Stop treating your remote contributors as second-class citizens

Image via Wikipedia

If you work in a multinational corporation like mine, you regularly work with people who don’t live in your area.  If you’re a contractor or self-employed, this will be even more familiar.  You’ll see them on mailing lists and dialed in to meetings from time to time.  We might not realize it, but often we leave these dial-in employees out of important team functions.

Maybe you’re having parties and meetings without informing the remote teammates.  Maybe your meetings feature photocopied handouts that the dialed-in folks never see.

Keep your remote friends in mind.

Be sure every meeting involving a call-in has a legitimate online component.  Share out your agenda and meeting documents online.  Take advantage of  screen sharing and video conferencing when you can.  Be sure that remote attendees can get their questions answered during the meeting, not just after.

Take care of your remote contributors.  In many cases you’re paying them as much as you pay your onsite employees, but you’re not empowering them to contribute and participate to their full potential.  The modern workplace becoming more and more decentralized.  You will be a remote contributor yourself at times, perhaps even permanently.

Take advantage of the opportunities you have now to get better at working with people in other places.

It helps them and it helps you.  You’ll need the skills soon.  Claire Flanagan, the most successful enterprise collaboration practitioner of 2009, honed her unique skills and insights by telecommuting.  One of the most creative and well-known E2.0 advocates has a similar story to tell:

I have been a remote employee, working from my home office, for over six years now and I absolutely love the experience. I probably wouldn’t even change it for anything else. And I suppose that would apply as well to the over 50% of IBM remote employees who work away from a traditional office. And I bet that would apply to most of you folks out there as well who have been working remotely for a while now. – Luis Suarez

Related articles by Zemanta

• Affordable and Usable Video Conferencing? (ask.slashdot.org)
• Procter & Gamble tries a bring-your-laptop-to-work program (computerworld.com)
• Pa. district accused of student spying puts IT workers on leave (computerworld.com)
• At1 All Things Wan Introductory Presentation (slideshare.net)