Much like the shirtless dancing guy in the amusing but compelling video above, workshifting is a physical movement--but instead of flailing your arms, you seamlessly move the location of where you do work. One day, you're meeting your manager online from a coffee shop.  And the next, you're prepping a client presentation while sitting at an airport gate.  This is all possible thanks to the World Wide Web and its wondrous ways of allowing us to use remote technologies.

• www.workshifting.com ;)
• "Work Unchained: Workshifting and the Competitive Edge of the Anywhere Office" [podcast, eBook]
• "Leading Virtual Effectiveness: Four Strategies for Effective Communication in a Distributed Workforce" [eBook]
• "The Top Ten Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers" [white paper]
• "Presenting the Business Case for Web Commuting" [white paper, podcast]

Today's post is by Tracey Webb, a 25-year business veteran with a depth of experience in high-tech, health care, software, and financial services segments. Having worked for global enterprises like Xerox, IBM, as well as some of the largest international learning and development organizations, Tracey has a long track record of producing success for her clients. Currently, she serves as the Director of Consulting Services for Cox eLearning Consultants.

For those of us who have spent years pouring over training manuals, being master-trained, or serving as master trainers, the advent of the virtual classroom can present a horse of another color (to quote that wonderful line from The Wizard of Oz).  We spent countless hours making notes and creating visuals (flip charts and PowerPoints) to use with our students.  Our goal:  to keep our students engaged and to make certain that they learned the material.  

What are the parallels between teaching in the virtual classroom and delivering training in a brick and mortar setting?  There are an abundance of skills that transfer between both mediums.  First of all, instructors have to know the material "cold" as we use to say in the training medium.  There is nothing worse than listening to an instructor who is obviously reading from the training manual.  The same is true in the world of the virtual classroom:  it is obvious when a facilitator is reading from a script, even if there is no visual.

The key to avoiding the boring "talking head" syndrome is to become extremely familiar with the material by making the contextual connections that make sense to us as trainers.  We might not use this color commentary in the deliver, but it helps us make the material "our own" so that the delivery is more natural.  

The Post-it technique works wonders in the live classroom as well as in the virtual "room".  As you are reviewing the instructor's training manual, PowerPoints, or other medium, you use no more than three Post-its per page to summarize the three key points that you must convey from that section.  This forces the brain to synthesize the material.

The next skill that is equally useful in both the virtual and the non-virtual classroom is the art of building in points of interaction.  Where do you ask a question?  How can the question be phrased in a provocative manner to illicit interest, responses, and discussion.  No one wants to listen to a talking head without some variation in the delivery.  Involving the audience is one of the easiest means of breaking up the delivery modality.  

Modern virtual platforms allow for a great deal of interaction between the instructor and the student and among the students themselves, such as in separate chats or break out groups.  These are the same tools that instructors use in a live classroom when they ask the group to break up into smaller sub-segments and to report back to the group at large.   This skill is very useful in the virtual classroom as long as the instructor becomes very familiar with the technological attributes of the selected e-learning platform.

There are two major differences between facilitating an on-line session and teaching in a virtual classroom.  

1.    Voice pitch, tone, and diction become even more critical in an on-line delivery session.  We have to test our voices and delivery through recorded medium to ensure that we are varying our tone.  In fact, one very useful technique is to use Post-it notes of a different color than those used for summary points as described above.  This other note color is used sparingly to make notes about tone (indicated where to emphasize a point by raising or lowering our voice for example) and about verbal content ("tell a short story" here or "make an analogy here").  This "coding" helps us remember that we have to be verbally interesting otherwise the delivery will fail.

2.    Pause a bit more to allow transmission of the data so that you are not verbally "running into yourself."  There is nothing more distracting than an instructor who is moving too fast through on-line material--faster than the students can absorb it.  Remember, in the on-line world, when you put up a slide, people really do try and read it--or at least most of it because the visual distraction of the live presenter is absent.  They focus on the material.  

The key to successful on-line delivery and facilitation of training content is to be mindful of the benefits and the challenges with technology.  The successful instructor understands that presenting in cyber-space requires that their voice, word choice, and intonation carry the weight of the delivery.  In other words, their voice is a very important vehicle for influencing the outcome of the training.  They also have to spend considerable time melding the content with the technology to ensure that interaction, engagement, and interest are maximized.

