Personal recommendations are great and, as with any job, past performance is a nice indication of a potential employees’ abilities, but the interview, as ever, is key. You’ll need to ask the usual questions to get at the candidate’s suitability for the work but you’ll also need to probe how the candidate will handle the remote team set-up. Handily, there are questions that can help.

The easiest way to gauge if a potential employee will thrive on a distributed team is to find out if they’ve worked this way before and how they handled being remote. Wayne Turmel, who writes the Connected Manager column for Management Issues suggests wording your question on this topic, this way:

What has been your experience working as part of a remote team? Shut up at that point and let them answer. Keep the question open. They may tell you about technology challenges, they may tell you about working relationships, let them start where they are most comfortable then you can drill down.

Finding out a little bit about their work setup (Do they work at a coworking space? A home office? What’s it like?) is also valuable. “Describe your remote office and virtual workday?” CIO Insight suggests asking in a recent slideshow on interviewing for remote posts. But even more important, according to Turmel, is understanding their approach to technology and communication. He advises asking:

What technology have you used in the past as part of working remotely? This is a good question for several reasons. You’ll get a sense of their comfort level (listen carefully to tone of voice. Does their tongue drip with venom when discussion firewalls and connection speeds?)

You may also learn about other tools they’ve used that can be of value to your existing team. New hires are often thought of as blank slates, but people bring valuable experience to your group.

Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO and Founder of FlexJobs concurs, suggesting in an article covering the whole process of remote hiring, that interviewers ask: “What methods of communication do you prefer?” She also recommends asking candidates how they prioritize tasks and stay focused. CIO Insights also suggests asking directly about a potential hire’s ability to prioritize but also offers more specific questions to get at this sort of information, including:

• What did you do when a manager was absent and you had to make a decision? To get at an employee’s ability to be independent in a virtual work environment.
• How do you manage working for more than one supervisor? To get at their ability to juggle assignments for multiple parties.
• How do you stay current? To get a sense of whether they’re proactive and keep up to date with your industry.

What other questions have you found to be effective when interviewing for a virtual team?

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Why did you decide to look to China for collaborators?

There are only three ways to acquire talent. Steal people. That’s basically what you do in the world of development — there are not good Python or Java or Rails developers sitting around with nothing to do. Number two, you acquire small companies, and number three, you go overseas and either hire people or more commonly, you contract to a contract firm. We’re basically employing techniques number two and number three, number three being unique in that we’ve built our own team of developers in Sichuan province, China.

How did you meet your co-founder?

We were introduced. I was looking for a technical co-founder. He, a fairly brilliant product developer in China, was looking for a partner, so it kind of was the perfect pairing where I needed a development team and he needed access to markets and relationships. IDG-Accel really gets the credit for marrying us together and giving us the capital to build some great products.

How many other team members do you have now and where are they located?

Right now we have about 15 people in China. Nearly everyone is in China at this point because it was easy to quickly hire and get our products developed in record time. Now I’ll backfill positions here in San Francisco, but our intention is to keep the majority of our development in China.

Why build your own team of employees rather than use contractors?

I don’t have any particular issues with contracting. I’ve hired contracting firms in the past. The challenge is, particularly when you’re developing sensitive software like security software, we need people that are committed to our product. With a contract firm you just never know what’s going to happen. You don’t have the ability to incentivize people to stay on a product. Generally, the contract firms don’t guarantee anybody on the team. So frankly we wanted the control that would allow us to build a team that could gel together, build a relationship and be committed.

One nice thing about having such a committed team in Chengdu is that while there’s a lot of burgeoning companies in China, there’s not nearly as many as in Silicon Valley, so I don’t have to worry about my developers getting poached by other software startups in the area. It can and will happen, of course, but not nearly at the rate it happens in Silicon Valley.

What other advantages are there to having a remote, cross-cultural team?

