I do a majority of my collaborating and individual work remotely, which I couldn’t do without the support of various programs. In this post, I thought I would share some of my favorite tools for working remotely. They may be useful to you in your collaboration work as well. I use most of these as a single user for private… Read more →
Surinder is my advisor and mentor in the doctoral program at Binghamton University. We have written several conference papers and collaborated on other projects together with Betsy and Professor Rui Huang at the university. Very often the two of us, or all of us, have worked together while geographically far apart. We have used tools like Google docs, Google… Read more →
A while back, Betsy blogged about paradoxes in virtual work. Yesterday’s NY Times had an interesting article that illustrates another paradox. Basically, virtual work can both decrease and increase visibility. Since virtual workers can be located anywhere, they are not visible to their managers. However, since virtual workers conduct a significant part of their work on or via information and… Read more →
It’s both good and bad that I can’t take my work home. These days my biggest limitation is technology. The work I do depends heavily on several expensive software packages. My employer has a policy disallowing the organization from paying for software for home computers, and these applications are too expensive for me to buy on my own dime. … Read more →
Recently, warfare expert P. W. Singer appeared on several shows (NPR’s Fresh Air, The Daily Show) to talk about his new book Wired for War. While not necessarily the central focus of the book, one point he made caught my attention for its relation to virtual teams. Singer talked about a drone pilot who engages in war, but from afar… Read more →
This week I read an interesting research article (Perceived Proximity in Virtual Work: Explaining the Paradox of Far-but-Close) that talked about perceived proximity. The authors (Wilson, O’Leary, Metiu, and Jett) define perceived proximity as two or more individuals having the feeling of being close, regardless of physical distance between them. Often, one assumes that physical proximity and perceived proximity are highly correlated, but the… Read more →
Part of the value of working with LeadingVirtually.com is that the group actually operates as a virtual team, allowing us to face the challenges that we write about in a working environment. LeadingVirtually.com is only one of the many things that each of us is involved in. One job I had previously was a telecommuting job for a company in New York City. I… Read more →
We have pointed out in several Leading Virtually Digest posts that telecommuting is all over the popular press lately (check out the coverage captured by Google News). But the majority of articles merely mention telecommuting without providing any specific information about doing telework. However, research does exist on this topic, and we have some evidence about the conditions that make a… Read more →
What: This past week, there continued to be a number of articles in regional newspapers about companies who are considering or trying out telecommuting. Check out a few from Michigan, Virginia, and Connecticut. There are plenty more available with a search. Posts to which it is related: Journal article cited in the Digest on June 13, Leading in Face to… Read more →
As more companies are considering the option of allowing their employees to telecommute (see the recent flurry of news about telecommuting), there is an increasing need to understand how leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face teams. In many cases, people have challenged the idea that leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face situations…. Read more →