Virtual Team Building

As someone who earned a journalism degree when the paperless office was just starting to be discussed as a cost-effective workplace/operational model (circa 2001), I read with interest yesterday's blog post by Max Chafkin, an editor at Inc. Magazine.  Inc. is Winning Workplaces' media partner for our Top Small Company Workplaces competition.

Chafkin links to a slideshow of photos of their snazzy new office space.  So why are they closing up physical shop and going virtual for a month?

He writes that this experiment is a way to walk the talk when it comes to the businesses they write about that have gone space-less and made it work.  This includes the desire to chronicle firsthand the related cost savings.

But Chafkin also says he and his fellow staffers want to find out how virtual team building affects the overall workplace culture.  With him and his staff leading a regular dialogue with Inc.'s blog readers over this month-long trial focused on their collective lessons learned (and, surely, avoided), I'm eager to see the takeaways this experiment yields.

To contribute to and learn from this dialogue, you can add the Fresh Inc. blog to your list of bookmarked websites.  If you subscribe to blogs in a feed reader, here's the link for their RSS feed (and here's our blog's RSS feed to add, too, if you don't already subscribe to it).

I was pleased to see that our blog was cited on the Event Manager Blog authored by Anne Thornley-Brown, President of Executive Oasis International.  Anne pointed to this post, where I discussed three benefits of virtual team building, as exemplified by our Top Small Workplace Point B.

Note the reference to yours truly on LinkedIn – I am a member of her group there, the International Business Team Building Alliance.  It contains some good food for thought when it comes to team building activities for the workplace.  I urge you to check out that group.

For more on using employee engagement practices to manage employees virtually, read these selected posts.

What have your fellow readers found most helpful when it comes to the workplace culture strategies covered here?  On the last day of 2009, I can share with you the following posts, in descending order of popularity.  Enjoy, and see you in 2010....

1. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
2. Friday Nugget: Transparency is a Business Model
3. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
4. Google Employees Can't Get No Satisfaction?
5. Inclusiveness, Multiculturalism, Employee Engagement the Norm at Phenomenex
6. 12 Ways to Save on Your Holiday Party This Year
7. 30 Reasons Jack Welch is Wrong on Work-Life Balance
8. 10 Ways to Motivate Employees
9. Top 10 Influential Small Business Thought Leaders
10. 10 Small Business People to Follow on Twitter
11. Six Ways to Measure the ROI of Employee Engagement
12. 30 Employee Development Strategies to Boost Productivity
13. Fair Treatment of Employees Counteracts Fear of Pro-Labor Bill
14. Two Inspiring Stories of Team Building
15. Toyota Leads Again, This Time in Team Building During Down Times
16. 10 Best Practices: Offering Vacation Days
17. 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)
18. Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
19. The Crisis of Employee Engagement Among Top Performers
20. 10 Team Building Strategies of the 2009 Top Small Workplaces Finalists

Most, if not all, small businesses are using this quarter to evaluate what worked well this year and where they can improve to retain customers, continue to remain as profitable, and hold on to their best employees heading into 2010.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share what your peers are finding most insightful among our library of articles on investing in your workplace with the goal of building employee engagement – both on this blog and on our website.  So here's a Top 20 list split by site:

Most popular in Q4 2009: winningworkplaces.org

1. Ask An Expert: Representing a Department or Team to Management
2. Feature: Ways to Engage Employees Using Technology That Deliver ROI
3. Success Story: Integrated Project Management (IPM)
4. Ask An Expert: Employee Opinion Surveys
5. Success Story: The Redwoods Group
6. Feature: How Small Businesses Are Increasing Sales in a Recession
7. Feature: Blue Jeans Day
8. Editorial: The Power of Communication
9. Q&A: LifemeetsWork President Kyra Cavanaugh
10. Feature: Michelle Obama Delivers Address at Best Bosses Conference

Most popular in Q4 2009: blog.winningworkplaces.org

1. Top 10 Influential Small Business Thought Leaders
2. Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
3. 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)
4. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
5. The Crisis of Employee Engagement Among Top Performers
6. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
7. 10 Ways to Motivate Employees
8. Stanford Prof Reinforces Theory: Poor Employee Engagement Will Lead to Talent Exodus
9. 12 Ways to Save on Your Holiday Party This Year
10. 10 Best Practices: Offering Vacation Days

If you find value in any of these links, I encourage you to share this post with your colleagues and contacts using the button below.

