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Management and Leadership – Managing Your Virtual Team
People used to think that “working from home” was code for “getting paid to eat Oreos in pajamas”, but with the recent recession, getting paid at all isn’t anything to take chances with. If you’re engaged in virtual project management you can’t physically just drop in to check on your workers – at least, not without a lot of gas, possibly a jet, and the risk of some extremely unpleasant surprises. But with the right web based project management software it’s entirely possible to keep tabs on your employees – without them setting their Twitter status message as 1984.
The main problem with online collaboration is that your staff, by definition, must have a reliable access to the Internet. Aka “The Infinite Distraction Engine.” Administering employees online can be like herding cats, except the cats are all in different countries, and invisible. The cats also have access to YouTube. How can you remotely manage them?
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Elmer Thomas blogs primarily at Thinking Serious which focuses on programming, design, business and productivity content for tech entrepreneurs living in a 2.0 world. That is, when he is not tickling his entrepreneur itch or consulting. To read Elmer’s complete biography, click here.
Can you remember what you ate for dinner last night? Last week? Neither can many others. How well then will a worker remember the nuances of his or her job performance days or weeks earlier on which feedback is now being provided? Probably not very well.
All too often vital communications go unheard, creating workforce discontent, reducing organizational effectiveness, and alienating clients. Why with today’s advanced communication mechanisms do so many messages go unnoticed? One answer is that people are so overwhelmed with modern society’s messaging that they sometimes don’t recognize the importance of a single announcement; filtering it out as noise. Another reason is that not all people meaningfully receive information in the same way and some important messages are only sent through channels not likely to be received. To overcome both these challenges, managers should consider communicating important messages seven times using seven different media.
Karen K. Juliano is StrategyDriven‘s Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Communications and Marketing. Prior to joining the StrategyDriven team, she helped produce weekly programming for a Public Access Television station and served as a production assistant in the public affairs office at United States Naval Base, Philadelphia. To read Karen’s complete biography, 
Whether creating a new product or service or upgrading an internal process or software application, all projects fundamentally represent a change to the way an organization does business. This change is represented by two components, the technical object being added or altered and the emotional acceptance and implementation of the new technical object by the workforce. While each change component is equally important to the project’s success, it is the later that often poses the most risk of failure. To reduce this risk and thereby increase the project’s likelihood of success requires strong line ownership especially on the part of executives and managers.
People, regardless of their position, experience anxiety relative to the unknown. Is my job secure? Will I be able to provide for myself and my loved ones? and Will I lose my home? are just a few of the questions that preoccupy the minds of all organization members during uncertain times. Like all distractions, these self survival fears steal time and focus from the job at hand, negatively impacting productivity. Unlike other distractions, these fears are nearly impossible to ignore and will only subside once conditions become more predictable. Therefore, it is critically important that the manager-leader minimize the magnitude and duration of uncertainty by providing subordinates with as much clarifying information as possible. The manager must communicate.
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