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Virtual Office Work

Guest post by: Kathy Clark

Article Overview: This articles describes what managers can do to foster a healthy and productive virtual office experience for employees. It outlines the advantages and challenges with having employees in various locations.

Virtual Office Work

More and more organizations are offering virtual work options for employees. Some offer it as a benefit in an effort to help support a healthy work-life balance. While others do it out of necessity or as an effort to control increasing costs. The ongoing advancement of technology has made the virtual office much easier, not only to equip employees, but also in the management of employees. It is predicted that a higher number of workers will be telecommuting in the next five years.

So what should organizations be thinking about and how should they prepare for virtual workers?

Requirements for a success virtual office structure

• Good leadership and oversight is critical to successful working processes and management of employees.
• Leaders must have the ability to resolve conflict and coach employees.
• Leaders have the responsibility to oversee and coordinate work completion.
• There needs to be a structured communication model for sharing information from the organization to employees and from employees to the organization.
• There needs to be a structured process for how work gets accomplished.
• Employees need to have the right job competencies.
• There must be a high level of trust between the organization and the employees.
• Employees must have a good rapport with the organization.
• The organization should have guiding principles for employees to follow.
• There needs to be good information technology support for employees to ensure their computer needs are met.
• Technology should be used for communication, planning and tracking of accomplishment toward goals.
• There should be specific guidelines for what is expected of employees, ie; work hours, how documents are moved back and forth, confidentiality, etc.
• Work assignments should have a well thought out plan.
• Employees need very specific SMART goals.
• There needs to be a good reward system for both the individual as well as work teams.

With all the advantages of a virtual office there are some disadvantages:

• It may be challenging to oversee the performance management of employees.
• Team skill development can be difficult for virtual teams that are absent from the day-to-day team interactions that affect healthy team building.
• Some workers don’t have the interest, or want to take the time, to learn the newest technologies, ie: chat rooms, social media, secured blogs that can help with virtual office communications.
• It can be difficult to openly reward employees for good performance or celebrate team successes.
• Employee engagement sometimes suffers because of less contact with coworkers and the organization.

Despite the challenges with virtual teams, organizations with good performance management processes are able to balance cost control, work-life balance with completion of organizational objectives.

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Article Tags: performance management, virtual office

About the Author: Kathy Clark RSS for Kathy's articles - Visit Kathy's website I am an MBA with 25 years of business experience in both large and small organizations.  I write for The Thriving Small Business website and have expertise is strategic planning, business development, performance management, process improvement, service quality and human resource management. I have a passion to give back and to share my experience and expertise with those interested in learning. Click here to visit Kathy's website More from Kathy Clark What can we learn from the Toyota crisis Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act HIRE Virtual Office Work

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