Remember the phrase "knowledge worker" that Microsoft and Intel coined back in the '90s?  Tim Keenan, who leads IT services firm High Performance Technologies, Inc. (HPTi), based in Virginia, doesn't like that term.

He prefers "knowledge leader" instead.  In fact, one of his key employee development strategies at HPTi is a comprehensive training program to create knowledge leaders.  Keenan says his leaders have improved HPTi's bottom line through:

• More employees generating ideas
• Problems tackled faster because employees start their questions with "What if we..." instead of "What's wrong with..."
• Fewer employees who pass the buck in dealing with customers, which results in faster service at lower levels and fewer negative customer comments

Ultimately, Keenan says he wants to engage employees to create leaders because they "take ownership of an issue and drive it to its best possible conclusion."

In the following interview clip with Keenan, he details how HPTi's knowledge leader training works for four distinct groups of employees:

mp3 - 6.1 MB - 6:41

Related:

• Our Success Story on HPTi
• Access our webinar recording on virtual team building, in which Keenan is a co-presenter

As I've mentioned previously, I am now doing my writing, web content management, and marketing duties for Winning Workplaces in a home office environment in sunny Los Angeles (our headquarters is in the Chicago area).

It's been a somewhat rocky road getting here – or at least not as smooth a transition as I had anticipated.  So I thought I would try to illuminate the way forward so those undertaking this change in work arrangement (or considering it) will be better prepared for it.

Here are 10 best practices from my own experience.  Feel free to add to this list by sharing your own thoughts or experiences below.

1. To have a better chance of getting buy-in from leadership, explain how service levels will be maintained, and/or costs saved.  I do 98% of my work on a computer, so I knew I could be based anywhere.  I was also able to identify cost savings as a result of not needing to take public transportation to work and have that be reimbursed (a company benefit).
2. You can't over-communicate to your coworkers as far as when you're leaving.  Make sure they have ample lead time to be able to wrap up any standing projects before you hit the road, Jack.
3. Whatever amount of time you think you'll need to pack up your workspace, double it.  Trust me, you'll run short on time here if you make a conservative or even middle-of-the-road estimate.
4. Another note on packing: it's a great opportunity for spring cleaning!  Which files do you really need?  (How many are already stored electronically?)  How much space do you envision in your home office?  That will help dictate how many boxes you'll need.  This is another opportunity to demonstrate a cost savings to your employer if, like me, you need to have your files shipped to you: "I thought I would need eight boxes, but I did some consolidating and I only need five."
5. If – again, like me – you're not merely moving your office to where you live now but are relocating to a new city, don't forget to think about how your new 'hood will affect your work environment.  Arrange multiple on-site visits if possible at different times of the day so you can get a sense of anything that might be an external distraction, such as traffic or construction.  On a related note, could your work activity annoy your neighbors?  (Maybe you like to blast music while making sales calls.  I don't know.)
6. Your new home office space shouldn't be an afterthought.  Especially if you have a family, you need to be intentional about the workspace.  Draw up a floorplan (a crude, napkin-quality one is fine) and map out the dimensions of your space.
7. When doing the above step, think about the work environment you've been used to and what you'd like it to be.  Are you the kind of person who works best with a general din going on around you?  You might not need a room all to yourself in this case.  If you're worried about pets or kids disturbing you, though, and feel you need to isolate yourself to do your best work, make your own room – or at least a cordoned-off area with the help of tension rods and curtains – a priority.
8. High-speed Internet is an absolute must.  Shop around for an ISP in your area that can provide both Business Class Internet and a static IP address.  You'll need the latter to set up a virtual private network (VPN) with the help of hardware like this.  (Yet another cost savings opportunity for your employer: if you think you'll use your work PC for both business and home, offer to split the monthly cost of the Internet connection with them.)
9. You will undoubtedly miss that person-to-person contact you had in your regular office environment.  Your phone and a webcam can be vital tools to help you feel as connected as you were before.  When communicating via email, be clear about project expectations and deadlines, and encourage the same from your coworkers.  You'll find that minutes of staff meetings, especially those you may miss while transitioning, are as good as gold.
10. It is even more important when working from home to learn and put to use this time-tested business lesson: know when to say no.  Make it a habit to under-promise and over-deliver.

Working from home can improve your virtual team building skills to enhance employee leadership development.  From a management perspective, because it promotes work/life balance, it can be a great way of investing in your workplace.  If you have questions about how work-from-home arrangements can help your business, give us a call at 847-328-9798.

