Page 169 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

148 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

growing company that offers storage area network optimi-
zation, specifically focusing on virtual infrastructure. He’s
responsible for a team of solutions consultants operating
worldwide.
His largest problem, he told us, is maintaining a connect-
edness to the corporate initiative and direction while main-
taining consistency in message and work products. “I have
12 employees,” he says. “I don’t have a single employee
[who] is in an office. Every single one works remotely from
home. Oftentimes, remote employees can feel like they are
stranded on an island. It is keeping them well tethered to the
mother ship via information repositories, online applications
like salesforce.com (which we use extensively), and GoTo-
Meeting–based Webinars and conference calls. It is creating
a virtual office space for a bunch of remote individuals.”
To do that, he maintains consistent communication, with
weekly worldwide calls with team members and supporting
functions. He also has assigned management objectives to
the team. “We have five overarching MBOs [Management
by Objectives], each of which is very specifically designed
to align the resource behind common goals.” Those goals
include giving consistent feedback to marketing about such
things as success stories or usage cases; providing feed-
back to engineering requesting feature enhancements or
additions; and taking responsibility for developing a partic-
ular area of expertise that will be valuable for participation
in the development of proposals, customer meetings, and
cross-educating one another.
He measures performance through a combination of qual-
itative and quantitative measures. Quantitatively, he gives
minimums (for example, the number of cross-regional calls
or proposals). Qualitatively, he judges the value employees
deliver to the larger organization (for example, helping oth-
ers as a subject matter expert). “It is a personal priority for