As much as I’ve always been impressed by developers in Silicon Valley, I’m thoroughly impressed with Chinese engineers’ level of commitment and willingness to work very difficult hours and perform superhuman feats. I did not expect to see the level of results I’ve seen and I can’t possibly overstate how dedicated and hungry these young Chinese engineers are to prove themselves and build great products.

What tools do you use to stay in touch and collaborate?

I wish I could say that we had some kind of special tricks and tools. The truth is, aside from the scrum methodology that many startups use to have people standing in a room for a couple of minutes reviewing a project, most teams even here in Silicon Valley are doing a lot of their collaboration using online tools. Long meetings sitting in conference rooms and reviewing project plans, people don’t do that anymore. With 37signals and some of these tools it doesn’t really matter if the person is in the cube next to you or thousands of miles away.

How do you handle the time difference?

It’s very interesting. Here’s kind of my routine. I wake up about 6:00am. It’s around 10:00pm in China and generally they’re still working. I have maybe a couple of hours overlap with them and then they go offline for eight hours. But then they come back online just about the time that my two-and-a-half-year old goes to bed, around 8:00pm my time, and we can review things together. The really neat thing is, I will go to bed, say, 10 or 11:00pm. I will have shot over some requests or some feedback and they then have seven hours to work on those deliverables, to prepare some things for me to review, so that when I get up and I grab my iPad at 6:00am I have an inbox full of messages.

The beauty of this is we operate 24 hours a day, and we have periods of being online at the same time to collaborate but we also have the benefit of these blocks of time where they can do what they do best without any interruption. During my workday I’m not getting all these emails, getting interrupted all the time. I can focus on the things I need to focus on. Likewise, when they’re cranking away, I’m asleep and I’m not bugging them and disrupting their flow. We each get seven or eight hours in which there’s no interruption. So it works really well.

Do you physically visit the office in China?

Yeah, I pop over there every 12-14 weeks.

Do you feel that face time is necessary for the smooth functioning of the team?

Honestly, I can’t tell you that it’s necessary because, Hugo, my co-founder, is there and it’s his team. He built this team. He manages this team and he has a great relationship with his team. I do believe that companies are built on people. I don’t care how good the technology is. I don’t care how great the market opportunity is. If you don’t have a good culture and a good relationship amongst the team, you will fail. So from a tactical perspective, me being over there isn’t necessary, but from a relational perspective I do believe it’s important that I spend time with them. We’re human beings. We each have our specialties but we have a relationship, and I think when I go over there, we are just strengthening our relationship in a way that you can’t do online via email or Skype.

You speak really highly of the talent in China. Do you think the U.S. should be letting more of these highly skilled people come to our country to work?

I think there are lots of people that are discussing this subject and I defer to their expertise, but we obviously have a problem of a shortage of developers in this country, and so we have a need for a near-term solution and a longer-term solution. Longer term we need to modify our educational system. There are several excellent startups that I think are going to upturn this antiquated, four-year college model and hopefully allow us to help the next generation to build great products. Near-term I do believe that it is in the best interests of our country to modify immigration laws and to allow us to bring in highly talented people to help us build our companies.

What are some of the educational startups that are shaking things up that you’re most excited about?

Obviously there are just the simple tools like Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a great thing, and now there are some games — I think Code Wars — that are specifically designed to help people have fun learning how to write code. One particular startup, New Charter University, comes out of Mitch Kapor’s incubator here in San Francisco.

Any other thoughts on the experience of starting a business remotely?

Just to really overplay the Thomas Friedman topic that the world is flat. We need to move away from this anachronistic way of thinking that there is us versus them. We are a global economy and we now have the tools in front of us to eliminate these geographic boundaries that have traditionally kept companies from growing and building great products. I think at some point in time we won’t just be thinking about country geography but also this whole concept around what does it mean to go to an office every day? This whole concept of driving to a box, sitting in a box all day and driving back is going to change. The way we look at a company is going to move away from being a physical building to being something much more virtualized. I think that this is going to be a growing trend and my kids will look back at it and ask the question: ‘Why weren’t all companies built that way?’

