By Abe Brown, FEIAA Vice President (LDS 449)

The term virtual office can be broadly defined as a geographically disbursed organization of employees who function together by using a variety of communication and collaboration technologies. Such “geographic dispersion” does not require real distance; a virtual office can consist of local employees who simply do not regularly convene in a single office location. 

In the Federal Government, where dedicated office space is becoming a decreasing commodity and offices are being increasingly dispersed nationwide, the virtual office concept can be an indispensable tool for managing heavy workloads with limited resources. 

These unique arrangements do require some special considerations (e.g., methods to ensure accountability and training on relevant technologies); however, focusing on the fundamentals of communication and teamwork go a long way toward the successful management of a virtual office—as they do with any office. 

The model virtual office will likely have several common features, including the following: 

• Flexible, consistently applied telework and hoteling agreements commensurate with the job duties performed
• Flexible and proactive management 
• Regularly scheduled virtual meetings and occasional face-to-face meetings 
• Weekly accomplishment reports and goal-setting reports 
• A strong culture of mutual respect, collaboration, and work-sharing 
• Uniform web-conferencing and user-friendly collaboration platforms 

These features facilitate communication among team members and balance autonomy with accountability to maximize productivity. 

Telework Agreements 
A virtual office can benefit from flexible, yet consistently applied, telework agreements in many ways. Such agreements not only improve general work–life balance and employee morale, much like they do for local offices, they also can prevent perceptions of unfairness or imbalance. If, for example, an office comprises a centrally located headquarters and one or more satellite components, then it may cause discontentment if the headquarters employees are required to report to a fixed workplace while the satellite employees seem to have a greater degree of autonomy. Autonomy is one of the most significant factors related to job satisfaction and, consequently, to work effort. 

It is also incumbent on Federal agencies to “think outside the box” when it comes to telework. Currently, depending on the office, job classifications like support staff and managers may not be allowed to telework. While it is true that not every job in every agency is suited for telework, a manager should carefully analyze the specific job responsibilities performed before arbitrarily prohibiting an employee to work from home. A focus on organizational achievements over in-office presence should be the governing tenet. 

In addition to creating an environment of fairness and understanding for employees, work–life balance creates something of a work–life bridge for the organization. Studies have shown that autonomous, satisfied employees who regularly work from home are more willing to contribute additional hours when needed. These discretionary behaviors bridge the gap between work days, allowing the agency to maintain maximum continuity. This is a distinct advantage that virtual offices have over traditional workspace arrangements; virtual offices are outcome oriented and time flexible, which allows employees to accomplish sudden and/or time-critical objectives more easily. That said, flexible and proactive management is necessary to make ideal use of the potential of flexible office arrangements. 
Managers must consider the administrative impact of telework agreements and develop uniform policies and procedures for dealing with them. For example, claiming and using compensatory time and credit hours when working from home will require planning and agreement between the employee and management. 

Telework Infrastructure 
Any office must have a strong IT support structure to operate at peak performance. Virtual offices must consider the difficulties introduced by their distance or dispersion from headquarters. Any replacements, upgrades, installations, diagnostics, or repairs of equipment that cannot be performed remotely will require the employee to either travel to a location where such services can be performed or send the equipment to that location. Both cases entail significant costs in time, money, and productivity. These costs should be incorporated into the routine budget and work plan in order to minimize their impact on organizational objectives. Before going virtual, an office should confirm that it will have reliable funds to furnish equipment and supplies—and to absorb the costs of the maintenance and repair of that equipment. 

Managing Telework 
The virtual office presents some unique challenges for management. Managers must balance autonomy with accountability. More importantly, managers must know, and they must make employees aware, that autonomy and accountability are neither mutually exclusive nor in any way opposed. In a traditional office, managers typically rely on the effect of observation as well as impromptu meetings and check-ins to ensure that employees are working diligently. In this approach, oversight and accountability are one-way processes. 

