Communicating with Workers in Remote Locations

By Heather C. Conover
Conover + Company Communications

Increasingly people are spending time working from home, satellite offices, and other “remote” locations. This trend has made internal communications much more challenging for managers. Whether members of one project team or of different departments or teams within the same organization, the need for sharing information – effective communications – is paramount, if an organization is to remain competitive.

A colleague of mine, Stefanie Heiter of HeiterConnect, specializes in helping companies develop and manage virtual teams. She aptly notes that many companies incorrectly believe that technology alone can address the challenges of dispersed workers. In fact, communications, or the failure to communicate effectively, presents the bigger challenge to companies. She explains that learning to communicate effectively face-to-face continues to be a challenge for many companies. Add to that communicating over physical distance and, perhaps, also dealing with different languages and cultures, and the challenge becomes an obstacle to meeting project and business goals.

Understanding not only the differences between face-to-face and remote communications and personal work styles, but also how one’s personal work style relates to working “virtually” are the first steps toward building and maintaining a motivated team that works effectively across different time zones and cultures.

It’s easy to think that people have understood what you’ve said unless they tell you otherwise. More likely, you won’t learn that what you’ve said was misunderstood until there’s a problem or crisis. Developing a system and channels for questioning and soliciting feedback, exchanging ideas, providing updates, and submitting progress reports – in real-time and through other channels – are vital to managing dispersed workers.

Without the benefit of frequent face-to-face meetings, including informal or unscheduled meetings, we tend to rely on methods of communication that are most convenient or comfortable for us. Managers and all team members need to understand and have an agreed upon protocol for when certain types of communication are used. There is no one hard and fast rule for the use of different types of communication. Different foreign and corporate cultures, technological capabilities and abilities, and budgets will influence the choice and use of communications vehicles. No matter which are used, the only way to know whether or not workers are receiving the right amount of and necessary information through the best communication vehicles is to ask, monitor behavior, and measure results.

Summer 2004 -Volume 14, Number 3

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