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Crisp notes that for many years most HR departments saw virtual work as the domain of a handful of road warriors who could be relied on to work with their managers to sort out their individual tools and needs. But HR failed to keep up with changing conceptions of virtual work as technology and shifting mindsets allowed the idea of location independence to spread through much larger swathes of organizations. He writes:

As time passed technology made most of us capable of working remotely at least part time with few special arrangements. It also enabled more people to tie into virtual meetings via various types of collaboration programs and online tools. The emphasis shifted away from remote workers as special cases that had to be monitored to an assumption entire teams might be assembled from workers who are located somewhere other than where the leader is or teams in one location being led by a leader located somewhere else.

Or as Wayne Turmel put it in his thoughtful meditation for Management Issues on the themes raised in the Canadian HR Reporter post, “it’s impossible not to acknowledge that while IT was busy building tools (and empires) to cut costs and minimize travel, the discussions frequently didn’t include HR beyond how much they could cut costs (and head count).” He concludes: “As often happens, HR is left to come in after the cow has run off and safe-proof the barn.”

So what questions is HR now scrambling to ask and answer about virtual work? Both Crisp and Turmel have suggestions, such as:

• Are employees expected to be connected 24/7? If so, should they be paid extra for it? And, I’d add, what are the longer-term risks of burnout created by such a policy?
• Are productivity and effectiveness being measured properly when it’s no longer possible to simply drop in on an employee’s cubicle and see what they’re up to?
• Do managers need training in how to communicate effectively at a distance? Issues like the tone of email, handling conflict across distance, making the most of virtual meetings and deciding who to include in which communications come up here, as do questions of how managers can maintain an “open door” policy when they have no door.
• How should managers or HR handle the situation when cliques or subgroups form within virtual teams and information isn’t properly shared?
• How should managers solicit feedback?

What other questions do HR departments have to confront as virtual work becomes more widespread?

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One of the most common definitions of crowdsourcing is “an open call to an undefined group of people.” This definition would seem to exclude a call for input to a more defined and limited group: your employees. Crowdsourcing techniques, however, leverage online technologies to “harness” the input of many and to apply that input toward getting results of some kind, so why can’t they also be applied to the people within an organization instead of without?

Some popular uses of crowdsourcing include:

• Crowd wisdom where many can contribute possible answers to questions.
• Crowd innovation where many can participate in problem-solving.
• Crowd creation where many can be part of producing something and often each participant takes a smaller piece of the whole based on their skills and abilities.
• Crowd voting where the best ideas “bubble” to the top by community review and voting.

Why not take these models and apply them to problem-solving, creative brainstorming, and creation tasks within your organization? You can even use readily available crowdsourcing technology and platforms to facilitate those processes.

Where can you go for crowdsourcing technology? Companies like Chaordix and Spigit specialize in “innovation management,” and they’ve built online tools to manage input from groups and allow for voting and other features to facilitate “crowd” participation. Even a DIY crowdsourcing system such as the one offered by Crowdtap could prove an interesting tool when the “crowd” you use for input and feedback isn’t a large random pool of unknown people but actually the folks working within your own organization.

In organizations, there is a tendency for each team member to operate strictly within their department or division. In virtual teams, these divisions may be less obvious, but the silos still exist, and may even be worsened due to the lack of proximity. By using crowdsourcing tools and applying more democratic methods of soliciting crowd input, allowing for group voting of ideas, and reaching across departments for participation, you may be able to:

• Innovate more quickly because you are tapping into your team in different ways
• Identify issues and reach solutions more effectively by utilizing your team more widely
• Gain insights into your team’s talents and abilities by providing more open opportunities for participation

In some situations, crowdsourcing can take on a competitive edge in the form of a contest or competition where participants are rewarded in some way for the “best” solution — and the best solution is often not something determined by a top-down approach, but rather by the votes of the crowdsourcing community as a whole. We’ve previously written about the gamification of work; in some circumstances, applying a competitive layer to participation in problem-solving or innovation initiatives can increase motivation and stimulate better responses.

