Advantages of Corporate Web Working

• Regular paycheck. It is really nice to know exactly how much you are going to make and have it just magically appear without having to send invoices or nag to get it.
• Taxes. These also magically come out of your paycheck with less hassle and no dealing with quarterly payments and more complicated taxes.
• Insurance and retirement. Both of these are considerably easier and often better than what you would have as an independent worker when you look at things like company match in a 401k and the quality of many corporate insurance programs.
• Less paperwork. Unless you happen to be a corporate accountant, corporate web workers can often avoid the piles of paperwork that are associated with running your own business.
• Paid vacation. I like being forced to take a couple of weeks off a year and still get paid for it.

Advantages of Being an Independent Web Worker

• Flexibility. When you are your own boss, you can be as flexible with your time as you want without worrying about your boss thinking you are a slacker.
• Choice of projects. As an independent worker, you can pick and choose the projects that you want to work on (or not), and you can choose to work on something slightly outside of your normal work, either just for fun or to expand your skillset.
• Tax advantages. Depending on how you organize your business and expenses, you can end up paying less in taxes because of all of the things you can write off as part of your business.
• Balance. It can be easier to balance your work with other parts of your life when you have complete control and flexibility over your schedule.

Although I have listed five advantages for corporate web working and only four for independent web working, it’s not a question of numbers. The real question that you need to ask yourself is which of these advantages are most important for you and your current situation. In other words, you need to think about what you want, your expectations and your working style to decide what it right for you at this point in time. Here are a few questions that you might want to ask yourself:

• Do I really want to own my own business? Is the increased flexibility worth all of the extra paperwork, or would I prefer to work in a more traditional corporate job?
• Am I self-motivated and will I push myself hard enough to be successful on my own or do I rely on having a manager provide me with work and feedback?
• Are my skills and talents better suited to freelancing or a corporate environment?
• Can I market my skills to make the change to the corporate world or to become a freelancer?
• How do I want to spend my time?
• What do I enjoy doing and which path would allow me to more fully enjoy my work?
• How well do I handle different types of stress? Keep in mind that financial, personal, project and other stresses may have a greater or lesser impact on you.
• Are you comfortable with uncertainty, particularly financial uncertainty, or do you prefer to have stability?

For me, the decision to become a freelancer was the right one at the time. I had never been a freelancer and wanted the experience of having my own business. After the excitement wore off and the burnout from the long hours started to set in, I decided that going back to the corporate world was the right decision for me at this point in my life. I was lucky enough to maintain some of the flexibility to work from home most days while still having the advantages of a corporate job.

Have you moved from freelance to corporate web work or vice versa? What were the factors that persuaded you to make the move?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Cubicle photo by Mark Sebastian used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, and bird photo by Flickr user Yogendra Yoshi used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

For many of us, social media helps to fill this gap. Not all of your colleagues are going to be on Twitter, Facebook or other social websites, but hopefully, you can at least keep up with a few of them. This can also be a sensitive topic for many people, so don’t be offended if some of your co-workers don’t accept your friend requests.

I know a few people who carefully separate their work and personal lives and aren’t interested in mingling them. One person I know has a “secret” blog where he talks about his family using only family member’s initials to respect their privacy, and he keeps this completely separate from his Twitter account and other professional blogs. Other people pick one social website, like Facebook, for personal activities and others, like Twitter or LinkedIn, for communicating about work. Many of us don’t make these distinctions, but it is important to respect your colleagues’ choices.

It can be difficult to keep up with everyone, so it can help to have ways to keep up with your co-workers to avoid losing their updates in the wave of updates from other friends. Here are a couple of tips:

Friend Lists in Facebook

Friend lists in Facebook perform two very useful functions. First, they can allow you to filter the information you see in your news feed based on how you’ve grouped your friends into lists. For example, you could have a work list that you can check separately to see what your colleagues have been doing. A quick check in the morning and another at lunch would help you keep up with people at work while minimizing the time you spend on it.

The other way to use lists is to control privacy, so for those of you who want to maintain privacy while also connecting with co-workers on Facebook, you can still limit how much information they see. If you spend a lot of time partying with friends or to respect the privacy of your children, you might consider hiding photos from your coworkers as one example.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are another good way to keep up with work friends, especially since many of the commonly used Twitter clients have built-in support for the feature, allowing you to use lists separately in columns or other views. I know some people who keep separate lists for professional and personal contacts, which is a good way to keep the streams distinct.