The UK has been an innovator when it comes to fashion and pop music.  Now we can add employer-employee relations to that list.

According to UK site Management-Issues, the government of the country that brought us that televised crystalization of productivity gone bad, The Office,

yesterday called for a "nationwide discussion" to better understand the effect of employee engagement on performance.

When I considered this news with the Obama Administration's affinity for "czars" to oversee such policy areas as healthcare, the economy, energy, and urban issues, I came to the conclusion that we need a czar focused exclusively on helping organizations better understand how making good use of everything from employee retention tips to virtual team building practices (enquiries on the latter, after all, have risen steadily over the past year, according to one recent study) can decrease absenteeism and turnover and boost productivity to grow revenues.

It goes without saying the effect this would have not just on a micro, company level but on our GDP.  Did you know, for instance, that parents who are too stressed out at work cost organizations (and thus our country) $300 billion annually in lost productivity?

Too bad, given her popularity, that this czar can't be Michelle Obama.  She gets small business' potential for employee satisfaction and customer and community enrichment – in 2006, when she was still VP for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, she spoke at our annual conference.

Do you agree with me that we need a czar focused on fostering employee leadership development at U.S. firms?  Why or why not?  If yes, who would be your pick for this post?

It's no secret, from companies' perspective, why telecommuting – arranging employees' schedules so they're working from home or otherwise outside the office one or more days per week – is becoming more popular.  The LA Times reported last week that virtual assistants cut overhead costs.  Cisco Systems has added to this dialogue by announcing it has saved over $270 million in productivity costs by allowing some of its workforce to telecommute.

But from the employee's perspective, while often their initial impression of this arrangement is sipping coffee while lazily working in their pajamas, the reality is often starkly different.  Many at-home or outside-the-office workers worry that their progress on projects is not meeting supervisor expectations.  This worry can extend to phone and email communications – "What did my boss mean when he said that in this way?"

I addressed this aspect of employee engagement and virtual team building recently with Kyra Cavanaugh, President and Founder of LifemeetsWork.  For our Q&A with her that will appear in our forthcoming July IDEAS newsletter, I asked her what employees can do to manage work/life balance in a telecommuting situation and not feel they need to be overworking in order to show decent returns to their managers.  Here's what she advised they do:

mp3 - 3.5 MB - 3:51

Briefly, her tips for telecommuters include:

• If you're a top performer based on regular manager feedback, don't worry that you'll be the first to be cut if jobs are on the line at your organization.
• Use transparency to your advantage.  For example, your company can host a project-tracking website for a nominal expense that logs your projects and reports on it to your supervisor as well as issues encountered and supervisor feedback.
• Ask specific questions about your performance expectations, and be clear about your own limitations or boundaries.
• In the absence of nonverbal cues that can be taken for granted in an in-person setting, when you communicate with your supervisor via phone and email, pay close attention to the cues that do emerge.  For example, if you're accustomed to getting multi-paragraph emails from your boss while in the office with good feedback on your performance and those stop or slow down when you're out of the office, it's up to you to bring that up and get to the bottom of why the nature of communications have changed.
• You can't over-communicate!

To read our full interview with Kyra when our newsletter goes out, subscribe to it here.  It's free.

I grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota.  Both states have taken a cultural beating through movies like Fargo and, more recently, New In Town.  Even in Winning Workplaces' home base of Chicago – which is not that far flung from those states – I run into people who don't know where those states are and, even if they do, think the population up there is basically zero.

Given this mindset, I'm happy when I can do my part to follow in the footsteps of resources like Small Biz Survival and show people that, yes, entrepreneurship is alive and well in rural areas.  The latest proof of this is this article in my old hometown paper, the West Fargo Pioneer, that talks about how a retired teacher at my former high school is heading up a local entrepreneur challenge.

Here's the skinny of this program according to the Pioneer:

As project consultant for the fledgling program, [Paul] Tefft hopes to help develop a network of innovative marketing and business opportunities for students at the eighth and ninth grade level.  Four goals of the program will be to work with the DECA program to help expand the development of marketing opportunities for eighth and ninth graders, create a youth mentorship network with area businesses, develop an annual innovation competition to promote technology-based career opportunities, and to create a virtual entrepreneurial challenge to help engage students as they learn about business and marketing strategies.

This sounds like a fantastic program – the model for which, if successful, could be copied elsewhere.  As Tefft and company develop their program and prepare students to tackle business challenges, I hope they will also focus on people practices such as daily huddles, virtual team building, and other measures designed to bring out the commitment and productivity of the employees the students may one day supervise.