Using your team for crowdosurcing can not only help to “get things done,” it can potentially produce fresh, interesting and beneficial results.

Editor’s note: Aliza’s new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, has just been published by Alpha.

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1. Run a test project. When you’re just starting out with a virtual team member, try running a test project. Pick something small that isn’t as potentially overwhelming as the big plans you have on the table. That will let you adjust to the situation on a low-risk project.
2. Be available. It may sound obvious, but if your only contact with a virtual staffer is the occasional email, it can be difficult for them to get a complete picture of what’s required.
3. Set up multiple methods of communications. Even if you plan to communicate exclusively through one channel, have other options available. After all, what happens if the internet goes down in your team member’s area and the only way you can get in touch with her is by email?
4. Add more time to your estimates. Lengthening your estimates is a good idea as you can expect to spend more time communicating back and forth if you aren’t sitting next to each other.
5. Record exactly how you do things. Instead of trying to explain what you do and how you do it, try recording yourself in action. With the wide variety of screencasting software available, you can have a video that shows your process in a matter of moments.
6. Provide instructions in multiple formats. The more methods you can employ in getting the message across, the better. If you’re working with multiple virtual team members, it’s likely that they’ll have different learning and communication styles, making it worthwhile to use different formats.
7. Set clear deadlines and expectations. Especially if most of your communication is through email or other written mediums, there are lots of opportunities for miscommunication, so you need to ensure your expactations are communicated clearly
8. Be flexible about how things get done, not what gets done. You can’t afford to be flexible about what gets done: you need certain tasks accomplished. But if your virtual staff has a different process that results in the same end result, don’t let that stress you out.
9. Write an organizational manual. It’s likely that if you’re working with one virtual team member now, you’re going to be working with more in the future. Creating an organizational manual based on your experiences now will make it much easier to handle future projects.
10. Ask your virtual staff for suggestions. Don’t be afraid to give your virtual team members a voice; they may have some helpful hints, especially as if they’re used to working virtually, they may have more experience in the process than you do.

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Distributed Training Technology

With screencasts, webinars and all the other online training tools out there these days, you can address many of the problems that slow down virtual training. For many team members, you may find that the most difficult part of learning a new tool is getting to see it in action, but screen sharing technology (available in many tools, including Skype and join.me) can help here.

Practice Makes Perfect

If you consider how training usually works when everyone necessary to the process is gathered in one place, you may still see some potential problem areas. When it comes to learning a new tool, many organizations follow a similar training pattern. The trainer goes over how to use the tool, following some sort of guidelines that the trainees will have access to. Then the group breaks up, and the trainees have a chance to put what they’ve learned into action, asking questions and helping each other along the way. That group dynamic is difficult to replicate online.

Estimating the Time You Need

There’s no iron-clad rule that states distributed teams needs X more hours of training on a new tool than an in-office team. But because of the nature of a distributed team, it makes sense to budget a little more time for training, even if you’re only making a trainer or an expert available to answer questions when you’re putting training into practice.

There’s no perfect training method that can speed up online training, either. Different team members learn at different speeds. Fortunately, those who push to be allowed to work out of the office on their own may have an incentive to work harder to get a new tool down pat.

