The Dispersed Workforce
How to Manage Teams Spread Over a Great Distance

This workshop is intended for people in Home Offices or Regional Headquarters who direct the efforts of people out in the field or in overseas assignments. The course shows how to modify the techniques of modern management and to best manage people in a dispersed or distributed workforce — those who are not all under one roof and certainly not in their manager’s line of sight. It demonstrates how to make the change from managing time (activity-based) to managing projects (results-based), from face-to-face communications to electronic one, from the physical office to the virtual one. This course is also beneficial for managers of telecommuters, widely dispersed vendors, partners, government agencies, and the like.


What's Covered

1. Managing from a distance is a process of modifying one’s present management skills and practices to suit the requirements imposed by a workforce located in places remote from the manager. There are six principals that this workshop examines:
   
   
   • Management Practices
   • Communications Practices
   • Staffing and Selection Practices
   • Performance Review Practices
   • Daily Operational Practices
   • A Summary of “Best” Practices
     
     
     
2. For managers at a distance to be effective in terms of Management Practices their team members' tasks, roles and responsibilities must be absolutely clear. That’s why we begin this course by showing participants how to take their present management style and adapt it to handle the following:
   
   
• How to establish and promulgate common mission, goals and a sense of collective purpose
• How to create a palpable feeling of group interdependence, leading ultimately to larger degrees of self-governance
• How to give members a sense of the value of group problem-solving and decision making as the primary way of getting things done
• How to establish accountability, for both individuals and operating units, as a way of assuring that assigned work gets done
• How to use some Project Management techniques — particularly the “up front” ones of early work definition and performance contracting and the “back end” ones of task allocation, time lining and periodic reporting and monitoring
• How to insure that the operating unit continues to attract high quality talent
• How to make sure that cultural and operating values are shared and frequently discussed, so that local groups can gradually increase the range of issues about which they can reliably make decisions on their own
  



3. In terms of Communications Practices, distance managers have to insure that all people in local operating units have access to the information they need and to each other’s knowledge and expertise. To this end, we show:
   
   
   • How they can identify the communications styles of their team members who work at a distance
   • How they can establish protocols for the rapid dissemination of information that has relevance and currency
   • How they can urge managers to adopt the broadest possible array of communications media and avoid their current over-reliance on email
   • We illustrate four circumstances where face-to-face communications is absolutely essential
   • We ask them to set guidelines that specify how quickly offsite people are expected to respond to phone calls, emails and the like
   • We help people design information flow systems which produce documents everyone should have, such as schedules, action plans, decisions, assignments and all the documentary tools people use to keep track of progress and changes
   • Similarly, we discuss with managers the creation of working documents: the way ideas are ideally solicited, summarized, exchanged for editing and finally put together in a timely fashion
   • We open up for discussion the more difficult issue of how team members engage in ordinary socialization from a distance: how they disclose personal information; solicit and supply feedback in a comfortable way; express appreciation; apologize for mistakes; volunteer for jobs; acknowledge assignments and the like—the full range of rich material that flows between people when they are in the same building, but which becomes much more difficult when they are thousands of miles apart
     
     
     
4. By far the most difficult challenge for distance managers is Performance Management Practices. We teach the ways to deal with this issue:
   
   
   • How to set and communicate clear performance standards
   • How to create performance contracts that motivate members
   • How to remove obstacles that get in the way of superior performance
   • How to tie in superior performance with the organization’s reward structure
     
     
     
5. In terms of Staffing & Selection Practices, there is extensive research that strongly suggests there is a recognizable profile for both managers and team members who are likely to succeed in a distance working relationship. This section of the workshop teaches:
   
   
   • The characteristics and behaviors of people who do best in a results-oriented work place
   • The talents, skills and knowledge one should look for, encourage and develop in people who are members of a distance team
   • Support and services that should be provided team members working at a distance in order to maximize the chances of producing superior work
   • Training, coaching and performance feedback for the distance worker
     
     
     
6. There is a final unit where participants and the instructional staff share Best Practices information gathered from their own experiences, from university research and from corporate and NGO experiences

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