Telemanagers vs. Traditional Managers

How they compare -- how they are perceived by the workers they manage

Who makes a good manager? Can a good "traditional manager" be a good "telemanager" (a manager of teleworkers)? What skills, if any, are different for managing employees who work remotely? These are core questions for employees, managers and companies considering or actually implementing telework programs.

To help answer some of these questions, Bill Morganstern, VP of Human Resources at Fortel (a performance management software company) and a doctoral student at California Coast University, surveyed more than 400 teleworkers and 100 managers as part of his dissertation.

Here are some of Morganstern's findings so far:

• A difference of perception
  There is a significantly wide gap in how managers and workers view managerial style.
  
• If you're good, you're good; if you're not, you're not
  Good managers are perceived as good managers by the employees they supervise, whether those employees work on site or off-site as teleworkers. The corollary is that bad managers are perceived as such by their on-site and off-site workers.
  
• Inaccurate self-perception
  Poor managers unfortunately perceive themselves as good managers, as having good communications with their employees, despite the very opposite view reported by those employees in the survey.

Communication is the Key
According to Morganstern, the key cause of poor management is the inability to communicate effectively. Morganstern offers these observations on how to enhance communication with teleworkers:

• While a telework policy may dictate the quantity of communication (e.g., correspondence by phone or e-mail between managers and teleworkers every day), the quality of such communication is the important factor.
  
• Talk "shop" when communicating with teleworkers to give them the feel of the "water cooler chat" that they miss while working off site.
  
• Set up a communications skills training program for managers who will be supervising teleworkers to enhance their ability to communicate and achieve the best performance from the people they manage.

To find out more

To take the Morganstern survey