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• Immediate recognition. Try to get in the habit of immediately recognizing people when they do good work or provide you with some extra help (Georgina suggested some ways to show recognition and praise here). A quick reply with genuine appreciation for doing a great job is a good place to start, and you can do this over email, instant messaging, phone or with a handwritten note. Be as specific as possible when you thank someone, and include something about why you appreciated their work. Just replying with “Thank you” is nice, but it isn’t very personal and can sometimes seem insincere.
• Set reminders. I know this sounds over the top, but it can help to set a reminder on your calendar every day or once a week to spend just five minutes thinking about your team and their work. This gives you time to reflect on how people are doing and remind you to recognize good work. On the flip side, it also gives you time to think about how you can provide helpful feedback for employees who might not quite be on the right track with a project.
• Staff meetings. I once had a manager who built time into her staff meetings where team members were encouraged to thank other members who had done something particularly awesome that week. This is a good way to make sure recognition isn’t just coming from the manager. Staff meetings are also a great place to provide public recognition or awards for employees, so don’t forget to think about recognition when putting together staff agendas.
• Rewards. Don’t forget to go beyond a simple verbal “thank you” when someone does something truly outstanding. A gift certificate or small bonus in addition to some public recognition are great ways to reward a team or individual for a job well done. For remote employees, make sure that you think carefully about rewards, since even gift certificates for major online retailers, like Amazon.com, can’t always be used in every country. This is where getting to know your team members’ preferences can really help, and giving a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant can be a really personal way to recognize someone.
• Celebrations. Most teams try to get everyone together in person at least occasionally. If you can time those meetings to occur shortly after some big milestone for the team (a big release or deliverable), you can use this valuable in person time to celebrate both team accomplishments and provide individual recognition in person. However, recognition is best when made as close as possible to the work being completed, so don’t withhold recognition until you meet in person.

What are your tips for recognizing remote employees?

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Ask the Big Questions

Last year, I started searching for interns to help manage a temporary project and also to hopefully find longer-term support. I knew, however, that even if the person ultimately did not end up being employed by my company, he or she still needed to walk away with something, and I wanted to make sure that, whatever it was, we achieved that goal by the end of the internship. So I asked them, “What do you want from this internship? What skills and experiences do you hope to acquire?”

Asking those questions gave me the information I needed to structure their internships in a way that ensured we both left the relationship happy, but then I realized there was an even bigger and more important question: “Why do you want to intern here?”

One intern included a detailed cover letter with her application, a story really, that told me what attracted her to my organization and why she thought she was the perfect fit for the internship. I agreed with her, simply because I then knew her story. I knew more about her from that one introduction letter than I did about clients and colleagues I had known for years, and it gave us a wonderful foundation for the relationship.

Learn Their Stories

When I think of the people on my team now, I’m most interested in those who are interesting, and those who are the most interesting are those who have shared their stories.

• What are their dreams and aspirations? As college students, in the interns’ cases, they’re generally starry-eyed dreamers right now, with high hopes for how their lives and careers will turn out, not at all jaded by circumstances and setbacks; they’re not afraid to share those big audacious goals with me. By knowing where they’re going, I can help them get there and, if our goals align, add strength to our shared mission and momentum to that of the company.
• What do they like, and what are their interests? As trivial as it might seem, knowing that one of my interns loves Dr. Seuss, another poetry, and another literature gives me unique insight into who they are as people and a way to appreciate who they are as individuals and, better still, combine our unique talents, gifts, and interests into a company with culture and character.
• What’s their past? By learning a little about where they’ve been and their history, I can learn if they are from a big family, for instance, and perhaps get an idea if they could possibly take on strong leadership roles within the company or if they’ll be good at working as a team.

Relating to Your Team

There are many ways to learn more about the members of your team, but the most important thing is to make the initial effort, using any method that best fits your company and its culture.

• Life lists. One of the tools I’ve been using to get to know my team members is “life lists” (aka “bucket lists,” 100-things-to-do-before-you-die sort of thing). I was originally doing this for myself and as a connecting point for supporters of a project I’m working on, but when one of the interns heard about it, she said enthusiastically, “I’ll do it!,” and within a day had completed hers, too. It’s interesting to see how many things we have in common.
• Stories. “Who are you?,” the caterpillar asked Alice. Get your team to share their stories by writing their own “About” pages for your website, and if you want to encourage greater connectedness, ask them to post them to a common message board or, as Chris Ducker recommended, to a company culture website.
• Company blog. Consider starting a company blog where employees can share funny or inspirational posts. Decide on a format (example, personal or company-related) and set some ground rules (example, no back-biting or negative comments), but then let it grow. You could encourage participation by conducting weekly interviews, where you personally talk with a different person on your team.

