over at harvard business blogs, gina trapani of lifehacker gives her best practice tips for not being in the office – in Master the Art of Working Remotely.

her tips include:

• get better at using email
• using IM so you are ‘present’ in the office for those quick off the cuff conversations
• use online tools that fit the client & the project (like shared calendars & docs or wikis)
• have regular voice/webcam chats

i agree with all 4 of those but want to put extra emphasis on the last item. i recommend organising regular (1-2x a week) voice communication from the very first day of the team or remote working relationship. depending on the stage of the project, increase the frequency (launching in 4 weeks? testing and need quick turn arounds? schedule a phone SCRUM for everyday).

it’s also a good idea to prepare and encourage folks to pick up the phone or use skype IMPROMPTU just as they would if the person was at the other end of the same building. perhaps it’s a hangover of thinking how much this long distance call will cost but email seems to be more popular.

having any sort of real time conversation takes more planning. check a time zone calculator! no one wants to wake someone up at 3am. make sure there’s at least an hour overlap in both people’s schedules and rotate the pain of the 10pm phone call if that’s required.

i have seen situations where emails went back & forth for a week or more with no resolution and only increasing frustration on both sides until a phone call clarified the situation (and then everyone realised the problem was small and easy to fix). This continued frustration hurts the relationship & trust and damages the ability of the team to continue working together.

making sure you have ‘f2f’ time is important. if you’re lucky enough to have overlapping time zones, make sure you use IM and other collaborative tools. being able to look at the same document/picture/video/etc in real time and discuss or mark up the object will save hours of work and cut down on mis-understanding.

Five years ago Ivan Bowman moved 800 miles away from his office.

First he & his coworkers tried email, phone calls, IM but it all felt very detached. ‘Out of site, out of mind’, they found.

Then they set up a ‘video portal’ in his old cube. This seems like a cool idea of giving the telecommuting person a physical home w/in the office. People can still drop by for chats. Meetings can easily be held there. The problem they found was the ambient watercooler conversations he couldn’t partake in. (although apparently he could hear very well – enough to hear those hallway conversations but not be able to contribute. how frustrating that must have been!).

The 3rd solution seems to be the winner. Now having a year’s worth of usage – ivan’s robot is working. A coworker put together a robot with webcam, laptop and enough batteries to last the work day. the robot can roam the halls, go to meetings, etc. it sounds like the perfect match of virtual & physical.

link: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/2008/05/send_your_robot_to_work/

the chief happiness officer blog has a post on a study out Penn State of showing telecommuting is good for both employee and employer.

the study was a review of 46 studies including 13k employees. the blog post has a fantastic summary of the main points so i won’t steal his thunder.

i need to read the full study but the most interesting part caught by the summary IMO is working 1-2 days a week outside the office doesn’t hurt the co-worker/manager relationships although 3 days away from the office has a negative effect on office relationships. wow. an extra 8 hours and damage is done.

the full report is here (pdf)