GigaOM » Wayne Turmel

Hiring for your remote team? Don’t skip these interview questions

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:45:59 +0000

As a manager you may be willing to hire the best talent for your team no matter where they’re located, but how do you go about determining if a potential hire is, in fact, excellent? This is especially tough if you consider that being a great remote worker means not only being excellent at a particular job but also excellent at managing communicating at a distance and juggling priorities outside of the office.

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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user bpsusf.

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The case for more (virtual) meetings

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:03:28 +0000

Everyone hates meetings. Makers complain that they interrupt their concentration and flow. Managers moan that their entire schedule gets eaten up by trips to the conference room, leaving no time for thinking, and virtual meetings in particular are so loathed that the internet is peppered with long lists of suggested activities to distract yourself and survive them.

So it takes a bold character to suggest that what the business world needs is more virtual meetings, but that’s just what Wayne Turmel did on Management Issues recently. Of course, Turmel is a clever guy and aware that his suggestion won’t be popular, so between multiple pleas for patience from his readers, he’s at pains to point out that what he’s advocating isn’t an increase in the total number spent by virtual teams in meetings but a redistribution of meeting time from few long meetings to more, shorter ones.

Why? Turmel says that remote workers have stuck too closely to patterns formed in physical offices since moving their work online. Setting up an in-person meeting is usually a logistical challenge, as multiple schedules need to be coordinated and physical meeting spaces booked. For this reason, traditional meetings are generally infrequent but long in order to accomplish what needs doing when you can actually manage to get everyone together. But this is a flawed approach to virtual meetings, according to Turmel

When people started to do online meetings, they followed the same model, for the same reasons, but there are several fundamental differences between thoughtfully run webmeetings and a traditional meeting:

People’s attention spans are naturally shorter online. Asking someone to sit for a long time in a static environment is going to impact their ability to engage, contribute and add value. You’ll get better work and attention from people who still have some energy and will to live left.

The logistics of setting up a webmeeting (once you master the software, which takes about three practices) are infinitely easier than trying to get everyone physically in the same place at the same time, book an available conference room, and all the other administrivia. It’s also much easier to get 45 minutes out of someone’s day than a couple of hours.

When people don’t have to leave their desks to attend, there’s a lot less wasted time. People can get more work done up to the moment the meeting starts, and pick up where they left off right away.

If the meeting is short and targeted, people will pay attention more.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning for remote workers gathering virtually, according to Turmel, is more meetings of shorter duration. The result will be more engaged meeting attendees, more productivity per meeting minute and a lot less doodling and covert web surfing.

“So put down the torches and pitchforks and let’s examine the notion that more frequent, but shorter and targeted online meetings, might be an option. It’s not like what we’re doing now works so well for most of us,” concludes Turmel.

Do you agree with him that more frequent, shorter virtual meetings might be an improvement on the current way of doing business?

Image courtesy of Flickr user David Recordon.

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Is HR behind the curve on virtual work?

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:08:50 +0000

Among technologists, futurists and those working at cutting-edge companies, virtual teams and the realities of remote work may be fairly old news. But according to a recent article from the Canadian HR Reporter, the same doesn’t appear to be true for most mainstream HR departments, which the author Dave Crisp feels are badly behind the curve when it comes to understanding new ways of working and implementing the necessary policies and procedures.

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?

Image courtesy of Flickr user x-ray delta one.

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