As Stephen Covey said, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” By learning the stories of the people who make up your team, you’ll be able to relate so much better to each other and be reminded that, at the other end of the Ethernet line, there’s a human being with goals and dreams, quirks and a unique personality, a person you should definitely want to know, because after all, he or she will be helping you build your dreams, too.

How do you better relate to the people on your team?

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As Ducker says, “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between motivating someone from a virtual standpoint and motivating somebody [...] where you’re working in real time with each other under the same roof. It just comes down to simple things, like being a nice guy, being understanding, being flexible, [and] wanting to spend a bit of time with them, above and beyond just giving them tasks.”

Here are a few things Chris recommends to help build stronger relationships with your virtual team:

1. Have an open door policy. “I always make time for my management,” Chris explains, “My management fundamentally run my company for me, and I’m well aware that without them, I would have to come in and start working ridiculous hours every single day. If they need to speak with me, all they have to do is pick up the phone, and I’ll make time to speak with them.”
2. Provide opportunities for career growth. Chris says, “I never want to hire externally, unless I truly have to. I’ll always look internally to try to promote people, if possible. That creates a great culture within a company.”
3. Provide opportunities for education. “I think there [are] other things you can do,” Chris says, “not only spending the time with somebody and giving them career opportunities, but also investing in them. I regularly put my management on different types of courses, training and things like that. It’s developing them as employees, and it gives them the opportunity to better themselves, and they appreciate that.”
4. Provide support resources. “We created our Live2Sell library, which now has just over a hundred books on everything from self-help to how to get over issues and problems in the workplace,” he explains, “People can come up to the HR department and borrow the books, just like in any other library.”
5. Spend time together as a team. “We do one yearly team-building weekend,” Chris says, “where we go out and stay the night at one of the resorts here, and everybody is together.” The purpose of the weekend is to build stronger connections in a fun atmosphere. He adds, “I’ve found that I have a lot in common with [team members]. We enjoy the same things. There is a lot more in common with workmates than a lot of people think.”
6. Treat your team members like family. “We have ten core values, and the first one is, ‘Treat everyone as family.’ That’s really important for any company,” Chris says, “We recently launched our company culture website, Live2Sell Family. It’s open for the public, but it’s all about us, [and] we’re now giving out little mini birthday cakes to everybody on their birthdays.” Another example, he adds, one of his assistants is a big music-lover, and every so often, he emails an iTunes gift certificate, because as Chris says, “The little things make big, big differences.”

“Above and beyond monetary gain,” he adds, “the fact of the matter is that, as long as you give opportunities to people, you’re nice, and they enjoy working for you, they’re not going to go anywhere. As long as you’re treating them well and with respect and paying them what they’re worth, you don’t need to lose people, unless you’re not managing your company properly.” By establishing these little connections, you’ll build better relationships with your virtual team and build a greater sense of unity and purpose.

How do you keep your virtual workforce happy and motivated?

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Here’s a breakdown of some things you should consider before taking a leap into the cloud and trying to bring your team along with you.

1. Portability

How portable is your business? If you’re dealing in intellectual property creation or knowledge work — anything that can be produced and delivered electronically via computers, the Internet and phone — then you’re probably in good shape for moving your company into the cloud. Andy mentioned public relations and marketing as good candidates for virtual companies: the virtual agency model. Any content creation shop with creative teams — ad agencies, news agencies, copywriters, bloggers, podcasters, editors, online producers — can work remotely.

