Maybe not, suggests a new study appearing in Human Relations and highlighted on the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog. The study was co-authored by a professor from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and involved polling more than 11,000 employees of a U.S. Fortune 500 company. Participants were asked how often they and their manager worked remotely, as well as about several work outcomes. BPS reports the results:

Respondents managed by teleworking managers reported receiving less feedback and professional development, a more unbalanced workload and feeling less empowered. A similar negative pattern was found for those with fully virtual managers. The effect sizes were small overall, suggesting this needn’t be a make or break issue, but the trend was there.

Note though that the negative effects of managers working virtually were only observed compared to when supervisors were co-located with their teams. When a boss’s reports were themselves telecommuters, it made no difference where the supervisor was located. This suggests it might be worth investigating if having a boss with the freedom to work from their back garden or the local coffee shop while his or her employees are stuck in cubes could be behind some of the negativity reported by those who report to telecommuting supervisors. The researchers, however, had another explanation for the fall off in satisfaction when a manager went virtual. The researchers chalked the problem up to social exchange theory, which BPS explains:

Working relationships that are partly virtual have less opportunities for rich exchanges, with communications lacking the face-to-face component and fewer obvious opportunities to ‘grab a moment’, described by social innovator David Engwicht as spontaneous exchanges. Interactions are likely to be more task-focused and obligatory, as email is more onerous to produce when compared to a quick coffee or moment in the corridor. And professional development and mentoring becomes similarly laborious, always a dangerous place for any ‘important to do’ but non-urgent activity to be.

If you’ve experienced working in an office while your manager is working virtually, share your feelings –did having a remote manager decrease your satisfaction with your work?

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Which means that while tried-and-true management practices like setting measurable goals, holding people to account and praising success continue to hold in a virtual team setting, other aspects of being a boss need to be beefed up and refined for the specific case of remote teams. What are these essential tweaks for managing virtually? Blog Workshifting recently came up with a list of seven.

Old standbys, like providing your team with the proper tools, are solid reminders but probably won’t come as an eye-opener to most — however, one tip in particular may have never occurred to managers of remote teams in quite the way Workshifting puts it. The blog suggests:

Tell them how to manage up. Telework team members aren’t in the office all the time learning how you work. Instead of making your team members figure out the best time to get your attention – tell them. Let them know the best topics to cover via email and the ones they should call about. Also inform them of those things they can just handle and never tell you. Or the ones they can handle and tell you after the fact.

As managers, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the right ways to direct employees, to coach their performance and to recognize them properly. Why not also let employees know how they should deal with you as their manager? It would save a lot of time and frustration.

This is in line with advice from communication coach Yosh Beier, who stressed in an earlier interview with WebWorkerDaily that teams that aren’t physically present in the same space need to talk not just about the ‘what’ of their work but also the ‘how,’ delving into the process and guidelines that the team will use to reach its goals and communicate. How are we making decisions? How do we give each other feedback? How do we want to deal with conflict? These are the sorts of questions Beier suggested teams discuss.

Of course, most teams are busy, and Beier acknowledged that in the rush of everyday work and under the pressure of deadlines, it can seem like a waste of time to have these seemingly touchy-feely chats. But Workshifting has another tip that may help you use your communication time more effectively, making space to discuss the hows as well as the whys.

Communicate instead of checking in. Managers should regularly communicate with the team – both individually as well as in a group. But it’s important to use that time productively. If employees are meeting their deadlines and delivering quality, don’t use the time for “status reports”. There’s nothing more boring than a “Let’s go around the room and have everyone tell us what they’re working on” meeting.

Do you find you have to be more explicit about how to communicate when you’re managing a virtual team? 

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Several years ago, when Brian Curin and his business partners were busy building up the Cold Stone Creamery franchise, “We built a big office, the Taj Mahal of offices,” he explains. But this group of surfers and outdoor enthusiasts wasn’t particularly taken with the suit and tie lifestyle, so when they moved on to their next venture, they let their lifestyle considerations guide them.

