Page 75 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

54 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

or merged companies. The business goal for customers is also clear:
to create the experience of “presence,” no matter where employees,
clients, or consumers are located.
Unfortunately, that won’t happen.
At least it won’t happen in the near future. Nothing, according to
Avey, will ever replace the need to meet employees or clients face to
face from time to time. You can’t go to dinner with a high-definition
screen, he says. We agree. You can’t give a hurting employee a hug or
shake the hand of a new customer with telepresence. You can’t smell
the sweat of an anxious project manager or watch your boss pace in his
office, awaiting the board meeting. Yet that day, we believe, is coming.

` presenCe And dIstAnCe

What does “presence” have to do with managing virtual workers?
Let’s dig a little deeper.
Peter Senge and his colleagues in their book, Presence, speak of
presence in terms of being totally in the present moment, fully aware,
deeply listening, with a sense of being connected. Presence, they say,
“starts with understanding the nature of wholes, and how parts and
wholes are interrelated.” Imagine being totally present and mindful
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and open to experience, to learning, to others, to nature, and to the
interconnected ecology of the world. As we will see later, presence can
be thought of as e-presence, social presence, and leadership presence.
The surprising idea about presence is that it doesn’t depend upon be-
ing in the same physical location—and in fact may have nothing to do
with location at all.
Let’s consider the notion of distance for a minute. Karen Lojeski
and Richard Reilly, in their book Uniting the Virtual Workforce, ask
us to redefine distance. Geographic distance is what we commonly
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think of, and Lojeski and Reilly remind us that companies like Hud-
son’s Bay Company, the premier fur-trading business in the 1700s
and 1800s, had managers distributed far and wide, communicating