For more than a decade, management gurus have heralded the rise of the distributed organisation ­ one unconstrained by physical boundaries, where new technology knits together virtual workers and teams across the country and the world.

Meanwhile, the twin trends of globalisation and technological convergence have made distributed business a reality. Today, most managers of large organisations, and a growing number of smaller ones, lead teams that are at least partially distributed. Leading those dispersed teams requires a new skill set ­ skills that IT has had more time than most to develop.

While globalisation has been largely unstoppable, many companies resisted distributing work more widely, fearing they would lose control over their people. Teleworking, as it was once called, took off far more slowly than had been anticipated, remaining for many years a privilege granted only to those whose roles were largely solitary in nature, or who had reached a suitable level of trust or seniority within their organisation.

But as firms seek to become ever more agile and competitive, we have reached a tipping point.

The growth of affordable, secure technologies for rich remote collaboration, combined with increasing competition for skills and the need to become ever more cost efficient, have brought us to the point where most organisations know they must have the culture and skills in place to manage a distributed working environment as effectively as possible if they are to secure their future success.

IT has not been merely an enabler of this corporate sea change ­ it has become a distributed function, where remote workers and offshore locations have become an integral part of delivering a service. Today’s IT leaders are uniquely placed to share both their war stories and successful experiences.

Managing distributed teams presents considerable challenges. Leading remote and mobile workers raises questions of how to foster team cohesion and commitment when people are not located together physically; how to measure people’s performance when they cannot be seen; how to ensure that employees know what they are supposed to be doing at any time; and how to ensure they have the resources and relationships to fulfil their roles effectively. To add to the difficulties, when teams are distributed globally firms face all these issues plus the additional hurdles of linguistic, cultural and time zone differences.

Nick Kirkland, chief executive at IT leadership forum CIO Connect, talks to many senior IT leaders who are addressing these questions. He also has considerable experience of the issues involved, having previously spent five years running globally distributed teams at research giant Gartner. In his view, a big part of the answer is about providing unambiguous leadership.

Emotional intelligence

“The effectiveness of communication fades with distance, so you need to ensure that any signal leaves you so strongly that it is still clear at the receiving end,” he says. “People have a habit of filling in gaps, so you need to make sure those gaps are as minimal as possible.”

The separation inherent in managing dispersed teams forces successful leaders to be sensitive to feedback mechanisms, says Martyn Sloman, learning, training and development advisor at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD).
“You need thoughtful and sensitive approaches to bring people together, give them appropriate feedback and strike the right balance between task activity and individual management,” he says.

Crucially, says CIO Connect’s Kirkland, leaders must exhibit “emotional intelligence”, which is about understanding and addressing the needs and motivations of your distributed teams. That means taking time to build effective relationships, both between leaders and teams, and among team members. And to do that well you need to meet them in person.

“In difficult times such as these you have to dig deep to find the budget to travel, particularly globally, but you need to build up and maintain relationships even if you only get together once a year. But don’t just meet the person who reports to you ­ meet the whole team. And share their pain. For goodness’ sake, avoid falling into the ‘royalty visit syndrome’, where you fly in to red-carpet treatment, deliver your presentation and fly back out,” he says.

“Spend some time with them and help out. Visit some difficult customers with them. If everybody just bows to the anointed leader, you will not succeed. You also need to encourage relationships between other managers and team members ­ getting people to deal with each other when they face similar challenges, for instance.”
Senior managers with experience of leading successful distributed teams insist building those team relationships is vital, and meeting in person is the best way to do it.

“You achieve the best relationships when teams have the opportunity to meet face to face, at least initially,” says Sharon Bevis-Hoover, chief information officer at Coca-Cola.

Karen Winney, director of global business services at Procter & Gamble (P&G), agrees. “It is about creating a shared bond at the beginning. Obviously, doing that face to face is best,” she says.

The problem with widely dispersed teams is that frequent face-to-face meetings are impractical, particularly given the need for companies to contain costs and cut their carbon footprint by reducing travel.