In my case, most of my friends work in the technology industry, so I don’t separate based on work vs. personal friends. However, I do keep a separate list of family and close friends where I want to read every tweet. I also have a short list of people that I like to follow more closely because what they say is almost always interesting and relevant for me, and I try to read as much as I can from them.

The best thing about this approach is that you can expand it to include leaders in your industry or people in similar jobs at other companies, broadening your virtual water cooler out beyond your immediate co-workers.

How do you keep up with your colleagues when you work remotely?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

In my job, I look at metrics in three major categories: awareness, membership and participation. I use website analytics and social media mentions to gauge whether people are aware of our activities. Membership is measured when people join the community or subscribe to mailing lists. Participation is the most important and most comprehensive set of measurements, looking at posts in our forums, mailing list participation, IRC activity and various developer activities, since I manage an open-source developer community. Most of these are measured and charted over time to show areas of growth or decline in the community on a monthly basis, which allows us to make adjustments if anything starts to stagnate. In addition to the numbers, I also do a fair amount of analysis to look for content trends and recommend potential areas for improvement based on how the community responds to certain activities. While this is a significant amount of work every month, all of these measurements allow me to justify my existence (and my paycheck) to the company and my manager while also helping me find areas where I can improve the community.

So how can metrics help you in your role? Many companies already have processes that require measurement of progress toward goals. The type of metrics that I’m thinking about would complement and augment those existing measurements with a few more details. While there are many good ways to measure effectiveness, there are also a few pitfalls, so let’s look at one approach to setting up some personal web working metrics.

Measure What Matters

Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should measure it! For example, I could measure something like the number or hours worked every day or the number of emails sent/received, but those measurements are irrelevant to my job.  As a community manager, many of the community’s metrics also serve as my personal metrics. You need to look at your position, job expectations and goals to find the best ways to measure whether or not you’ve been effective and productive as a web worker. If you don’t tie your metrics into your career goals and specific job requirements, you won’t be measuring the right things.

Pick What to Report

I consume a significant amount of information, and I measure many different activities. Less than half of my measurements or the data that I look at on a monthly basis make it into my report. Let me be clear, this is not about hiding information; it’s about finding a representative data set that can be consumed by most people without an excessive time commitment. I spend a lot of time looking at the numbers because that’s part of my job, but other people also have their jobs to do, so I need to distill the information down to only the most important information. I have a set of things that always go into the report — this is the baseline of activities that I track over time. A few others might be added if something unusual happens or if I notice something really interesting. In other words, measure some extra activities that you can use to determine how you’re performing, but make sure that what you deliver to your manager is a digestible amount of only the most important metrics.

Categorize

Most of us have jobs that span several different areas, and you probably need to measure your performance across a couple of categories. For my community, I break it out into awareness, membership and participation, which boils down to three levels of engagement for community members. As a web worker, you might have a category or two for your core job function and another category for learning, training or other measures related to career advancement. By categorizing your metrics, you can make sure you aren’t neglecting an important area. For example, neglecting training or learning new skills might not matter in the short term, but if you neglect them too long, you might find that your skills are no longer the ones that your employer requires. It’s part of our human nature to categorize, but be careful not to go overboard here. For most people, two to four categories are all you need if you pick the right ones.

This is just one possible approach to using a metrics or numbers-based approach to measuring your effectiveness, but don’t get too caught up in the process. Stay focused on measuring a few of the most important things for your job and build on it over time.

How have you used metrics and numbers to demonstrate your effectiveness as a web worker?

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Despite (or maybe because of) these adjustments to my work day, I manage to meet or exceed the expectations for my job. My employer is flexible about when I work as long as I get the job done, and I occasionally pull some late nights, early mornings or do work on the weekend to make sure that I’m taking care of the community that I manage.

All of this flexibility works for me, and it looks like I’m not alone. According to a recent study by a group of researchers at Brigham Young University, people who telecommute balance work and family life better than those who work in an office, but only when flextime is also part of the plan. These researchers analyzed data from more than 24,000 IBM employees from 75 countries to find that telecommuters using flextime could work 57 hours per week before work starts to interfere with their personal lives, while the number was a paltry 38 hours per week for traditional office workers.

This isn’t just an IBM phenomenon, either. About a year ago, I looked at a Cisco study of its telecommuting employees that found:

69 percent of the telecommuting employees see increased productivity.

67 percent said that their work quality improved.

80 percent had an improved quality of life.

