Working outside of a traditional office setting is increasingly common, according to a September 2015 report in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, but managing remote employees to ensure their productivity and effectiveness requires a thoughtful approach.
Some organizations, like World Vision, a global anti-poverty organization, have long had employees spread across the world running programs. Laura Blank, a public relations director for the nonprofit, works remotely and manages a team of three other employees who all work in different places. Other nonprofits allow a few employees to work from home on a case-by-case basis. Partners Global, which supports international peace-building, has 25 full-time staff members working at its Washington, D.C., office, and over the past four years has had three staff members working from different states, says Nick Oatley, chief operating officer.
The Chronicle talked to Ms. Blank and Mr. Oatley to learn about the benefits, challenges, and keys to success when managing remote nonprofit employees. Johan Hammerstrom, who oversees remote employees as president of Community IT, a company that provides technology services to nonprofits with remote employees, also offered advice, as did Patty Hampton, vice president and managing partner of Nonprofit HR.
Benefits
Remote work can help attract and retain employees, who may prefer to work from home or from a satellite office to reduce commuting times, enable them to live in a lower-cost area, accommodate disabilities, or allow them to care for family members. Ms. Blank says she appreciates the flexibility working remotely gives her; it helps her balance her personal life and her job.
“I think as organizations are beginning to look at different ways they can attract and retain the talent and shape their culture, they’re looking at benefits like telework,” Ms. Hampton says. She calls it the low-hanging fruit of benefits.
Permitting employees to work remotely can help nonprofits avoid turnover and retain high-performing employees. For example, at Partners Global, when two staff members’ partners accepted jobs in other parts of the country, the nonprofit allowed them to work remotely to avoid losing them.
“Certainly it’s been useful to keep valued members of staff we wanted to keep in the organization,” Mr. Oatley says.
It also can help organizations expand their services and become more resilient in case of emergencies or other circumstances that shut down the main office.
After a few Community IT employees tried working from across the country, Mr. Hammerstrom says, the company realized that having them in different time zones meant it could provide more hours of support. When the main office of Community IT flooded after a fire in the building, remote employees continued working normally, and those who usually worked in the office used remote systems to work from home while the mess was cleaned up. Remote workers can offer a big advantage to nonprofits in times of severe weather or natural disaster, too, allowing groups to stay up and running to help meet the needs of those most affected in the community.
Challenges
Remote working arrangements present challenges too. Separating work time from leisure time is not always easy. Some people are less productive, while others feel pressure to work all day, every day.
Finding the happy medium requires discipline, Ms. Blank says: “You have to be a self-starter. You have to be very independent.”
She advises the remote employees she supervises to start and finish their work days with small rituals to help them delineate work time and leisure time. Hers is turning her Skype profile to green when she’s ready to work each morning.
To make sure her team members don’t feel pressured to work extra hours, she often ends emails to them with a note asking them not to respond until the next morning.
Insufficient technical resources can also hinder remote workers. It’s important that employees working from home have sufficient Internet capacity to do their jobs and stay connected to supervisors and colleagues, Mr. Hammerstrom says.
Some nonprofits may be tempted to save money by asking remote employees to supply their own devices, but Ms. Hampton recommends against allowing them to use their personal computers for work, because it can further blur the line between personal and professional duties.
5 Ways to Ensure A Remote-Work Policy Succeeds
Nonprofit managers can take several steps to keep a remote-work program on track:
1. Assess individuals and job responsibilities. Not everyone is suited to work remotely, and Ms. Hampton says it’s important for managers to assess whether a potential remote employee is dependable enough to work outside of the office.
And some roles simply don’t work as well when performed remotely. Mr. Oatley says that Partners Global had a communications director who worked from home for several years, and she found it difficult to stay sufficiently connected to her co-workers.
2. Set expectations. Monitoring and evaluating employees who work remotely is important, according to the Psychological Science in the Public Interest report, and its authors suggest creating contracts that stipulate the organization’s expectations. Employees who work remotely for World Vision sign contracts that spell out the days and times they agree to work, for example.
At Partners Global, employees who work remotely must be clear about their working patterns, accept Skype and telephone calls during the work day, and travel to the Washington office about once a month.
3. Communicate often and effectively. A variety of tools can help remote employees stay connected. The nonprofit supervisors cited video and chat tools as essential for managing remote employees. Project management tools, such as Slack, and document sharing tools, such as Google Drive and Dropbox, help colleagues collaborate.
Communication norms vary by organization. Partners Global asks employees who work remotely to use Skype’s video features for casual conversations and GoToMeeting for more formal meetings. It also requires them to have regularly scheduled check-ins with their supervisors.
At World Vision, Ms. Blank uses Skype’s chat feature to work with members of the communication team based around the world. Because employees live in different time zones, they create an almost continuous stream of messages, and Ms. Blank stays informed by scrolling back through the messages she missed while she was off the clock.
4. Reinforce organizational culture. When employees are dispersed, it’s harder to make them feel included in the company culture, since they miss out on the casual chitchat that happens in the office hallways. As the Psychological Science in the Public Interest report puts it, communication tools make planned interactions more effective, but “do not remedy the loss of the random ‘watercooler’ conversations that occur among workers who are colocated.”
Managers should take deliberate steps to keep remote employees personally connected to the rest of the team, Mr. Hammerstrom says. Ways to do this include requiring them to work from the office for a set period after being hired; asking them to reserve the first few minutes of their Skype calls for small talk; and streaming holiday parties via webcam so they can participate. At a recent Nonprofit Technology Network conference session Mr. Hammerstrom led, a participant said her nonprofit organized a recipe exchange with its employees who work around the world.
Include remote employees in morale-building exercises, Ms. Blank advises: On World Vision’s staff appreciation day, she received a coffee mug and a bar of chocolate in the mail with a message thanking her for the work she does to help children around the world, and she gets half a day off when World Vision offices have employee picnics.
5. Meet face to face. The Psychological Science in the Public Interest report suggests that “a balance of face-to-face and virtual contact may be optimal.”
Some nonprofits, like World Vision, build travel expenses for remote employees into their budgets, while others, like Partners Global, sometimes require those employees to pay for their own travel to the main office.
Ms. Blank says she travels about once every other month. She visits Washington, D.C., about once a quarter, attends team retreats in Seattle at least once a year, and participates in global conferences.
“There’s no doubt that face-to-face interaction is really important,” she says.