What do you think?


Photo Credit: Mr Flip

I think we would all agree that of all the hurdles that we face when trying to implement a workshifting culture our technical problems are nothing compared to our people problems. The technical challenges are likely the easiest to overcome because they are purely black and white, either it works or it doesn't. Its easy to get discouraged but I am here to tell you that a little planning up front will make the task of convincing your boss that much easier.

The biggest challenge we will face is changing the pervasive work environment that can be found in the majority of businesses across America that still sees workshifting as a pipe dream, something that will never work. Lets work through these five and in another post we will give you five reasons why we can make workshifting happen.

1. When you are working from home I can't tell when you are really working. Look, I already have enough to do without having to worry about what you are doing while working out of the office. When 8:00 AM rolls around and I can see you sitting at your desk, I know that you are in the office and stuff is getting done.
2. No one can get real work done at home. I know my place has way to many distractions to be productive. Your kids are running around the house, screaming, all while you are trying to talk to a customer? Forget about it, no way am I going to take a chance that we will look unprofessional, not even in the slightest.
3. How about filing your TPS reports? We have filing cabinets full of those reports that you have to refer to daily. How can you do that while working out of the office. Think we are going to send them to you? Don't be selfish, our jobs are hard enough already without having to cater to your whims and wishes.
4. You know how it is, out of sight, out of mind. You really want that promotion? I'm telling you, if you work out of the office you miss all of the offline chatter that builds relationships and relationships are what builds careers.
5. I know that you have valid reasons but as soon as I let you start working away from the office I will have to let everyone do it. No favorites are played at this company. My job is hard enough managing the people that I have. As soon as I open this up for you I will have ten people breathing down my neck to do the same.

Honestly its pretty easy to explain away why someone cannot make workshifting happen in their organization. Go ahead and Google "telecommute problems" and see what comes up at the top of the list. Its not the technical chops that you need to make it work, its the management and people problems that are hard to solve.

That is one of the reasons that we are here, to help solve some of these problems. The Workshifting.com community is here to help answer some of these questions and be a great reference on why you can make this happen.

These are five that I came up with. Any you have heard that you would like to share?


Photo Credit: Editor B

So, with the World Cup upon us, employers are once again getting twitchy about the high levels of absenteeism - or 'throwing sickies' - which may well arise over the next few weeks.  No surprise there of course, based on the evidence of previous tournaments when big matches are scheduled, especially those involving the British teams.
 
Yet as an employer, the solution is firmly in your own hands.  Your HR departments will already be under varying legal, social and environmental pressures to introduce more flexible working practices.  And the good news is that, whatever cultural or organisational issues your organisation may have to address,   technology no longer presents a costly barrier. 
 
Easy-to-use voice and data collaboration tools providing secure remote access to your network, web conferencing, training and diagnostics are now within financial reach of even the smallest business.  As a result, staff can remain fully operational and stay in touch with colleagues and customers, wherever they are.
 
By doing this, employers can help their staff achieve a better work/life balance.  And, as recent surveys have shown, such moves are likely to have a really positive effect on staff satisfaction and retention levels - without damaging productivity.   Sounds like a winning goal to me.

What do you think?


Photo Credit: Phalinn
 

In the world of project management, one of the highest and most recognized accolades a project manager can achieve is PMP® certification. In return for the many hours of studying and proven project success, as a certified PMP® one of the requirements we are held to by the Project Management Institute® is continuing education to maintain the certification. Despite the costs, time and effort involved in earning "PDUs" (Professional Development Units) to maintain the certification, PMP®s welcome the opportunity - albeit involuntary - to learn new and enlightening facets of the field. Given the international recognition and proliferation of PMPs, many companies are offering webinars and other online learning opportunities to make PDU-acquisition that much less painful! I recently attended a free webinar entitled "A Sixth Sense for Project Management," which spoke to the need for projects managers to find and invoke an intuitive "sixth sense" to overcome and identify that which empirical business acumen and planning simply cannot supersede.

And, so I began pondering....how we, as project managers, must essentially invoke ALL of our senses to manage projects and ensure success.

Sight: A good project manager not only "sees" the vision and scope for the project, as derived from stakeholder requirements, but also keeps the project "visible" throughout the organization and throughout the project life cycle.

