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Chuck Kolyvas
Contributor: Chuck Kolyvas
How the virtual workforce is shaping business

Email is not the answer

When it was rolled out in the ’90s, email represented the end of the physical paper trail. It was a way of speeding up and freeing communication, and it gave us instant engagement with colleagues and customers, regardless of location.

However, Nina Sochon of Nina Sochon Consulting said that “email is past being useful” and no one is reading anymore. We spend a lot of time creating it, yet recipients spend very little of their time digesting it.

If you thought using email was a natural tool in the virtual work environment, Vaughan Klein, general manager of collaboration at Cisco, has news for you. “You don’t get high-performance teams in virtual environments if you’re using email.” He went on to call email the “fat” in our work diet. “We’ve gorged ourselves on the email platform and it has made us slow and inefficient.”

Virtually is better than actually

There is perhaps no greater authority on the virtual work environment than Klein. He lives and breathes his division’s own ethos – on average he works two days a week from his 30,000-acre cattle farm, some 400km west of Sydney. From there, he manages his team as naturally as if he were in the office. However, the fact that Klein’s working from a farm is irrelevant when you consider that his team is spread across Australia and New Zealand.

Klein champions video-enabled, face-to-face meetings and says it’s better than being there, in much the same way that it is when watching a televised football game with a viewing experience enriched with commentary and close-ups of the action.

We already have the technology

Consider also that with the ubiquity of camera-enabled laptops, phones and tablets, the solution to effective videoconferencing is purely one of software – one that works seamlessly across multiple platforms.

While on a much larger scale than a typical team meeting, the ease of videoconferencing was demonstrated at the Future of Work conference in keynote talks given by authors Dan Pink and Frederic Laloux. Respectively located in San Francisco and Brussels, in each of their talks the speakers interacted effortlessly with the MC and audience in Melbourne.

Getting the balance right

But Klein stressed that virtual environments are not a complete management solution. “[While] it’s an enormous relief to use videoconferencing, anybody can run a tele-presence environment if you get the balance right.”

Klein regularly meets his staff in person as a way to team-build and change the dynamic. This balanced approach to the virtual work environment is practised further up the chain as well. As part of a group of 20 Cisco executives, Klein and his peers meet monthly, alternating between virtual and in-person sessions, cutting their travel time in half.

Trust works

There’s a perception that the virtual work environment leads to reduced performance and accountability. However, Sochon said that in order for it to be effective, it's important that organisations move to a results-based measurement approach with less direct supervision from managers.

Recent research published at Stanford supports this. In a study of call-centre workers randomly selected at a billion-dollar Chinese travel agency, it was found that: “Home working led to a 13 per cent performance increase, of which 9 per cent was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4 per cent from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment).”

Unexpectedly, figures improved when the program was rolled out to the rest of the workforce and those involved in the initial trial were allowed to reselect their mode of work. “Over half of them switched, which led to the gains from working from home almost doubling to 22 per cent.”

We have the technology and we know that our workers will respond to the flexibility and autonomy that virtual environments can give them. The question that the leaders of our organisations need to start asking themselves is: why aren’t we embracing this way of work?

To find out more about this new world of work, view our free webinar on activity-based working. 

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