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Managing remote employees can prove rewarding, liberating and fulfilling…or you can feel like an empty nest parent whose kids don’t stay in touch. Building teamwork, trust and trackability are three cornerstones of effective remote management of virtual employees. Learn how to build credibility and confidence with a virtual workforce. Micro-managing vs. micro-monitoring. Often, the difference between resentment and resilience occurs in the subtleties of remote employee management. If virtual employees feel “Big Brother” is watching, they will naturally tend to become defensive. On the other hand, if they feel supported and know they have a safety net, positive results are likely to follow. This class will help managers learn how to: Motivate remote employees Handle conflicts in virtual settings Communicate convincingly from afar Create a tightly-knit team that stays loose

Development of remote employees Training – methods for training remote employees, when to use each Skill vs. talent training On-going mentoring – development as a continuous process Reactionary vs. proactive Socratic coaching How to give good feedback Performance reviews and feedback – frequency, how to conduct and communicate, evaluating team Identifying skills vs talent performance Motivating remote employees Creating leaders and building ownership Empowering employees – enabling employees by giving them decision opportunities. Turning work into play Ways to reward a virtual team No vs. low vs. high cost options Public vs. private reward systems Disciplining remote employees Action plans Key items to include How to deliver How to monitor Handling conflicts between remote team members Hiring remote employees Ideal traits of the remote employee Using the remote employee skill assessment Implementing remote management skills Creating action plans, getting immediate results.

Managing Remote Employees Topics Covered Leading a remote team Setting the vision – how to communicate the team vision and keep employees focused on it in their work efforts. Creating expectations – how to clearly communicate and set performance and team expectations to ensure employees move toward common objectives correctly. Communicating WIIFMs – drive employees toward goals by communicating the benefits to them “what’s in it for me.” Communication Quantity and quality – increased communication needed with remote employees Communication vehicles – the different ways to communicate with a distributed workforce and when and how to use them Picking the appropriate option for different situations How and when to have team meetings Accessibility – establishing your credibility through commitments, guidance, and owning decisions Micro-Monitoring vs. Micro-Managing Creating and using tools to enable employees to manage themselves and track their own performance Increasing responsibility to decrease management time Setting goals – how to engage employees in their own development Managing to expectations Monitoring tools What can be monitored & how to monitor What can be managed & how to manage

For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract.

Social software is whatever software or online network that enables users to interact and share knowledge in a social dimension, emphasizing the human potential instead of the technology that makes the exchange possible

reshaping the way in which collaboration happens

new generation organizations.