One of the biggest surprises for Cisco was that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. This isn’t really surprising to me as I spend more time working when I telecommute. For one thing, I shave over 1.5 hours of driving time out of my daily schedule. I also tend to start work as soon as I get up around 6am and then take a little break later in the day to go for a quick run, take a shower and put on something other than my pajamas. This lets me get a jump on the work day and take a break when I need it, thus increasing my productivity while allowing me to be flexible with my time.

Smart companies should be taking a serious look at web working as a way to improve employee productivity while saving money that they would spending on extra office space. By being creative and flexible about working arrangements, both companies and employees can benefit.

How do you benefit from telecommuting and flextime without sacrificing productivity?

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Since I’m currently working full-time in a corporation with part of that time as a web worker, I’ve been thinking more and more about the way that corporations are run compared to freelance and other types of web worker businesses.

Planning and Strategy

Most corporations have whole teams of people who are responsible for planning and strategy. They look at the next few years to determine the best direction for the organization over the longer term, while coming up with shorter-term plans to make sure that they can execute on that longer-term strategy. Some web workers spend an appropriate amount of time strategizing, but I see too many web workers making mistakes by avoiding it entirely, or taking it to the opposite extreme and spending so much time planning that they don’t have time to do the work that pays the bills. Either extreme can be devastating for web workers, especially freelancers or small startups. Spending time setting your strategy and creating your plans to achieve your long- and short-term goals are important for all web workers, but be careful about how much time you spend.

Budgeting

Corporations have formal budget processes where expenses are planned, approved and adjusted throughout the year. We’re currently reviewing our Q3 budget requests at work, and I’m remembering how rigorous this process can be within a corporation. You need to be able to clearly explain how much you will spend and what it will be spent on, along with being able to justify exactly why you need to spend that money. Sometimes you even need to compete with your peers to demonstrate why your request is more critical than the others. While a complex budgeting procedure is overkill for freelancers and smaller organizations, having a slightly more rigorous process can be beneficial. Even for freelancers, looking at your projected income for the year or the quarter and deciding how much of that should be spent on expenses is definitely worth the time you’ll spend. Once you have the amount you can spend on expenses, you are in a better position to make appropriate trade-offs between the many conferences, supplies, equipment and other expenses to determine which ones you can realistically afford and which ones you can skip for now. Don’t forget to revisit this budget if there are any changes (positive or negative) in your income or when you encounter unexpected expenses.

Training

As an employee of a corporation, I have certain required training classes that I must take along with other opportunities for training that I can choose to take if needed. As a web worker, especially as a freelancer, it’s easy to get busy and neglect training. When time taken out of the day for training means hours that you can’t bill clients, this can be a tough trade-off. However, a web worker with stale, out-of-date skills is unlikely to be successful, so at some point you need to make time for some type of training to learn new things. However, you don’t need to attend formal, classroom training to improve your skills. A great way to get some training without sacrificing income as a web worker is to take on an assignment that stretches you just outside of your comfort zone and requires some additional learning on your part. I’m also a big fan of picking up side projects or other activities outside of work to learn new skills. Even just spending an hour or two a week learning a new tool or technique on your own can make a big difference.

What are some other things that web workers can learn from corporations?

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In my case, I work for a large corporation with some days in the office and other days working at home, but I’ve also done this job while working full-time as a remote employee. As a matter of fact, I’m about to shift back to working from home full-time for three months while our office building is remodeled. While I’ll be discussing full-time community management work in this post, it’s also a great gig for freelancers or consultants.

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about being a community manager here on WebWorkerDaily, but it’s been a while since I wrote about community manager careers, so I thought that it was time for a refresh. I did a whole series of posts over a year ago with details about the job, what it takes to be successful, what we do and the dark side of community management. Most or all of that content is still relevant, so I recommend going back and reading that series if you are new to the blog or if you just want a refresher.

Each online community uses slightly different tools, including established environments based in IRC and mailing lists, forums, wikis, complete social networks and more. Because the community that I manage is fairly large with several different audiences, we use a wide variety of tools. Software developer interactions take place mostly on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and code repositories; users of the software interact mostly in the forums; we have a wiki for documentation; and we use a few other miscellaneous tools. Regardless of the tools used, I can access and manage the community whether I am in the office, at home or in a coffee shop. This gives me the flexibility to manage the community regardless of where I am physically located.

