Past Meetings

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Managing a Remote Workforce

This is a great meeting for businesses and consultants as working remotely not only expands business talent pools but also helps consultants live where they want to live and perform the work they actually want to perform.

Bios

Carolyn Paddock Moore is currently a third line manager in IBM Silicon Solutions Engineering managing Application Specific Integrated Chip design development, Foundry Enablement and Product Engineering. Her organization supports customers in the US, Asia Pacific and Europe. Carolyn's organization includes employees in VT, NC, OH, CA, AZ, CO, NY, GA and Bangalore, India.  Carolyn has been a leader in workplace flexibility in IBM for several years and will  describe how this imperative in driven by both economics and employee morale. Through workplace flexibility, IBM is able to keep critical skills on the team supporting our customers world-wide while allowing employees to meet their personal needs. Workplace flexibility is a Win-Win for both employees and management.

George Thompson is currently the Supply Chain planning manager responsible for all IBM semi-conductors used in IBM computer systems.  He and his department interact with a world-wide team so flexibility is a must.  George has been a supporter of flexible work arrangements for the past several years, including location, schedule, even work content, to best match team talent and individual work-life requirements with business needs.  He has several practical examples as well as tips and traps for any team to consider.

Jim Michael has worked at IBM Burlington for over 17 yrs.  He has held various positions throughout the Manufacturing, Characterization and Product Engineering teams for both the Vermont 200mm fabricator and the East Fishkill (NY) 300mm fabricator.  He has been an engineering manager for over 8 years and has managed many groups with both locally remote employees as well as the challenge of having employees in different timezones.  Jim is currently the Foundry Product Engineering manager whose programs include Sony, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc.  Jim has a M.S. degree in electrical engineering and a B.S. in Physics.  He and his wife are also the parents of five children so work / life balance is a must.

Chris Marcus is the new Software Development Manager at Vertek Corporation.  Prior to Vertek, Chris worked at Conix Systems managing a team of virtual software engineers located all across the U.S.  Chris has also worked at IDX Systems as a Lead Software Engineer on the Imagecast team and in Boston for Bechtel/PB as a systems engineering manager focusing on the Central Artery Project’s computer control system.  Chris has an M.S. in Computer Information Systems from Northeastern and an M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas - Austin.

Notes From The Meeting

Tim Nitz
Panther Internet, Inc.
www.PantherInternet.com

Benefits of Remote Work

1. Much higher employee satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Retention of high quality employees
3. Work time can be focused time b/c of fewer office distractions.
4. Can get an employee close to a client, so their work with the client is not remote work.

Drawbacks of Remote Work

1. Lack of "water cooler" talk, which means lack of community
2. Novice employees, or non-self-starters, fail at remote work because they need direction and are afraid to ask questions.
3. Lack of visual cues, which carry a lot of important information.

Experience shared by the panel & audience

1. Video conferencing - IBM discontinued video conferencing three years ago because they couldn't get the quality high enough to make it not a distraction.
2. Community building remotely
    a. When starting a new project, or putting together a team, a physical meeting is essential. While teams can work well together remotely after the team is launched, new teams don't work well together unless they meet physically
    b. Whenever employees who normally don't see each other are in the same town, they are required to get together, e.g. at trade shows, even if they have no official business together.  Even if they are in different departments or specialties.
    c. Have meetings often, so that people aren't "all business" when they do meet - schedule in slack time for teleconference chatter
    d. Manager requires remote workers to call each other and local workers, even if they don't have official business to talk about, often.
    e. When having teleconferences, each participant's photo is displayed so that everyone has a face they can put to the name and voice.
    f. Each employee has a profile page that is linked to during the conference, so participants can read about their families, career, etc.
    g. When every team member is a remote worker, building community is easier than when there are "outsiders" and "insiders", which causes friction.
    h. Employees hate travel the most, so try to build community in other ways than frequent travel, if possible.
3. Collaboration remotely
    a. Wikis have been very useful for creating collaborative content
    b. No one has used a good collaborative white board, either the panel or in the audience.
    c. WebEx is the online sharing tool of choice.
    d. Have at least one person in meetings who is not afraid to cut people off if they are too verbose - they don't get visual clues to finish up, so they must be told.
4. Managing clients remotely
    a. Require in your contracts that you be given remote access to their machines for installs/troubleshoots/client support, so you can see what they are seeing.
5. Everyone on the panel uses instant messaging heavily for interacting with their supervisees
6. Local workers have to understand that it is company policy to support remote workers, so there is no short-changing the remote workers, or animosity towards them.

Tips for managers who manage remote workers

1. Overcommunicate.  Remote workers don't get face time to pick up on visual cues, so the managers must be redundant.
2. A remote worker requires 20% more effort to manage than a local worker, but that extra effort returns rewards much higher than the same amount of effort spent on local workers.
3. Communicate often, and ask questions about supervisees personal lives, since you don't get this during office banter.
4. Communicate 20% more than you think you need to.

Tips for remote workers

1. Performance evaluation will be based on results, since the manager can't witness your effort or your presence.
2. You must specifically state what you have done for the company, and how that benefitted the company, often.
3. Create a dedicated space for your work at your remote location
4. Try to have all the tools at your remote location you would have if you were in the office. If you can't, then get software to log in to a machine at the office that has all those tools.
5. State your hours very specifically to your teammates - being a remote worker doesn't mean always being at work