The result is Flip Flop Shops, a quick-growing franchise of more than 45 stores selling beach-ready footwear, that Curin, who serves as president, and four partners run out of home offices spread from Atlanta to Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s a true lifestyle brand,” says Curin. “Jeans, T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops: that’s what we wear everywhere and what’s nice is it’s sort of expected. So where most people couldn’t get away with dressing like bums, when we go to places everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s the Flip Flop guys. It’s OK. Let them in.’”

Talent

Curin has a simple mantra when it comes to hiring: Attitude first. When adding to their team of support staff (currently five people) or deciding who gets a franchise, experience and qualifications come behind passion. “It’s so critical for us to get the absolute right fit, and that may not be the most qualified all the time. It may just be the person who goes, ‘I used to work in the corporate world and I’d cut off my left arm if I didn’t have to deal with that,’” he says, adding “when you find those people, you just have to set the expectations.”

And a particular location isn’t among his. “Go to Mexico!” he tells his staff. “You’d probably do better if you were just living the life and doing what we need you to do.” Nor are set hours important. “If the waves are good, they’re probably going to be out of their office,” Curin concedes. What is important is that people get work done on time and forge a personal relationship with the team.

To find the right talent for this type of team, Curin is a firm believer in interviewing face to face. “People can sound one way on the phone and interview great and look good on paper, but nothing compares to face to face,” he says, but he’s also a huge fan of a healthy degree of social media snooping to screen candidates before that stage.

“People aren’t smart on Facebook. Most people put everything out there, and so in a matter of a few minutes you get a really good flavor for their vibe. You either like it or you don’t, but it makes you way more prepared when you go meet with them,” he explains. Referrals also help ensure cultural fit: “It’s rare that we get somebody that’s just cold, never met them, out of the blue.”

Tools

In collaboration tools, as in footwear, Curin doesn’t get too fancy. “Part of the whole ‘free your toes’ mentality, this lifestyle we lead, is simplicity, so Apple,” he says, giving a one word answer to the tools his team uses to keep in touch. “Apple gives us all the gadgety things we need — iPhone, iPad, iEverything — to make this whole virtual office thing work for us,” he continues, sounding like a contented fanboy. Anything else? Just FaceTime (Apple again) and “no less than 20″ calls a day to CEO Darin Kraetsch.

The company is also a fan of social media, as we’ve heard for recruiting, but also for keeping up to date with franchisees. “We set up a closed loop Facebook page for shop owners only. We’re the admins on it so we can accept or deny people. The public can’t view it, and it’s set up as a platform for all of our shop owners to talk and share best practices, complain, share inventory, whatever it is,” he says.

Tips

“We respect the fact that we’ve got a really good thing here. We don’t suit-and-tie it. We don’t report to anybody,” says Curin, but he does see one downside to his current setup, and it’s a common one for virtual workers. “The one downfall is you truly never get that total shut off downtime except maybe once, twice a year where we tell each other, ‘hey, I’m going to Hawaii,’ my phone’s done,’” he says.

And while Curin admits that shutting out work stuff at home is a challenge, he’s firmer about shutting out home stuff when he’s working. “Make sure your space is set up the right way, so basically, when you go in there, it’s: ‘I am at work.’ You’ve got to make sure those ground rules are set with your significant other or your roommate, whoever it is.” And this space shouldn’t just be any old desk, chair, computer setup but a place that truly reflects your lifestyle. “To do it successfully, you can still be in your pajamas, but make sure your space fits the vibe of whatever business that you’re in.” Need an example? Check out Curin’s home office to the left.

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Onboarding any employee into a company can be tricky, and as we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, getting new virtual employees up to speed is even trickier. In fact, the process has so many potential pitfalls that some experts on remote work recommend you skip it entirely, opting instead to train your remote workers face-to-face.

