Eric Richert, principal of 8 Corners Consulting and the former director of Sun Microsystem’s Open Work Practice, prepared a research paper that analyzes the work practices and success factors that managers and employees use to work at a distance. It aims to provide answers to the question: "What do we do to make distributed work situations work well?”
Based on a review of a wide range of academic and practitioner literature, the paper identifies nine success factors that help create employee engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and the achievement of business objectives.
KEY CONCLUSIONS IN ERIC'S PAPER
- Most of the work practices identified as essential for distributed work have been previously identified as recommended practices for management of any teams of knowledge workers.
- The failure to use these practices results in much more serious consequences when the team is distributed
- Collocated teams perform some of these tasks through informal socialization, but distributed teams must accomplish them explicitly with conscious team agreements
- When teams have a mix of collocated and distributed members, the team should follow the practices associated with a distributed team.
- Locally distributed teams can be/should be widely prevalent, given advantages over both collocated and globally distributed teams
NewWOW’s 4th Symposium, “Work Practices and Processes for New Ways of Working” was devoted to discussing the implications of Eric’s research. After Eric presented his study, the group explored the challenges posed by the enabling work practices and their implications for the design of organizations, technologies, and workplaces.
