, and provides you some social interaction to break up the days of sitting alone in your home office. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to overcome all these issues – but if you have the opportunity to meet with your team in person now and then, it’s one valuable tool.

A simple way to solve this situation is just a little coordination. Raise the topic in your team meeting if your boss approves. Or just send out an email to your coworkers. Work with your team to pick one or two days per week that people will focus on coming into the office. That doesn’t mean everyone has to come in on the agreed-upon day(s). But rather, if you’re going to try to come in, that these days will be the ones you’ll aim for.

Another option if you only have a few local people on your team is to just coordinate on a weekly basis with them. For instance, each Friday you could exchange email with those folks and ask how their schedule is looking and which days the following week they think they’ll be coming in.

While telecommuting can be a huge boon, a cost and time saver, and a way to balance your personal and work demands, a little face-time can go a long way. So when you do plan to go into the office, make sure there are people there to make your trip worthwhile!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting advice, telecommute, remote work, virtual presence, telework, work from home, work at home

There are right ways and wrong ways to run a meeting that has virtual participants and yesterday I had the privilege of seeing it done right!

Yesterday I went to an all-day face-to-face meeting with a team in my organization. There were about 15 people attending in person and 3 attending by phone. Usually when I attend these kinds of meetings, the people on the phone are on their own. Sure, there’s a polycom speaker and the presenter is sharing his/her screen so the virtual attendees can see the slides. But that’s it. No attention is paid to whether the attendees can here the whole conversation - especially when people in the back of the room, furthest from the mic, are speaking. There is no concern over whether the virtual attendees can hear, can keep up, or can even tell who is speaking.

But this was quite different. Tony, the person leading the meeting and doing most of the presentation, really cared about the folks on the phone. He constantly asked them if they could hear. When someone who wasn’t near the mic was talking he’d either hand them the polycom or, if they were too far, he’d quickly summarize what they said when they finished – speaking quietly into the phone. He also took copious notes on his computer, while sharing his screen – summarizing what each person said.

But it wasn’t all just what Tony did. Apparently the whole team had a culture of taking care of their virtual team members. Someone had brought a small webcam and either she or someone near her always made sure the web cam was pointing at the current speaker, turning the webcam, balancing it on a Kleenex box or water bottle to get it up high enough if need be. They made sure if someone got up and wrote on the whiteboard, that the webcam took that in too.

The whole effort of the team was quite amazing. This is a team I haven’t interacted with very much before, so I don’t know if this was just a fluke – perhaps driven by Tony who seemed to make the most effort. Or perhaps this is how the team always behaves. But regardless, I was very impressed.

So if you’re a telecommuter or remote worker who can’t make it into the office for face-to-face meetings because you live too far away, consider yourself very lucky if you work in a team like this one. If your team is not quite so conscientious, perhaps you can recruit a few friends to take this approach for you and see if they can spread the attitude to the rest of the team.

Most importantly, when you are attending a meeting in person and there are other virtual attendees, make it your business (as much as you can) to be the Tony in the room and take care of those virtual attendees!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting advice, telecommute, remote work, virtual presence, telework, virtual teams, remote teams

More and more these days, people are starting to work in environments where they are not face-to-face with others. When it comes to co-workers, this applies to telecommuters, to people who work in teams that are geographically distributed, and to people who work with teams that are in low-cost off-shore locations. When it comes to clients and customers, this applies to anyone (whether they are at a large corporation or run their own small business) who interacts with non-local clients and customers

Whenever you have relationships, professional or personal, you have to maintain some level of presence with them. You need a way to keep yourself in their mind, to maintain a rapport, to make sure they think of you when they need whatever it is you want to provide, and to keep them sufficiently vested in the relationship to be willing to help you when you are in need.

When you see your coworkers in the office every day, maintaining that presence is easy. However, when you aren’t face to face, your relationship with someone can slowly erode as the out-of-sight-out-of-mind phenomenon can chip away at any level of comfort and familiarity that person has with you. Maintaining that presence virtually requires a new set of skills and techniques that may not even occur to you.

Let’s take Stan, a friend of my family who has a great humor mailing list – and frequently sends out some really good ‘funnies’. He really takes the time and effort to maintain this. I replied to one of those emails and happened to include my standard email signature which asks people for their feedback on their challenges with telecommuting and virtual presence. Stan wrote back and told me he didn’t even know what “virtual presence” means.