Speaking to MoneyWatch’s Laura Vanderkam recently, Mom Corps CEO Allison O’Kelly suggested managers bring new hires that will be working at a distance into the office for the first week or two:

Train in person. If you’re hiring someone into a virtual position, awesome. You can find a great person without having to pay moving expenses! But “training is the most difficult part,” says O’Kelly. You have to explain exactly what it is the person needs to do, as well as your culture. “We have had some people who we have tried to train virtually and it really is difficult,” O’Kelly says. The solution? Spend time together. O’Kelly is in Pennsylvania, and recently hired a CFO in Atlanta who spent two different weeks with her. Spread out over several weeks, those two weeks have been “invaluable,” she says.

Donna Wells, CEO of online company Mindflash, concurred with this position last year on Mashable, suggesting managers should:

Plan to have new remote teammates spend their first days or weeks at HQ. As good as collaboration tools are, they are not effective in building the personal relationships and communication shortcuts that come very quickly face-to-face. For the employee, it’s a chance to feel a strong sense of belonging and to establish a positive bond with the boss and whole team. For managers, it’s an opportunity to convey the company culture, to set expectations and start building the trust you’ll need later on to hit mutual goals.

Even here on WebWorkerDaily where we’re usually focused on figuring out how to do nearly everything better at a distance, my colleague Darrell Etherington has conceded that when done virtually, “training is tricky. Orientation for new remote workers, especially if they’re new to the job or company and not just making the shift from being an in-office employee, can be very difficult.” Though there are plenty of tech tools to ease the stresses of training remote workers and keep them closely connected to the office during those crucial first weeks if a trip in to get to know the team is impossible.

In your experience is trying to train at a distance a hopeless undertaking or can it be done well?

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How much you feel you should pay remote workers is one thing; what your payment is worth to them — and how its value changes over time — is another.

Recent global financial strife continues to cause some economies to suffer, including that of the U.S. Many digital freelancers earning U.S. dollars are now receiving substantially less for the same work, as their own nations’ currencies gain strength against the U.S. dollar.

The rates that U.S. companies offer to remote workers may no longer compete with firms that are more local to the freelance web worker. For U.S.-based organizations, this may make sourcing good remote workers much more challenging. It may also be a challenge they haven’t had to face before.

Of course, currency fluctuations don’t just affect pay rates. In theory, web workers buying goods from the U.S. should enjoy exchange rate benefits as the U.S. dollar weakens, but this is rarely the case.

Late last year,  for example, I bought a $35 piece of software from the States on a day when the U.S. dollar was worth 1.015 Australian dollars. The software should have cost $35.53 AUD, but my receipt shows that I was actually charged $1.40 AUD more. The effects of a stronger currency aren’t usually reflected across the board.

And of course, your remote freelancer’s local costs don’t fluctuate with your currency’s value. So what could be a great rate for them this month might be a very lackluster rate in a month or two. You may need to consider offering other perks or advantages to procure the remote talent you really want, rather than accepting that which you can get cheaply.

Freedom and fun stuff

If your remote freelancer has some ideas they’d like to trial on your project, or extra suggestions that they feel are worthwhile, can you give them the freedom to implement those ideas?

The extra work may take extra time, but if you can see real value for your project, the extension of scope could be beneficial to the remote worker as well as to your business. It could also ensure you get a top-notch job on the key parts of the project, rather than settling for second-best.

Software and systems

Can you reduce the cost to the freelancer of taking on your project by giving them a license to use necessary software, or providing access to specific systems?

Finding ways to make their lives easier — and more cost-effective — could help you to win the remote worker.

Team involvement

Some remote workers really value the opportunity to work with a team — particularly if they’re solo operators, or work from home. Showing them how you’ll involve them in the project team, making them feel welcome, and communicating their value to their new colleagues are a few ways to help cement good relationships with valuable remote workers.

The promise of close working relationships with like-minded pros is likely to appeal to more than a few web workers — especially those who are interested in collaborative, on-the-job learning, and in building networks.

Credits or kudos

Kudos matters. Can you give credit to the freelancer you’re pursuing, perhaps through social media, LinkedIn references, linking to their site through your organization’s blog, or some other method?