Community management is a hot career right now, and quite a few companies are looking for community managers or related positions (social media managers, moderators, etc.) Companies like Zappos, Samsung and Wieden + Kennedy have recently hired community managers while other companies like Wikia, EMC and Google are actively looking for people to fill online community positions. I’ve even had several people email me in the past couple of weeks asking me if I knew any experienced community managers who might be interested in their positions.

The best community managers are the ones with several years of experience under their belt and the scars to prove that they’ve been around for long enough to have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, but we all have to start somewhere. Community management isn’t one of those traditional careers where you get a degree and start work in your chosen field. Most good community managers have a diverse background with good communication skills, organization or project management background, and some specialized experience and a passion for the type of community being managed (hardcore gamers managing gaming communities; people with technical backgrounds managing developer communities, etc.) In fact, many of us transitioned into online community roles out of other related careers.

I occasionally speak to groups of university students about community management careers. If you want more information about the job requirements, salaries, job satisfaction and more, you might also be interested in this presentation about community manager careers that I delivered about a month ago at two local universities.

What are some other interesting careers for remote web workers?

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Here are a few tips for meeting organizers to help make sure that they have a great meeting over the phone (with “phone” being loosely defined here to include Skype and other online real-time audio):

1. Give people plenty of notice for the meeting, if possible. Ideally, try to schedule your phone meetings with plenty of advance notice to make sure that people have time to prepare. I know this isn’t always possible, but a little planning ahead of time can really help. Keep in mind that what seems like two days’ notice to you might be considerably less for international participants who won’t see your request until their morning, which could mean they have considerably less time to prepare.
2. Keep time zones in mind. In cases where people are spread out across time zones, taking the time to find out where people are physically located so that you can pick a time that is most convenient will help your attendees be alert and prepared for the meeting. With phone numbers becoming less tied to your location, don’t assume that you know where people are based on a phone number. Take the time to ask where they are and find out if they have a preferred meeting time. For example, I work with one person in Finland who prefers 10pm calls to 5pm calls, so he can have meetings after his kids are in bed.
3. Send a written agenda and materials out via email (or post them online) when you schedule the meeting, or no later than 24-48 hours before the meeting, when possible. This gives people plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, especially for people who primarily speak other languages. Giving people who are less fluent in your language a little extra time to assimilate the information can make a big difference in their level of participation. Don’t forget to include the phone number or other logistics for the meeting with local dial-in numbers in other countries, if they’re available.
4. Send a reminder about an hour before the meeting with any last minute updates. This reminder gives people one last chance to prepare for the meeting and can help forgetful participants, especially those for whom the meeting is at a non-traditional time.
5. As people join the meeting, make sure that they announce themselves so that you know who is attending the call. A quick prompt like, “welcome, who just joined us?” can help people know that they should announce themselves. I do this even for Skype calls where you can see who joined because it gives you time to make audio adjustments for anyone who can’t be heard clearly.
6. Double-check that everyone has all of the materials for the meeting. Start the meeting with some introductions (if needed) and a quick review of the agenda and what you plan to cover. This gives you a final check that people know how the meeting will be conducted, and you can make sure that they have all of their materials before the meeting.
7. Consider using online meeting tools. There are many tools that can be used in real-time to manage the content during the meeting and make sure that people are all looking at the same pages of the materials (GoToMeeting, for example). You should make sure that the solution you pick will work for most people given their bandwidth rates and system configuration. For example, if you have some people running on Macs, don’t pick a tool that only works on Windows. I always consider this an optional step for international meetings, especially if you have people located in countries where maintaining a stable Internet connect can be a challenge for people calling in from home outside of the work day. Using these tools doesn’t replace the need to send materials out in advance, since you want to give people time to assimilate the information and have a copy as a backup in case they can’t get connected during the meeting.

Meetings held over the phone where you can’t see the other people are challenging enough, but add international participants, time zones and language challenges into the mix, and you can end up with a seriously unproductive meeting. Taking the time to prepare and keeping a few of these tips in mind can help your meeting go much more smoothly.

What are your tips for making sure that your international phone meetings are successful and productive?

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My full-time corporate gig is as a community manager for an open-source developer community. The community mainly comprises no-nonsense, no-frills people who love some old school tools. The fancy graphical environments in the latest and greatest collaboration web apps just get in the way of power user developers who know every trick in the book to get the most out of tools like IRC and mailing lists. Keep in mind that open source communities tend to have people — from corporate developers to passionate enthusiasts — collaborating across the globe in every time zone to develop software that we use every day. They know a thing or two about collaboration, and they use the tools that work. I had stepped away from hardcore developer communities for a couple of years when I was consulting, and in coming back to these established tools, I’m rediscovering why they are so useful for collaboration.