2. Process

Just asking yourself the simple questions: “If we didn’t go into an office together, could we still get work done?” and “If so, how?” These will lead you down the path of thinking about how to configure, or reconfigure, your business. You need to deeply analyze the way you currently get things done and document it. Illustrate your work process using a mind-mapping or flowchart tool. Break down how your projects are handled from start to finish. When does your team meeting face-to-face? Envision how that would look as a videoconference instead. What are the steps you might be eliminating by going virtual? Don’t just stop at mapping out your process and translating that to a virtual workflow. Add dollar amounts to your current process versus a virtual process. You should begin to see why virtual work makes good financial sense.

3. Personality

Even if you’re in an industry with proven virtual models, this doesn’t mean that your company that has been entrenched in “the office” can eschew physical location and hit the cloud running. As you probably know from managing people: people hate change. Even if change is for the best, the very act of changing can paralyze some. You may have to make some hard decisions about how to handle resistance against the change to virtual work. Start with open communications, present the concept of going virtual to your team, and suss out the champions of this model. Chances are, you’ve been approached in the past by someone or several team members who’ve asked about telecommuting, even part-time. For the nay-sayers, find ways to offer support every step of the way as they transition from being in the office to working from home.

You may want to bring in consultants to assess your team and offer individual consulting on setting up their virtual workspaces. Set up training sessions for workers and their managers to make sure everyone is up to speed, not just on the technology changes but the culture changes as well. If not everyone is thrilled with your intention to go virtual, don’t be shocked. Be prepared.

4. Infrastructure

In my post What Does It Take To Run a Virtual Team (Redux), I listed the needs of a virtual team, namely:

• Communications amongst your team members and externally;
• Management of projects, team members, deadlines, and document;
• Archiving of files, knowledge and communications content;
• Interaction between team members including integration, collaboration and socializing.

There is no “one size fits all” technology solution for every company that goes virtual, although there are many enterprise solutions available from Microsoft to Cisco to a never-ending procession of innovative startups looking to solve the problems of virtual work. If you pick a fully-integrated enterprise system, keep in mind it may be more expensive and less flexible than newer, more innovative solutions. The rub of going with smaller startups for your virtual infrastructure needs is that you may have to cobble together several tools, so while they might be highly affordable, you’ll be looking at issues such as cross compatibility and integration.

5. Accountability

A common question managers ask when confronted with the prospect of managing a virtual worker is “how am I going to make sure they get their work done?” A manager who is constantly looking over a worker’s shoulder to make sure they are working is going to have to go through a fundamental shift in how to manage — and how not to manage — to be able to handle managing a virtual team. Managing virtual workers isn’t about watching them like a hawk and micromanaging their every move. Instead, the infrastructure you put into place should have built-in checks and balances to watch productivity and on-time delivery.

Make sure your processes and expectations are not only clear but also communicated clearly to team members. Not everyone will thrive in a virtual work environment, but the issue may be less an inability to get work done and more to do with a feeling of isolation or being disconnected from the team. Be ready to address any issue that crops up as you move toward virtual work and have a plan for addressing issues including missed deadlines, lack of participation, failure to properly document or archive, and forgetting to log time, if that is a requirement.

6. Commitment

You need to decide how committed you are to going virtual and how flexible you’ll be with team members who resist. Can you afford to move in phases, first deploying the team members who are ready, willing and able to take to the cloud, while leaving the others in the office? In order to get the real benefits of going virtual, you should at least consider downsizing the physical work space and look for suitable alternatives that offer real cost savings.

As more and more of your workers opt to go virtual, pretty soon those who are resisting may give in or give up. There is no way to please everyone, but having an understanding that you may have some very unhappy team members from the moment you say “virtual” should help to guide you in your approach. Consider consulting your lawyer to make sure any drastic changes you make in your workplace don’t infringe on workers’ rights.

By thinking through your process carefully and thoughtfully in advance and spending time considering and reviewing the technology you’ll use to build cohesion amongst your dispersed team members, you can certainly construct the ideal virtual workspace. Bringing everyone to the cloud without encountering some digging in of heels is the best scenario, but as a leader and manager, be prepared for the worst.

What do you think about bringing your own company into the cloud?

Stock xchng image by user linder6580

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