Touch: In the world of project management, "touch" is synonymous with impact. Without a doubt, a project manager's ability to lead and influence are paramount to a project's success. Your priority is not only to capture requirements and obtain stakeholder buy-in from inception with a strong scope statement and kickoff, but also to continually "touch" the resources assigned to your project and on whom you rely for its completion. There's a lot of meaning behind the phrase "All hands on deck" when you need stakeholder, resource and project manager cooperation to ensure a project's timely and successful completion.

Hearing: It goes without saying that a project manager must have an acute sense of hearing in order to catch all of the requirements, scheduling constraints and deliverables which are part of every project. However, project managers need to be able to "hear" undercurrents of emerging risks, schedule constraints and resource apathy which will all adversely affect a positive project outcome. Tuning in to such inaudible signals is crucial so that you can avoid hearing stakeholders shout at the top of their lungs when a project gets off track. 

Smell: A project manager does not need to be a bomb-sniffing dog to know when the wheels are stuck, rubber is burning, and a project is veering off track.

Taste: A good project manager must be able to taste for "done-ness" to know when requirements have been fulfilled and a project is fully ready for implementation. And, much like a restaurant tasting, all members of the project team must agree on the level of "done-ness" in order for the product to be offered. Ultimately, there is no sense a project manager likes more than this one and the taste of sweet success when milestones are met, schedules align, budget constraints are not exceeded and stakeholder expectations satisfied!

When managing a project, whether large or small, personal or professional, you need not be a certified PMP® like me to appreciate that you will engage 100% of yourself and your senses. It is important to recognize the relationship between a project manager's "sense-ibilities" and the innate ability to initiate, drive, and guide a project to success.

What do you think?


Photo Credit: Snowpea&Bokchoi

Many articles have been written about the personality traits needed to be a successful workshifter. Most stress the importance of finding people who are flexible, adaptable go-getters and disciplined workers. But in my opinion, the traits of those people who manage workshifters are equally important. A strong relationship between managers and workshifters is one of the most important elements in a sustained remote working environment.

I'm lucky because two of the three people who supervise me also work out of their homes and as a result understand the situational factors that influence a workshifting environment. But I know this isn't the case for everyone. As a workshifter, the people who manage you are often the only lifeline you have to the office and sometimes even clients and customers. It can quickly become frustrating if you're stuck with a manager who isn't in tune with your unique needs or tries to control every move you make.

As a result, it's important for organizations to not only focus on the workshifters that are part of the team, but also the managers who oversee them. Identify the people who have a management style that best supports worshifters, and provide them with the freedom they need to successfully manage a remote workforce.

From my perspective, here are some of the traits I've found to be most important in people who manage workshifters:

1. Be an over-communicator. In my opinion, there's no such thing as communicating too much with a workshifter. Workshifters are not around to hear the back and forth about ongoing projects in the office, which is valuable information they're missing out on. Make sure you keep your remote team in the loop. Develop mechanisms that will help them stay informed without having to constantly call their office cohorts to get the information they need.
   
   
2. Be a team builder. Feeling a part of the team is important to the success of workshifters. It increases motivation levels and helps reduce feelings of isolation. Managers who are natural team builders will succeed in acting as a bridge between the culture within the office and the remote team.
    
3. Don't micro-manage. Excessive scrutiny increases stress, fosters insecurity and doesn't empower workshifters to contribute their own ideas. It also gives the impression that that you don't trust them. Managers need to figure out a way to monitor the workshifter without micro-managing them. Build trust. Emphasize deliverables instead of actions.
   
   
4. Be responsive. Appointing your busiest employee to manage a team of workshifters is probably not the best idea. Workshifters who don't hear back from their manager until the end of the day will become frustrated at their inability to move projects forward due to lack of information. Managers need to make a conscious effort to be responsive and make themselves available to their team. 
   
   
5. Be curious. Take time to understand your workshifter's world.  It's easy to build relationships with the people you see every day in the office. For offsite employees this becomes more challenging. Workshifters who believe their managers do not understand their world will feel unsupported and skeptical about their managers' ability to give performance feedback. Managers should go out of their way to get to know workshifters and make them feel more connected. Visit each other's home office. Share family photos. Meet regularly.
   
