Trends confirm that more organisations are encouraging remote working/home working/virtual teams as part of the flexibility offered to staff and to cut costs for leaner structures.

At Strong Enterprises the focus has been to look at the practical side of managing a remote or virtual workforce from the strategic thinking to the practical implementation of the day-to-day operations.

Some of the questions managers have asked include:

• What new thinking is needed to define the strategy for a virtual organisation?
• How do you manage/communicate with the people you will not see on a day-to-day basis?
• How do you get the balance right between remote and face-to-face management?
• How do you maintain core organisational values and measure the results of a virtual or remote workforce
• How can Internet based technologies add value to your business?

Virtual management

Managing people effectively at a distance is critical in organisations that require people to work together from multiple locations around the world. This applies equally to those working across international boundaries, in different offices in the same country or indeed those who work from home.

Many organisations have been operating with remote or virtual workers for some time with a range communications technologies. The question is what is the most effective structure for an organisation with virtual or remote workers? Strong Enterprises has been working with clients who want to adapt their structure to be more ‘virtual’.

The current and emerging issues for the virtual organisation include: reducing costs, distance-leadership, knowledge sharing, technology security, policies, communications, regulation, reducing in the impact on the environment and trust.

Establishing and maintaining trust can get more difficult as more people work away from the organisational culture and the day-to-day interaction. This means a leader needs to be competent, confident and sensitive to their teams.

Strong Enterprises supports leaders seeking to develop the following areas:

Virtual organisational

• setting up a remote working policy
• risk assessments for home working
• regulation and the law for remote working
• measuring and monitoring the performance of remote workers
• work-life blending
• corporate social responsibility and social ‘nice-working’.

Virtual leadership

• communication styles and techniques specifically for a distributed workforce
• leadership and behavioural competencies for remote workers
• trust and how it works in virtual teams
• influencing skills and maintaining a presence in virtual teams with many stakeholders
• performance management and discipline
• coaching and mentoring remote staff.

Managing change in a virtual environment

• Providing a range of frameworks in change management that will support and build a practical plan
• New ways in communicating and facilitating a change process with the staff
• Methods for keeping your staff with you through the transformation
• Identifying, defining and monitoring additional or new skills sets needed
• Getting clarity and focus on the solutions and desired outcomes.

Further information on courses run by Strong Enterprises

Virtual meetings

Running meetings over the Internet can be a challenge both in terms of learning a new technology, the reliability of the communications infrastructure and the behaviours needed to make a meeting work.

A question that is always worth asking is what is the real objective of the meeting? Where does it fit in the organisational process flow? Or is it more about bringing people together as part of an inclusive and information giving update?

One of the real benefits from the expanding choice of Internet tools and technologies is that it is much easier to have on-line meetings.

One-one meetings using MSN or Skype are a popular choices. It can even be possible to link with a standard mobile phone. If a group wish to meet there are highly affordable PC web based systems such as MSN or Skype through to the state–of–the-art Internet based video conferencing tools.

Alternatively, in fact very alternatively, you can send your avatar to a meeting in one of the many virtual worlds meeting spaces.

This is assuming that the web-based conferencing tools such as text based chat, document sharing, tagging and e-mails networks have not already done the job.

Small group meetings where products such as Go-to-Meeting and MegaMeetings, Cisco’s Telepresence and Hewlett Packard’s Halo system can manage a typical group of 10 -12 people and provide an experience that gets closer to that of a ‘traditional’ face-to face meeting.

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, provide a space for all types of meetings with a range of media technologies. The important consideration is how comfortable the user is in the virtual environment. See virtual worlds.

Web conferencing

Web conferencing is the term used for conducting live meetings, presentations slideshows with a group of people simultaneously over the Internet such as Webex (Cisco), Powwownow and slideshare.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing allows the attendees to see each other using a web cam such as Megameetings to the state of the art systems such as Cisco's Telepresence.

Further information on courses run by Strong Enterprises

Virtual Worlds

A virtual world can be described as a computer generated 3D environment where you can visit in a digital form of yourself (Avatar). Virtual worlds are more commonly known as platforms for computer generated games with pre-defined quests called Massively Multi-player On-line Role-Playing Games, MMORPGs (for example: World of Warcraft). In fact, there are over 100 virtual worlds most of which are directed at children to engage them in learning exercises, networking and socialising.

Driven by the popularity and growing revenues from computer games, the technology has brought with it a broader range of applications, markets and opportunities for growing businesses. This has encouraged several global organisations to build corporate virtual worlds where they create an on-line learning environments and meeting spaces. Second Life is one of virtual worlds available to the public that can demonstrate the potential from having a meeting to running a virtual economy with its own business community. If you would like to learn more about Second Life ask Nicola’s avatar, Thalia Poliatevska to show you around.

A popular application of virtual worlds is to provide scenarios where avatars act out problem or emergency as part of a learning programme. The script will change according to how the learner responds to each situation and can be adapted to a particular language or cultural difference.

New developments include non-human controlled avatars that can learn from their environment and the questions you ask them as well as open source tools that allow people to create their own world and therefore the rules and form they can take.

Further information on presentations run by Strong Enterprises

Virtual communications

Communications across the Internet is growing fast and can seem complex and too time consuming to be useful. Today there is multi-level convergent media where all modes of communication and information are continually reforming to adapt to the enduring demands of technologies (ref: Wikipedia.org/wiki/technological_convergence) Another term used is ubiquitous computing also known as ‘everyware’.

What a business needs is technology and techniques that will enable people to communicate, meet, consult, inform and involve the workforce in delivering to the customer.

Strong Enterprises has conducted research in both well known and the more obscure Internet tools to see what real value they can bring to different parts of a business. Here are some examples:

On-line social networks

On-line social networks are the hot topic for 2009. They are an internet tool that allows groups of individuals and organisations to interact and share information. Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are leading this market with both ingenious applications (or apps) and controversial demands on their membership. What is clear is that while social networks themselves do not appear to make money from the millions of users they are becoming an important part of our communications infrastructure.

Twitter is a free social network or micro blog service that is accessible via a number of technologies. As a user you will inform your group of ‘followers’ with short messages of up to 140 characters in length. What is clever is how you choose your followers and what you tell them. These can include links and references. A team member can send in updates on progress, a celebrity can amuse their fans, a friend can tweet a holiday postcard message.

Podcasting

A podcast is a short audio or visual film that can be a simple as a recorded monologue or interview to a sharp, professionally produced marketing message. Many organisations are using podcasts as a new way to demonstrate their products and services with the benefit of being able to set the context or brand in another way.

There are two parts to creating a podcast the art and the science:

• The art is all about catching the audience, developing the content, a spot of choreography, useful techniques for interviewing.
• The science behind podcast technology included the technical requirements, recording and getting clever with the camera, editing and encoding, launching onto the Internet.

Knowledge management

Sharing information, processes to create learning and insights across a distributed network is key to ensuring teams and remote workers can operate efficiently. There is extensive research into how this can ensure the information is easily accessible, how it is catalogued and maintained. Strong Enterprises has explored a number of methodologies for knowledge management and knowledge sharing on-line. See knowledge sharing event in the training section.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the term used for businesses that are entirely web-based with mobile devices that can access the data at anytime of day or night. Companies pay a subscription that is dictated by the types of business software bundles required (accounting software, customer relationship management tools, communications and document editing suites). Cloud computing has clear benefits in that all the IT upgrades, accessibility and document back-ups are the responsibility of the host ‘cloud-managing’ organisation with a monthly payment. The disadvantage is the reliance on the Internet and the continuing issues of security – not to mention ensuring the subscription is paid!