Thanks to another emerging voice in rural entrepreneurship, Greg Tehven of Students Today Leaders Forever, for pointing me to this story.

What are your thoughts on the availability and effectiveness of rural programs to encourage entrepreneurship?

Photo credit: The Montana Journalism Review

If you haven't checked out Management-Issues, what are you waiting for?  Longtime readers of this blog – and our followers on Twitter for that matter – have seen me reference them often, and for good reason.  Of the entrepreneur and business sites I follow, this is one of the most consistent for team building stories and actionable employee engagement best practices.

In their most recent post, for instance, Nic Paton shares five tips for keeping virtual teams on track, based on a recent study by corporate training provider VitalSmarts.  They are:

• Talk before problems start.
• Praise early wins.
• Never raise individual concerns publicly.
• Start by clarifying what you DON'T want to say.
• Gain allies before raising problems with a group.

Along with work issues concerning Millennials, I have taken a particular interest in this topic as I will soon join the telecommuting workforce.

For other Management-Issues posts I've commented on, type "management-issues" into the Search box on the right, just above the Categories listing.

Several of our applicants for Top Small Workplaces 2009 are based in the U.S., and yet have some or most of their workforce in countries such as India and China.  So the question arose in our judges meeting here last week: Does a foreign-based workforce that results in fewer jobs for a struggling, jobs-thirsty American economy – a workforce that's treated the same as the company's U.S. workers are treated – prevent that company from being named as a Top Small Workplace?

You'll have to wait until September 28 to find out the answer our judges gave, which will no doubt be part of the coverage our media partner for TSW, The Wall Street Journal, provides in their Top Small Workplaces 2009 Journal Report that will go out that day.

In the meantime, I want to know what you think about this.  Besides providing your answer to the question above, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the impact a globally diverse workforce has on virtual team building and other measures for investing in your workplace.

Please add a comment below with your thoughts.  Thanks.

I remember reading this statistic by Forrester Research back in March: 43% of U.S. workers will telecommute by 2016.  I circled back to it today after reading this new post by America's Best Companies (ABC).  It talks about how Washington (particularly Rep. James Himes from Connecticut) is working on legislation that would remove tax penalties for employees who live in one state but work in another.

This is a topic I'm actively researching because in August I will set up Winning Workplaces' first home/satellite office – mine.  I look forward to serving as a guinea pig on this emerging trend so my successes and pitfalls can inform your employee engagement and communications team building strategies for those workers who may telecommute to your office.

I agree with the reasons that Forrester Research's Ted Schadler states as to why telecommuting will be more widely adopted:

• More broadband pipes to homes, work laptops, and secure VPNs.  Schadler's point is strengthened by the progressive views on broadband access advocated by President Obama's pick to head the FCC.
• Employees are making more, and stronger, cases to their bosses that telecommuting will save the company time, and thus money.
• Business leaders benefit from an ease-in approach: Forrester found that "The number of full time telecommuters today is small compared with 'regular telecommuters.'"
• "[M]anagers and other high-influence employees ... are most likely to work from home regularly or occasionally.  And that means their growing comfort with the ability to monitor and manage employee productivity will spill over into their support for a telecommuting workforce."

The newer ABC article digs deeper, addressing people practices that lead to a more productive workplace as a result of greater telecommuting:

• Improved productivity
• Personnel retention
• Reduced office overhead
• Reduced absenteeism
• Wider recruiting pool
• Stronger continuity plans

All of this said, I predict that the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act of 2009 sponsored by Rep. Himes will not be the last, nor the most sweeping legislation that will come out of Washington and the states to help companies benefit from the reduced costs and increased productivity potential of this emerging trend.

Stay tuned as I relate my experiences on my journey toward telecommuting full-time from Los Angeles....

Related: Our interview with Intelligent Office Founder Ralph Gregory that addresses virtual team building.

If you're new here, you're probably wondering what's good – just as you would if you were visiting a new city.  Well, I've listed our 10 most popular posts ("points of interest," if you will) below on workplace team building and getting employees engaged since we started this blog last June.