   
6. Be flexible. Workshifters are a self-motivated, autonomous and dedicated group. This means that managers must look at workshifters as individuals and not as a group entity. Understand each individual's unique needs and motivations and how to respond to them.
   

Do you have any other traits that you would add to this list?

Photo Credit: Round Indigo Rock

Recently I have been reading the Starfish and the Spider, a book I have been meaning to read for a while now.  Finally I started it and I am half way through.  As I was reading the first couple chapters there were a few things that made me think of workshifters.  In the first section of the book there is a discussion about decentralized organizations, this is where I started to see direct correlations to workshifters.  

In the book, Brafman and Beckstrom make the point that in a decentralized organization, a starfish organization, to be productive there needs to be a core set of principles that remain constant.  The best example for this is the reference to Alcoholics Anonymous.  Anyone can start a group.  However, the recovery process is exactly the same.  The core principle is the recovery process, but anyone can start a group in any place they want.  This should remain the same for any workshifter.  We should have a consistent set of core principles and/or behaviors regardless of where we are working.  

For instance, in our company, we ask all our employees to log their time in Less Time Spent so that we can manage client hours, we use Basecamp to manage projects and we meet on Skype daily with our project manager to discuss what's on deck for the day.  Those are our core principles that remain constant no matter where we are workshifting.  This is what allows us to be starfish workshifters, no matter what environment we are in we can work productively keeping our core principles in tact.

If you are thinking of allowing your team to start workshifting, you should develop a set of  guidelines that remain constant such as work product or work process.  This will allow your team to workshift while still remaining productive.  

What are the core principle that remain the same for your workshifters?

Photo Credit: Topyti

As someone who's been workshifting for more than 15 years, and also as someone who during that time has managed workshifters for a number of organizations, I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to successfully supporting remote employees. Here, a few suggestions and observations from the trenches:

• Workshifting isn't for everyone. Although most companies will see significant benefits from allowing employees to work from home and/or the road as needed or desired, some employees simply aren't cut out for the independence and discipline such a set-up requires. Many people (especially mature adults who've been in the workforce for a while) know that about themselves--given the choice, they will opt to go into an office everyday for the companionship, sense of purpose, or even just because they don't trust themselves to be productive at home. Other employees may want to workshift but are clearly ready to do so. It's a manager's job to recognize when an employee shouldn't work from anywhere but the office, and support any employees who fit that group.  Alternatively, you could know what traits you're looking for ahead of time and hire for those workshifting qualities.
  
  
• Sometimes, a transition period is needed. Letting people work from home one or two days a week is a good way to trial the new way of working, and make sure that it's a good fit for everyone--not just the workshifting employee, but also his or her manager and colleagues. However, for the transition to succeed, workshifters must be given the technology and business model support they would get if they were workshifting full time.
  
  
• Speaking of which, make sure you give workshifters the technology they need to work from somewhere other than a corporate office. These will likely include a notebook PC, mobile phone, access to IM and conferencing tools, and a headset.  Ensure that you have a remote support option in place to help them at a distance.
  
  
• Shift your reward system to focus on results, not time spent on any given project, or any given workday. Workshifters get used to the freedom to work anytime and from anywhere pretty quickly; as long as they're getting the job done, don't stress about how or when they're doing it. (That said, if part of their job is meeting with clients or participating in conference calls, you should expect them to be available at the necessary times to do so.)
  
  
• Assign workshifters to small working teams whenever a project supports collaborative work--and make sure you mix up the players often. Working with one or two colleagues on a specific task ensures remote employees get to know one another better--and having a solid relationship will help the team be more collaborative and engaged even when they're not working together on anything specific. Audio, video and web conferencing can help small teams work effectively across physical and cultural boundaries.
  
  
• Leverage social networking tools to keep people connected from afar. This, too, will help far-flung employees get to know each other better, and stay in touch even when they're not actively working on a project together. That reaps rewards when the time comes for favors, support and collaboration.
  
  
• When possible, meet in person. If you can't afford to bring an entire group together on a regular basis, encourage team members to meet live in small groups whenever they happen to be in the same place--at conferences, on client calls, etc. This will help people get even more out of their virtual meetings during the rest of the year.

What are some of your tips that you have found useful for managing workshifters?

Photo by: joelogon

Today we have a guest post by James Ware.  James is the co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program.

