RE: Managing telecommuters (a little long)

["walden miller" <wmiller -at- vidiom -dot- com>]

OK, I'll weigh in.
>> One of the problems for a telecommuting employee is
> getting that visibility that the onsite people get
> naturally. I'm managing an employee that telecommutes
> full time and I'm wondering what strategies that I, as
> a manager, can use to overcome that problem and best
> get a feel for what's going on beyond the status
> reports.

Over the past ten years, I have managed telecommuting writers or remote
sites with writers (this is a real distinction).  With Philips, I worked on
projects that included engineering and writing talent from a single site and
on projects with input from five or six sites.  Now I have a writer
telecommuting locally (lives in Denver, our company is in Boulder) and a
writer who telecommutes from New Mexico.  The real twist to my current
situation is that all the engineering projects we work on are based in
California.

So, I have two issues with visibility.  The writer's visibility within the
department and the writer's visibility within the company.

First, within the department, I write email to the (NM) off-site writer
almost everyday, I try to phone him once a week (privately), and I include
him via conference call in departmental meetings.  I try to give him both
the corporate culture updates (who's doing what, etc.) as well as a
corporate issues update (upcoming projects, workloads, etc.) This keeps him
happy.  We have scheduled him to fly to Boulder four or five times a year
for on-site work. This keeps him a fresh face to everyone in the department.
Our local telecommuter is required to come into the office twice a week for
assimilation with project teams, etc.

Second (and this is the hard one), within the company, I make sure our
writers are mentioned by name in all project documents so that our two
offsite writers have name visibility. Also, they attend all project meetings
by phone.  I encourage intensive email and phone contacts between engineers
and writers.  This takes care of voice recognition.   All of my writers fly
to California twice a year for face recognition.  It should probably be
more, but the budget (and the writers) won't stand for it.

It takes a certain "type" of writer to handle working off-site and part of
their personality must be aggressive enough to ensure they have visibility.
As a manager, you can only do so much to include off-site employees.   As a
professional in today's market, the telecommuting writer is a common phenom.
It may take some time, but I think the corporate culture will change to
include the off-site employee in a good way (i.e., not require special
handling for visibility purposes).

From my soap box,
walden miller
technical documentation manager
Vidiom systems
boulder Colorado