IRC / Group Chat

The best thing about IRC or Group Chat is that you can set up a place for your team or your project where people can drop in and out to ask questions or just have conversations with other people working on similar projects. It’s kind of like the water cooler, if you want to get even more old school, where people gather to talk about both work and social topics. Because it’s real-time chat, you can get quick feedback even when you don’t know exactly who to talk to because you are reaching out to a group of people with similar interests or similar jobs.

Lately, we’ve also been holding quite a few scheduled meetings in IRC, and it is a great way to get a lot accomplished very quickly. By scheduling it, you make sure that you have the right people available and anyone can participate as long as they can get some type of internet connection. We also make the logs available, and we use MeetBot to capture minutes of the meeting. This allows people to miss the meeting, but still see a full, unfiltered record of the meeting in the logs along with a summary of the meeting from MeetBot if they just want the highlights.

Mailing Lists

By mailing lists I mean both traditional mailing lists, like LISTSERV, or more recent additions like Google Groups. The fact that I love mailing lists is a bit odd, since I hate email. Part of what I love about mailing lists is the control that you have over how you receive the information. Most lists allow you to get every email immediately, or in a daily digest depending on how you prefer to interact with the list, and many of them allow you to turn the email off entirely when you go out on vacation. That way, your email doesn’t pile up, but you can skim through the online archives when you get back to catch up on the big news. Regular email just doesn’t have that flexibility.

The reality is that everyone uses email, and mailing lists are a great way to collaborate with a group of people without accidentally leaving anyone out of the loop. It’s too easy to forget to copy every person on the team when communicating with a group of people. The online archives are also a great way for new members to learn about the project and get a sense for the history of the group, and it gives you a place where you can always look back at the conversations when you forget some important detail.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new tools, too. I get a tremendous amount of value out of tools like Twitter and the newer collaboration suites that have social networking and plenty of bells and whistles built-in. However, sometimes you just need something quick and cheap that just works. Just because a technology is old doesn’t mean it can’t rock.

What are your favorite “old school” collaboration tools?

In past jobs, I managed quite a few people who worked out of remote locations. Some of them worked from home full-time while others were in offices that were spread out in California and Washington while I worked here in Portland, Oregon. But right now, all of the people that I manage are working in the same office building. While we all work from home regularly, we all have cubicles in our office. However, that is all about to change. The building that we work in is being renovated this summer, and we’re being kicked out of our little boxes. There isn’t really room for us in the other buildings, so the company is encouraging us to work from home full-time from July through September. I’ll be managing remotely again, and here are my tips for managing a remote team.

Regular Staff Meetings

It’s important to get the team together on a regular basis to stay in touch with each other and keep up with what other team members are working on. Depending on the team and how much collaboration happens between team members, you may want to meet weekly, monthly or somewhere in between. I’ve worked on teams of program managers where the team members spent most of their time working with stakeholders outside of the team, so the staff meetings focused on learning best practices from each other along with occasional corporate communications or budget updates. Other teams work much more closely together and meet more frequently to collaborate on common tasks. It’s important to get the team together occasionally at least over the phone, but how often you need to meet depends on the team.

Check In Regularly

The focus here should be on checking in with your employees (not checking up on them). This could be a regular meeting with each employee or something less formal over IM or email, as needed. One of the most important responsibilities of any manager is to make sure that the people who work for you have what they need to accomplish their jobs efficiently. You may need to help them overcome roadblocks from other teams, which could involve kicking some butt on their behalf, or you may need to help them get budget for some critical resources. When people are working remotely, it can be easy for them to feel a little alone, so it’s important to keep in touch and let them know that you’re happy to help with whatever they need.

Email Updates

I mentioned the importance of email updates for remote employees last week as way to make sure their manager knows exactly what they are doing. This goes both ways, and managers should also be providing regular updates for remote employees. These updates might include any corporate communications people need to know, updates from other teams and anything else you might hear that impacts the people who work on your team. Making sure that the people who work for you have accurate updates is especially important for remote employees who might otherwise miss important information.

An important task for any manager is to make sure that your team stays well connected and productive regardless of the obstacles. This is especially true for remote employees who can become disconnected from the company and other team members if they don’t have good support. Getting everyone working together regardless of their location is critical for managers of remote teams.

What are your tips for managing remote workers?

Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.