10/ 15/ 2008
by Maggie Flynn
Stay in close touch with employees who don't work in your office
While having an interpersonal relationship with an employee you rarely see—or possibly have never met—may be challenging, it's common in today's business world. Employers have a lot of freedom in hiring, and many jobs are no longer tied to physical location. The best person for the job may reside in another state, or even a different country.
Follow these management practices in dealing with your virtual employees:
Keep in regular phone contact
Communication is made up of endless visual and verbal cues, gestures and inflections that help people understand the subtext and intention of another's words. Email, on the other hand, is not the ideal way to build understanding. Sentences typed with the warmest intentions can come across as abrupt or confusing, which may lead you or your employee to believe that one party is angry or frustrated when this is not the case. For this reason, it's important to set up regular phone chats with your off-site employees.
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology makes it affordable to call your off-site employees to check in about on-going projects, or simply to hear if they have any questions or concerns they'd like to share. Making the effort to talk to them on a regular basis will go a long way towards making them feel like part of the team, no matter how far they work from the home base.
Utilize webinars
Instead of sending virtual employees nothing but training manuals and long documents, design webinars to make their training and learning experiences more interactive. All you need to hold a webinar for your virtual employees is some simple software, Power Point slides and Internet connections so employees can watch your seminar on their computer. Hooking up phone lines will make your webinar more interactive, allowing you to take questions from the audience.
This additionally gives employees a chance to hear each other's comments and interact with one another. Webinars are a great means of keeping off-site employees in the loop, allowing you to conduct the types of learning and employee development workshops your in-house employees may experience on a regular basis.
Bring employees together
If feasible, fly in your virtual employees for annual meetings, holiday parties or other big events. If you have employees in a few different key cities, organize a get-together for them. For example, let's say you're located in New York but have employees in the Los Angeles area. Put one of your L.A. employees in charge of organizing a dinner for the off-site employees after they finish a big project. While working from home has its advantages, off-site employees miss out on office friendships and every day events such as chats around the coffee maker, so do what you can to make them feel less isolated.
A key concern of employers today is cultivating employee loyalty and finding ways to encourage key players to stay with the business. Unfortunately, off-site employees often have less incentive to stick around than those you see every day. Therefore, one of the beset things you can do is make these employees feel like part of the organization—even if they're working out of their living room.