We all know there is a virtual explosion of distributed/mobile/flexible work occurring across theeconomy, including large organizations, small businesses, and free agents/entrepreneurs. In fact, our research suggests that fully 15% of the U.S. workforce now spends one or more days a week outside a corporate facility. We project that number to grow beyond 25% within five years.Yet managing mobile workers and distributed teams is an enormously difficult challenge. When your staff is working at great distances from each other, keeping them focused on their tasks and connected with each other and the larger organization often seems nearly impossible.

We've written previously about the "anywhere office" and the growing desire, if not need, of most knowledge workers to tune in and log on from anyplace at any time. But being connected technically is actually only a small part of the solution.

The most frequent objection we hear from managers concerned about the possible loss of shared knowledge and corporate culture when workgroups start operating more virtually is the fear of reduced accidental meetings at the coffee pot or in the hallways. They worry that distributed teams will suffer from a reduction in the serendipity that so often leads to important business breakthroughs--those unplanned, spontaneous conversations between people who don't interact normally in the course of doing their jobs.

More importantly, however, is the need to keep team members focused on common goals. One CEO several years ago posed essential questions about leadership of a distributed workforce:

"How do I know that our 5,000 employees spread out all over the globe are focused minute by minute on doing the things the company needs them to be doing? How do they know in the moment that they are making the decisions and taking the actions we want them to? And how do we know what they're thinking?"

There is no simple answer to this fundamental challenge, but here are four basic principles for connecting distributed team members with each other and the organization at large:

Use Highly Participative Approaches in Distributed Work Environments

People who are involved in decisions affecting their work are much more likely to go along with them. That doesn't mean that you have to get 100% buy-in before doing anything; just being asked about their views will go a long way towards satisfying most people, even if in the end their manager doesn't agree. It's primarily a matter of valuing staff ideas and acknowledging their individual perspectives.

Define and Publish Formal Policies and Procedures for Distributed Work

As soon as you allow employees to work remotely you are opening a can of worms, including legal issues, financial disputes, and potential misunderstandings. Legally, when an employee who is working at home trips over a rug and breaks an arm, is he or she eligible for workers' compensation? Who will pay for the home office furnishings, the telephone that is being used for work, or the Internet connection? And when is the employee expected to be accessible to other employees and management?

It is critically important to treat employees consistently--in all matters, of course, but particularly as they move into flexible work programs. Nothing will stir up employee anger or legal action more quickly than the discovery that some of them are receiving different levels of financial support or being held to different work schedules.

Establish Explicit, Tangible Measures of Individual and Team Performance

This is the single most important thing you can do to keep distributed team members aligned with company goals and each other. Formal performance and productivity measures (here are some tips on being a productive workshifter) serve several important functions:

• They establish clear guidelines and common expectations about how each distributed employee will be measured and rewarded.
  
  
• They help create an atmosphere of accountability in both directions and across the organization.
  
  
• They provide senior management with clear evidence of how cost-effective (or not) the distributed work arrangements are.
  
  
• They help shift the dominant management culture away from managing time spent on tasks to focusing on the results produced.
  

 "Managing by walking around," which was a common rule of thumb in the 1980's and 90's, has deep common-sense appeal in that it encourages managers to be visible and to interact regularly with their subordinates.  In that context, however, "interact" generally meant face-to-face communication (though it also often included peering, uninvited, over employees' shoulders to scrutinize their work).

But clearly that kind of interaction just can't happen in a distributed environment. It's absolutely essential to replace such close-in monitoring of employees' actions with a focus on the results they produce.

Develop Formal Agreements about Regular Interaction

One of the inevitable consequences of working in a distributed team is that members just don't see each other or their managers as often as they do when they are co-located. Yet we all know that more frequent interactions generally lead to higher levels of trust and greater comfort with other team members.

But with distributed teams frequent face-to-face interaction just isn't feasible. However, there are several critical points in the life of a team when being together in-person can make a huge difference:  at the very beginning, as the team converges on a design solution, and as it winds up its work and disbands.

For managers of distributed teams the bottom line is really very simple: Make the invisible visible for team members--be proactive in reaching out and paying attention to the personal/social side of your team's members, no matter where they are physically.

For more information on connecting and engaging distributed teams, read the full whitepaper.