Where In the World?

  Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

More and more projects span different locations, time zones, even cultures. It only makes the project manager’s job more challenging. To succeed on such projects, you must learn how to improve your interactions with remote team members. Here are six suggestions.

Managing people and projects from across the hall is tough enough. Managing people and projects from different cities, states, time zones, or countries is infinitely more difficult. You might as well be on different planets. And, as the world economy changes, this remote sort of management is becoming more and more common. Whether your organization has a sales force spread around the country, an engineering group located across the state, or projects you might be building across town, the lack of opportunity to “run into” the other members of your team can be devastating to the team’s performance. While there are certainly some advantages to a remote workforce, its downsides must be recognized and either minimized or avoided completely.

The goal of most organizations and sub-organizations is to deliver something of value to their external customers, their internal customers, or both. As such, the difficulty of managing people remotely has a direct impact on both the productivity of the workforce and the quality and quantity of the end product or service. To operate at peak performance today, …

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