A recent post at Richard Florida’s Creative Class focused on the virtual workplace.  My clients are continually working to find ways to create, organize, and lead distributed teams.  This post offers an insight the leaders need to consider–unfortunately all are not as effective working remotely or “at home”

Ironically, the most effective telecommuters and home-based workers are those who are naturally great at connecting with people and intuitive, good communicators. This is one of the messages in Kate Lister and Tom Harnish’s new book, Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). Introverts tend to be less successful working from home.  Another key message is that slackers need not apply — successful home-based workers tend to be self-starters, highly motivated, and dedicated.

APPLICATIONS

• Those that are effective in groups are also the same ones that work well remotely.
• We do not always have the luxury to select who’s on the team; to the extent possible, select those with distributed team experience and the motivation to make the adjustments needed for a distributed teams to work.
• Create a virtual office for the team and use it as “the team’s office”; some teams actually stay on-line together in these “virtual offices” even though they are located in multiple global locations.

Tags: Collaboration, project-based work, team, virtual

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