It is a point acknowledged by Bevis-Hoover and Winney, who both think that while face-to-face meetings may be the best way to build relationships, technology can help you maintain them at a distance. Both leaders make extensive use of teleconferencing and videoconferencing, as well as other rich collaboration technologies such as instant messaging and social networking.

“We do a tremendous amount of videoconferencing and teleconferencing,” says Bevis-Hoover. “I prefer videoconferencing where possible because it allows people to be able to read facial expressions and increase the level of engagement. In the past such technology had drawbacks, but today’s telepresence systems have a much more natural feel.

“But there are still techniques and etiquette you need to learn to be able to use these systems effectively. For example, if you have a concentration of people in one videoconferencing room and one or two people in other rooms, you have to make a real effort to ensure the people in the same room do not just talk to each other and forget there are other people in the videoconference. We also find instant messaging to be a great way for distributed teams to stay connected.”

Out of sight

P&G’s Winney suggests that different types of collaborative technologies are appropriate for different tasks. “For example, when you are trying to work through a difficult problem or innovate as a team, being able to see each other’s body language really makes a difference, so we tend to use Cisco TelePresence.

“For other types of discussion, we might use LiveMeeting or a teleconference, or for more everyday tasks something as simple as Microsoft Outlook and Communicator,” she says. “We are also looking at social networking technologies such as Facebook and virtual environments such as Second Life, although these are still at an early stage.”

But technology does not overcome all the problems of global distributed teams, for example time zone differences. CIO Connect’s Kirkland says the answer once again is to use emotional intelligence.

“Do not fall into the trap of imposing headquarters’ time on everyone. US-owned companies are notorious for this ­ when it happened, the remote people used to say ‘You’ve been Yanked’,” he says.

“People in Singapore had to get up at 3am because the Americans would not call outside their own hours. If you want your distributed team to function well, show you value them by taking turns to do the late call or the long-haul flight. It all helps strengthen those vital team bonds and build relationships.”

The distributed manager must also take into account cultural differences. Social interactions can help team members become accustomed to colleagues’ working practices, says Coca-Cola’s Bevis-Hoover. Even so, the team has to be sensitive to cultural differences. “In certain cultures, it is not unusual to hold meetings at the weekend, for example, while in others this would be considered extremely intrusive to family life. Helping people understand these kinds of differences and make compromises is extremely useful,” she says.

Organised chaos

But once you have built up some solid, mutually understanding relationships, how do you ensure your distributed teams are directed and measured effectively? One thing is certain ­ old-style micromanagement, where you have direct control and oversight of everything your employees do, is no longer possible or desirable. Kirkland believes managers should measure exclusively on people’s outputs and not worry about how they are working hour to hour or day to day. “That applies as much to your onsite employees as to distributed teams,” he says.

All the CIOs and experts interviewed agreed with this approach. Dave Dunbar is head of BT’s Workstyle programme, which advises customers on introducing remote and flexible working. He says: “Measurement by objective and output is the only real measurement. People sometimes say: ‘How do I know if people are working if I cannot see them?’ Well how do you know they are if you can?”

For Richard Dawson, IT services manager at Bracknell Forest Council, it comes down to trust. “For me it is about 100 per cent trust. I trust that the people working at home are doing what they have said they will do, and I measure them by their output. I know they are doing the tasks by the quality of their work. And obviously if the output is not of sufficient quality I want to know why,” he says.

But since introducing a Citrix system to enable remote working across the council, managers in various departments are having to acclimatise to this new way of doing things.

Dawson says there are ways to reassure more traditionally-minded managers that their remote staff are not neglecting their posts.

“With the collaboration tools we use, we can see when people are online. It is not Big Brother, but it means people know their manager knows when they are at their desk,” he says. Such technology can only be introduced in tandem with policies that ensure people do not feel that they cannot take breaks because they are being watched, he says.

In the end, effective distributed management is about giving people the ability to collaborate in the way that best suits both the culture of the business and the working style of individual employees and teams, wherever they may be located.
As Kirkland says: “The best managers of distributed teams want people to work in the best way that they can, and be as successful as they can, regardless of where they happen to be.”