Check out what your fellow readers have found most helpful and inspiring:

1. Friday Nugget: Transparency is a Business Model
2. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
3. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
4. Fair Treatment of Employees Counteracts Fear of Pro-Labor Bill
5. 10 Small Business People to Follow on Twitter
6. Toyota Leads Again, This Time in Team Building During Down Times
7. Inclusiveness, Multiculturalism, Employee Engagement the Norm at Phenomenex
8. Google Employees Can't Get No Satisfaction?
9. Two Inspiring Stories of Team Building
10. Friday Nugget: 15 More Blogs for Small Business and Entrepreneurship

What piques your interest most from this list and why?

Yesterday I ran technical support for our webinar on fostering trust in the workplace – really just a fancy way of saying I helped connect people to the call and passed attendee questions to the moderator, my colleague Diane.

The experience, coupled with my reading of Debbie Weil's corporate blogging book – in which she talks at length about how inter-company blogs differ from external, employee-written blogs – got me to thinking about how webinars might be used for employee engagement.

I would think that, given the fact that even small businesses are increasingly national and international in scope, these would be effective tools – complements of or replacements for other technology-driven tools like company intranets or virtual team building sites or software.

Yet, when I searched Google News for "webinars employee engagement," I found one lone article that doesn't even link the two things.  My initial assessment, therefore, is that webinars are being used for marketing purposes or, like ours, to deliver a web-based learning product, and not really within companies to help communicate with employeees or for team building with the aim of improving morale or retention.

Costs don't seem to be a factor in tipping the scale from webinars toward, say, a license for the same number of employees to be on a company intranet.  For instance, when we were starting our search for a webinar provider a little over a year ago, Microsoft Live Meeting was offering an annual contract to serve up to 125 users for $1,500.  At the time WebEx WebOffice, by comparison, offered a five-user annual license of its intranet software for $60.  So 125 users would incur the same annual cost of $1,500.  (Of course, this comparison does not factor in custom-designed intranets, which are more expensive but often have more features that result in greater employee participation.)

Is your company the exception?  Do you use webinars internally to engage employees in some way?  If so, we'd like to hear how you use them and what the impact has been on your workforce.

Today the online community of commentors, Gawker.com, ripped BusinessWeek for its recent focus on promoting the benefits of the virtual world Second Life's potential for workplace team building.  Their editorial argues that

Lots of the hype was the fault of BusinessWeek, which bought into it with wide-eyed enthusiasm. And the magazine is still trying to get your employer to drag you off to a fantasy computer island for fun team-building exercises....

The unidentified author calls efforts by companies the magazine identified, including IBM and Xerox, to hold virtual forums to connect employees around the world "the single least fun corporate event that could possibly be inflicted upon an employee."

Perhaps Second Life, which the author (rightly) calls "an imaginary land packed with flying monsters," is not the best venue in which to host these events – it certainly depends, first and foremost, on a firm's mission and values, and then on the demographics and interests of its workers.  But to write off the whole notion of virtual team building would be a disservice to employees as well as businesses, which can benefit from these new and evolving employee engagement activities.

As Wikipedia notes, virtual teams can generate the following benefits:

• For employees: lower commuting-related expenses, enjoying flexible scheduling, and making physical handicaps a virtual (no pun intended) non-issue.
• For businesses: Freeing up physical office space, reduced travel expenses, no capacity limits, and improves flex benefits offerings for recruiting purposes.
• And for communities/society: Less commuting means decreased air pollution.

One of our 2007 Top Small Workplaces that has made virtual team building not just an initiative but its lifeblood is Seattle-based professional services provider Point B.  Started with just a handful of employees in 1995, Point B now has over 330 employees in seven cities.  The really amazing thing, though, is that they have no physical offices!  (Their project management work takes place mainly at client sites.)

How, then, do they maintain their culture and stay informed?  Primarily through these three best practices:

1. A highly customized, leading-edge company intranet. This provides employees on the go with starting points, if not solutions, to their most pressing daily issues, based on the experience of employees who have treaded there before.
2. Frequent, city-specific networking events where workers can talk shop and also about what's going on in their personal lives.  These range from informal and formal lunches and dinners to intramural-style sports activities.
3. Perhaps most importantly, Point B's leadership requires each employee to "define their own Point B," which means including both personal and professional goals in their job descriptions and career growth plans.

Some of the bottom-line results of this hybrid of virtual and physical workplace team building include staff and revenue growth of over 20% for the last seven years and industry-low attrition of 8% (the average is over 20%).  Clearly, the business case is there for incorporating virtual teams into overall team-building efforts.

Leaders: What is your experience with virtual teams in your workplace?  If you've implemented them, what have your results looked like?