Most freelancers will appreciate being publicly named for their contributions — especially if that recognition can help them win further work, or gain them exposure among peers who matter to them.

These ideas may not win you the remote web worker you want, but they might help sweeten a deal embattled by global financial tumult. Are you finding it harder to land good remote talent in places where your currency has weakened?

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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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As virtual worlds become as prevalent in business as they are in games and socialization, we need to learn how to present ourselves as effectively as possible in this medium. Since first impressions count in virtual teams just as much as they do in face-to-face teams, we need to take our virtual appearance more seriously. In the case of these immersive environments, appearance is based on our avatars.

How do we create avatars that are more than just placeholders? Which avatar features contribute most to the quality and richness of the conversation?

Eye gaze

While 3-D avatars can generate motion and activity, it doesn’t seem to be enough. Just because an avatar looks and moves like a person, it doesn’t mean that the quality of communication mimics face-to-face interactions. Avatars still can’t use subtle body language in the way humans do. But adding even something as mundane as head and eye motion, combined as “gaze”, can make a huge difference.

This was demonstrated in a study conducted in University College London. The research compared an avatar whose gaze was based on the conversation’s turn-taking (informed-gaze) and an avatar whose animations were unrelated to the conversation (random-gaze). They also compared these two types of avatars to other media, such as live video and audio-only conversations.

According to the study, even the inclusion of a relevant, expressive gaze created a significant improvement in the perceived quality of the conversation. When comparing to the participants’ sense of involvement, informed-gaze avatars barely had a significant difference from communicating via video.

What’s even more surprising is that the random-gaze avatar had no significant improvement over pure audio. This implies that a mere 3-D presence doesn’t automatically mean that the communication quality and richness improves. To be truly useful and engaging, avatars must exhibit behaviors that are relevant to the conversation — even if it’s something as simple as eye gaze.

Gesture and manners

Taking a step beyond eye gaze, it appears that other non-verbal manners, and our responses to them, persist in virtual worlds.

In a study from Stanford University, researchers observed how interacting avatars used interpersonal distance and eye gaze in Second Life. Based on their observations, non-verbal norms were still present, even if controlling them meant moving a mouse and keyboard rather than our own eyes and legs. The study, which focused on gender norms, showed that male-male pairs, like their face-to-face counterparts, maintained less eye contact and were further apart than female-female pairs. Also, when the “physical” distance between avatars was decreased, the avatars compensated by avoiding eye contact — just like people would in the offline world.

But it’s not just gender norms that persist in virtual environments. Cultural norms are still exhibited, even when the technology allows us interaction with people from different cultures. An experiment from Augsburg University in Germany showed that cultural speech nuances such as timing and pauses affected a viewer’s preference for an avatar. Their results showed that people preferred avatars that exhibited the nuances from their own culture. Perhaps this means that even if we are meeting other people in a virtual environment, we should still take cultural factors into account when we’re communicating.

How important are these cues? Quoting from a paper on the use of avatars in collaboration (PDF):

The ability or inability to maintain an “appropriate” interpersonal distance or the ability or inability to control one’s viewpoint so other avatars may be seen, among other things, will affect the feeling of being there together. [...] Being in an environment where people feel connected is more likely to enhance development of trust and reduction of conflict, which in turn lead to more effective collaboration.

(Source: “Avatars, Text, and Miscommunication: The Impact of Communication Richness on Global Virtual Team Collaboration”, Columbia University)

Looking back at all the research, it’s a lot to take in. Doesn’t it seem cumbersome to have avatars that allow you to control all of these tiny factors? After all, in real life we barely even think about these non-verbal cues.

The answer is simple: it should be automated in our avatars’ programming, just as it is in our own minds and bodies. The more these virtual environments have an intuitive interface, and the more these communication nuances are automated, the more natural it will be for most people to successfully use their virtual world avatars for collaboration.

How do you create and control avatars?

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