In a virtual office, however, successful managers encourage employees to participate in holding themselves accountable. This two-way accountability process involves mutually agreed-upon deadlines and regular discussions regarding employees’ current workloads and their capacities. For these reasons, employees who are successful in a virtual office setting are disciplined and adaptable team players. Hiring managers should look for these attributes in job candidates. 

A successful virtual office manager will ask that employees submit regular reports of completed deliverables and upcoming action items via e-mail or phone call. If possible or practical, employees should also give managers an idea of how much time each project took or will take per week. There is a fine point of balance between autonomy and accountability, yet for work-planning purposes, managers must have an idea of their office’s current workload compared with its potential. These reports should be handled in a way that prevents employees from feeling micromanaged or untrusted. 

One way managers can balance the need for information with the need for respect and autonomy is to invite employees to have very casual one-on-one conversations. This kind of informal meeting can be held on a weekly or biweekly basis and last no more than 30 minutes. Each office should determine which method works best—the meetings could occur by phone or via web conferencing tools. During these meetings, managers and employees can “catch up” on business, HR or administrative issues, training needs, career development, or anything else they may see fit to discuss. These informal meetings give managers an opportunity to get more familiar with the employee’s routines, projects, and workload capacity. Because these meetings have a mentoring component, they also provide the employee an opportunity to seek feedback on his or her projects or career goals. Open and honest channels of communication give employees a sense of ownership and belonging, while providing managers with the insight necessary to make the best decisions. 

Virtual office managers must also make a concerted effort to hold structured and productive staff meetings, which will help provide necessary cohesion between the employees as peers, as well as between employees and the office as an organization. These gatherings will most likely include regularly scheduled virtual meetings and face-to-face meetings on a quarterly, semiannual, or annual basis, depending on the dispersion of the virtual office. It is important to consider best practices for facilitating meetings and how they bear even more significantly on virtual meetings. 

Regularly scheduled virtual meetings give employees an opportunity to report their accomplishments, set goals, or solicit help from the rest of the office. Such meetings also provide managers with a less obtrusive way to monitor the workload of their virtual employees and hold them accountable for their assignments and their time. 

Telework Culture 
An intangible, but critical, component of any office is its culture, which can be difficult to foster and maintain in a virtual setting. A successful virtual office will have a strong culture, one that is built on the agency’s mission as well as on internal factors such as work-sharing and collaboration. This ensures that employees seek one another out for help and work together to accomplish organizational objectives—rather than seek to minimize individual workload and maximize individual rewards. The mutual respect and interdependence that is created by a culture of collaboration and work-sharing leads to employees “self-policing,” which can mitigate some of the management difficulties associated with a virtual office. 

One of the weaknesses of a virtual office is that reduced physical contact and communication can diminish ties and commitment both between employees as colleagues and between individual employees and the agency. For that reason, newly hired employees must be brought into the fold and encouraged to seek out opportunities for collaboration with their colleagues and opportunities to grow within the agency. With little or no day-to-day socialization, managers cannot rely on newly hired virtual employees to “settle in” and “catch on.” The office culture must be proactively planted and cared for with each new hire. Without this awareness, a successful virtual office could fall into dysfunction with only a handful of turnovers. To that end, new hires could be paired with mentors who have demonstrated a great deal of success in working efficiently and effectively in a virtual office setting. 

Telework Sustainment 
As with any office, the most important factor in the success of a virtual office is its management. Managers in these unique settings need to be flexible and accommodating, but also hyperaware of the fundamentals of professional leadership. Dispersion and flexible telework agreements bring increased autonomy and satisfaction for employees as well as challenges for communication and accountability. Managers must pick up the slack, so to speak, to bring autonomy into balance with the needs of the agency. Time management, work planning, and collaboration can be challenges for virtual offices; however, with proper management and adequate agency support, these arrangements afford an opportunity for the agency to accomplish its objectives more quickly, more effectively, and more dynamically, all while reducing its physical footprint and resource requirements.