Word: virtualization
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From a high-rise office building just off a freeway in suburban Atlanta, for example, the eight virtual bosses of Popeyes last month orchestrated a restaurant opening in Iceland, designed a new outlet in Honduras and handled a chicken-supply crisis in Fairbanks, Alaska (which is so far from both the Atlanta headquarters and its vendors that it's treated like a foreign outpost...
...same time, technologies for videoconferencing, Web conferencing and intranet sites have improved in quality and price and have spread around the world. They have made virtual management not only possible but preferable for many companies. Of 82 large multinational firms surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2000, 24% allowed home-based employees to manage operations in another country instead of forcing them to relocate. A higher proportion of firms took the more traditional route of sending their managers to live in foreign countries. But looking forward, most companies said they expected to adopt the virtual approach at a much faster rate...
...talent has compelled a new way of thinking," says Tom Casey, head of the talent-management practice at Unifi Network, a PricewaterhouseCoopers division. Casey is based in Boston but oversees projects involving 40 people in eight countries "all over God's creation." He also advises other companies on virtual-boss setups. The biggest adjustment for U.S.-based managers, he says, is learning to trust out-of-sight employees. Just because they are in a land far away and aren't always right by the phone doesn't mean they are sipping umbrella drinks at the beach. Despite managers' fears, most...
...reason why managers decline overseas assignments is a relatively new one, according to the PWC survey: they don't want to fracture a spouse's career. The second most common explanation is that they don't want to disrupt their children's education. Not surprisingly, virtual managers report much less stress than employees who commute or relocate...
...sure, virtual management is not for everybody. Projects that require continuous give and take--like the development of public relations campaigns or new software--often require in-the-flesh management. The ideal virtual assignment is a long project with plenty of clear milestones. According to a WorldCom study released on March 14, technology companies are almost four times as likely as other companies to have a formal policy encouraging virtual management. That may be because tech companies are generally more willing to invest in the hardware and software that are needed to make long-distance supervision work. "Surprisingly...