I find this ironic as Stan’s funnies list actually makes him very successful in maintaining his virtual presence with his friends and family. I told him that every time I get an email from him I think of him. His emails keep him up near the top of my mental awareness. If I were to encounter something that would be useful or valuable to him, I’d be more likely to think of him and send him a note than I would other friends of the family who are not as successful in maintaining their virtual presence with me. When I do see Stan in person I feel closer to him and more comfortable, more eager to catch up on his life and plan to see him again.

As technologies advance, the people we interact with are less likely to be located in our home town anymore. Having the right skills to maintain your relationships with them is becoming a critical necessity in the business world. And it’s even starting to become, if not necessary, then definitely advantageous, in personal situations.

Whether you use the term “virtual presence” or something else, now more than ever you still need the ability to interact with people and successfully maintain your presence in a non-physical (virtual) manner. There are many different techniques and methods you can use to maintain that virtual presence, if you know what they are.

How good is your virtual presence, and is there room for improvement?

Technorati Tags: telecommuting advice, telecommute, virtual presence, work from home, work at home

One of the biggest challenges to telecommuting is avoiding that nasty Out-of-Sight-Out-of-Mind phenomenon. When you’re not around, and people can’t see you, it’s all too easy to forget about you.

But you don’t need to take that lying down!

There are many things you can do to keep your virtual presence front and center even if your physical presence is absent. I have a whole chapter dedicated to this in my book coming Summer 2008 (make sure you’re on my mailing list to get an introductory discount). But here are just a few things you can try…

1. Make sure you and your coworkers are on an Instant Messenger (IM) program.
2. IM coworkers frequently to address short questions that you would otherwise ask by email. Take the opportunity to ask how they’re doing, what they’re up to, etc.
3. Schedule a weekly or every-other-week meeting with key team members to make sure you touch bases. This replaces the chats by the water cooler.
4. If you live close enough, try to get together with your team for lunch once in a while.
5. Send out a weekly status report to your team members so they know what you’re working on and where you are in your projects.
6. Find out which forms of communication (phone, email, IM) work better with which team-mates and then use them!

These are just a few things you can do. Different techniques will work for different people, but everyone who works from home should be using at least a few of these.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, virtual presence, IM, Instant Messenger, work from home

So there’s a new study that’s been circulating widely lately that looks at the impact of telecommuting on those workers who remain in the office. I’ve seen dozens of news articles and blogs with titles such as “Telcommuting May Harm Workers”, etc. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and felt I had to speak up.

After digging around a little I found an article that seems to have put some effort into covering the full story and providing the full set of facts: “Telecommuting May Harm Workers Left Behind in the Office” on Yahoo News.  The points are basically that people who work in the office but have a lot of telecommuting coworkers are less satisfied in the job. The belief for the reasons are twofold:

1. People build less strong, less meaningful relationships with their virtually-present coworkers.
2. People may feel that they have less flexibility and more work than their virtually-present coworkers.

I can see how these could be an issue. However, I believe people who have these experiences are suffering because the company itself has probably not thought through their telecommuting program carefully. Just like for all other benefits that an employee receives, the telecommuting benefit needs to be a program offered across the board with consistent rules for all. If some managers let their employees telecommute and others whose staff have very similar roles and functions don’t, this can definitely cause resentment and damage relationships. Of course, other factors such as performance may dictate which employees a manager allows to telecommute but the general rules and approach must be consistent.

Upper management needs to have policies in place about telecommuting just like they do for other employee benefits, and then provide tools and training for both the telecommuting and the non-telecommuting workers to make sure the interactions, communications and relationship-building opportunities are addressed and that the visibility of productivity (probably the cause of item #2) remains high.

I think many people believe telecommuting is something you can just ‘do’. But there are skills to learn and behaviors to modify for you, and your company, to be successful in telecommuting arrangements.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, virtual presence, employee satisfaction, employee benefits

There seems to be a telecommuting revolution headed our way. I found an interesting article today on Webwire titled “Resolve to Telecommute or Web Commute in 2008“. It shows some fascinating statistics on telecommuting. According to this article, 23% of American workers work from home or another location on a regular basis! Wow - that’s something. And even more interesting is that 15% of the people polled would prefer the option to telecommute over stock options and onsite childcare!

