1. Overcoming “hidden” conflicts. An obvious and undeniable challenge with managing an entirely virtual team is a lack of visual cues and body language when communicating that can trigger misunderstandings. But less obviously, frequent misinterpretations can chip away at someone’s confidence or comfort level, creating tensions that are hard to name and even harder to address. In one virtual work situation I’ve experienced, all the team members were only privy to what they read in emails or heard on the phone for nearly a year before the company brought everyone to the same location for a retreat. Just sharing moments in a physical space melted away much of the negative energy that was damaging the remote interactions. At this gathering, one person even said to me that just seeing my eyes showed them more kindness than my terse email messages conveyed. Ouch! What an important lesson to learn about e-communications and the human touch.
2. Building stronger bonds. Nothing can strengthen the bonds between team members in the same way as physical presence. I will never deny the incredible power of online communications and online community, but the bottom line is that we are social creatures. We crave belonging, being near others, not being alone. Virtual work can thrust even the heartiest of us into isolation, and the only real way to solve that isolation with lasting effects is a face-to-face meeting. It may not be feasible to bring an entire company to a single place due to the number of people involved or budget constraints. But maybe it is realistic to arrange gatherings of smaller teams or to put together a schedule of in-person meetings over the course of a year — even a series of one-on-one meetings. Another possible solution is to have team members meet up at industry events, several at a time, for both bonding and learning.
3. Delivering really bad news. If your company is in crisis, it is not the time to send out a short email that can be misconstrued or a long email that is confusing and triggers panic. Find a way to get everyone together in one place to drop the bomb. If getting everyone in a single physical space isn’t doable, you should have smaller groups meeting physically or management meeting team members individually. And if those options aren’t possible either, use the best virtual workplace solution you can find, be it a virtual world or virtual meeting space with video. An audio conference call? Barely a step above an email. Be a more solid presence to cushion the blow.
4. Delivering really good news. If you’ve got something big to report, do it when everyone is together on that big client pitch or the company retreat. Small wins can be shared well in email or on weekly calls, but the huge wins deserve more presence to infuse the team with the power of the accomplishment. When you’re managing a team of remote workers, the wins somehow seem a lot smaller than the losses, and over time that dynamic can drain morale and affect productivity. Surround good news with as much “physical” fanfare as possible. People often need something tangible to hold onto. Provide mementos of the big wins that they can take back to their remote workplaces to remind them of being a part of something real and positive.

In our everyday work, far from our team members, face-to-face and in-person may simply not be affordable. Invest in a quality virtual meeting space or conference tool, whether it’s iMeet, Google Talk, Skype, Second Life or any of the myriad solutions out there. Let your team test several of those solutions with you, and get their feedback before making a final purchase and rolling out the technology. Let your workers be just as invested in being present as you are.

What other situations warrant face-to-face and what do you do when you can’t be there?

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user irum

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TweepSearch

Finding interesting people on Twitter can be a challenge, especially if you’re just getting started with the service. With TweepSearch, you gain access to a very valuable person-finding resource thanks to the ability to search users’ bios for keywords. You can either do a broad, network-wide keyword search, or search for any user’s “@” handle to limit your results to that person’s followers.

Once you’ve retrieved results, you can also click on any person’s avatar to limit the search to that user’s followers. Also, you can use a “location: place name” search to filter results according to the location field. I use it to for expanding my network of contacts. It’s also handy if I’m looking for a specific subject matter expert in my area. It could also be useful if you have a long list of followers and you’re looking for someone specific but can’t remember their particular handle.

PeopleBrowsr

Not exclusively a Twitter tool, but I find it most useful when applied to this generally disorganized network. PeopleBrowsr is an in-browser solution that sort of works like TweetDeck. It displays the recent tweets of your followers, allows you to post, and provides customizable windows that can view any other posts you might like to cover.

For instance, I took part in an #editorchat on Wednesday night, so I set one window to retrieve all posts by everyone with that hashtag. A third window is set to find local chats, by people in Toronto, where I live, since I find local connections to be some of the most valuable for web working purposes.

PeopleBrowsr has a number of other features; so many, in fact, that I can’t begin to get into them here. I will mention that it supports automatic retweeting, profile viewing, and cross-network searching for finding contacts on Facebook and other places. That said, it can be a bit overwhelming, so proceed with caution.

Sigpad

If you’re a web worker, you probably know the value of a good email signature. It can lead the right people to the right place, and it’s not too pushy to offend people who don’t want to be “marketed” to. Mine has WebWorkerDaily’s URL, my Twitter profile URL, or my personal site’s URL in it, depending on who I’m communicating with.

With Sigpad, you can provide more in your signature, as long as your recipient can receive HTML email. At the Sigpad site, you simply input your username for any network they support, and then they generate a signature of your latest update, and provide instructions on how to use it with a number of different popular email clients. I find it handy with Twitter, since you can provide an example of the type of tweets you publish, instead of asking someone to go look at your profile and then decide whether or not to follow you.

I’m very selective with my audience using Sigpad, since it requires HTML email support, and since I know some will find it obnoxious or gaudy. Still, well-placed usage might help your network to grow.

In a lot of ways, Twitter is still very much a beast that has yet to be tamed. You can use it well, or you can use it poorly, but since you’re probably using it either way, this tools might help you achieve the former.

What tools do you use to improve your Twitter usage?

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Together presence and status indicators weaved through our various communication channels make teleworking and telecommuting less painless and provide useful ‘social signaling’ that would ordinarily take place in office environments. It’s arguable that time & distance are no longer useful measures of the value or cost of communication, but the richness of contextual signaling available in any one medium.

Personally, I’ve found the most profound innovations in presence, latterly, to be Twitter and to a lesser extent Jaiku. Both provide important mechanisms for richly describing presence location – whether it’s location, activity or even mood…the latter perhaps signaling the solicitation of communication. In Jaiku’s case, it’s not difficult to imagine the universe of Google applications setting and utilizing presence through Jaiku.

Recently, Anthony Townsend of Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future speculated on Telepresence as a Driver for Presence. Townsend writes about the correlation between new communication technologies and long-haul travel, speculating that the arrival of HD videoconferencing and the uptick in fuel prices should be a perfect storm, but improved fidelity is often applied to mundane communication with a premium still attached to in-person meetings when closing down important decisions.

Certainly, HD sports channels are no substitute for watching your favourite team live at a stadium, though such media broadens the appeal and access to physically exclusive events. So despite living at the bleeding edges of human communication, we web workers do place a premium on ‘live’…

Read more at Telepresence as a Driver for Presence and The Future of Presence…

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