The numbers continue to grow every year. This is great progress - so many people have the ability to telecommute - their jobs don’t require their physical presence in the office and the technology makes working from home more feasible as it advances. This telecommuting revolution can continue to be a success - with one requirement… proper training! This is as, if not more, important for the employers to realize as the employees - spend a little money up front and train people on the right skills so your company’s telecommuting program is successful.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, virtual presence, work from home

With the holidays mostly, but not completely over, many of you may be struggling with the tension between desire and reality. You’ve packed up the whole family, survived hauling the kids through airports, making them sit still on long flights, dealt with layovers and flight delays (or maybe you’ve suffered an equally challenging road trip with all the usual potty breaks and are-we-there-yets) to get the family to grandma and grandpa’s house on the other side of the country or further. Everyone is there - your parents or in-laws, your siblings and their kids, and a great time is had by all. You’d love to stay longer - through New Years Eve.

But the reality is that you don’t have enough vacation days to stay as long as you’d like. In the US, our vacation time is meager, and every day is guarded preciously. There’s a few days between Christmas and New Years that you’d be quite happy to work - but you don’t want to leave where you are to do it.

Enter occasional telecommuting! Even people who normally prefer to work in the office and never telecommute can take advantage of this opportunity. For one or two days during the annual family trip you can leave your spouse to take care of the kids, and find a quiet room somewhere to sit down with your laptop and get some work done. You can work for a solid day (or spread it out over 2 half-days) and that’s one less vacation day you have to burn through. It may make the difference between being able to stay where you are for New Years or not.

The nice thing about this arrangement is you can really get a lot of work done. Chances are not many of you coworkers are working. So you can sit down, get focused, and plow through some projects you’ve been unable to get to because of all the usual interruptions. And after the holidays, when all your coworkers are struggling to get through their inbox, yours will be nice and empty already from the hour you spent going through it during the holidays! You don’t even need to worry if your in-laws don’t have high-speed internet access. Since this will be a day of mostly working on that Word doc or spreadsheet you’ve been needing to roll up your sleeves and deal with, you can dial-in over a slow modem line, let all your email download to your inbox, work offline for most of the day, and just dial-in once or twice more to let the emails you’ve written get sent and synch your inbox.

What a perfect arrangement! Just be sure to get the ok from your boss so he knows and approves of what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, remote work, virtual presence

Does Santa telecommute? Well, I’d have to say yes. In fact, I think he telecommutes almost exclusively. You see, for 364 days/year Santa works from his home workshop, overseeing the elves who make toys for the children. But one day per year, he has to travel all over the world, delivering said toys.

What’s my point? My point is that telecommuting isn’t an all-or-nothing arrangement. You may not be able to, or even want to, find a situation where you telecommute exclusively. Some people work from home just a few days per week, going into the office on regularly scheduled days (e.g. every Tuesday and Thursday). Even if you want to telecommute exclusively, you will probably still find there are times where you need to go into the office on occasion. Perhaps you have an important customer meeting where your boss wants you to appear face-to-face. Or maybe a coworker who is located in another part of the country or world is visiting on a business trip. Or maybe you’re kicking off a new project where it’s helpful to sit down with your coworkers in a conference room to brainstorm on a whiteboard.

The point is, be flexible. If you’re arranging a telecommuting situation with your boss, or have just started telecommuting, make sure your boss knows that you are willing to come in on occasion for important face-to-face meetings. This occasional physical presence also helps you reconnect and strengthen your relationship with your coworkers - something that is valuable to do once in a while when your only presence is virtual most of the time.

I will add one caveat to this. An experienced telecommuter can manage with few to no face-to-face interactions. I had a teammate who, for personal reasons and with agreement from HR, actually moved to a different part of the country where there were no corporate offices. He was allowed to do this and continued to perform very well in his role, working remotely almost 100% of the time. He did fly out for a few team meetings once or twice per year, but that’s about it. So if you do have special circumstances, where you can’t come in to the office at all, don’t worry - it can be done! You just need the right working habits to be effective and retain your virtual presence with your teammates - stay tuned on this blog and watch for my upcoming e-book where I’ll give you the information you need to succeed!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, virtual presence

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Nicole Bachelor and the purpose of this blog is to explore all things related to virtual presence - telecommuting, working with distributed teams, working with offshore teams, etc. I have been telecommuting now, exclusively, for over 4 years, and telecommuting occasionally (working from home some days, going into the office on others) for many years before that. I’m working on my first eBook which will have tons of information on how to telecommute, tips, tricks, etc. I will make that available here just as soon as it’s ready and in the meantime, of course, I’ll be putting some great info into my blog.

Thank you for joining me and I look forward to a fabulous virtual relationship!