5 Tips on How to Effectively Manage Virtual Employees

In the classic business book, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters coined a phrase for a great management strategy: management by wandering around, or MBWA. Peters wrote that if a leader really wanted to know what was going on in her organization, she was best served by getting out of her office and talking to her employees face to face. MBWA would help her stay connected to her employees and get the unvarnished truth of how the business is performing in nearly real time.

In Search of Excellence was written more than 25 years ago, though, and while much of the wisdom in it remains relevant, there have been changes in the way firms are structured that make MBWA impractical. High speed internet, nearly free long distance phone calls and easy remote access have contributed to the rise of a new breed of virtual legal professional, whether attorney, paralegal or legal assistant. These virtual employees are just like any other employees of the firm except they work some or all of the time someplace other than the law firm offices.

Thanks to the march of technology, there are relatively few functions in a law firm that can not be efficiently farmed out to virtual employees:

-virtual intake assistants can answer incoming calls and route them via VoIP lines anywhere in the firm

-virtual paralegals can work with scanned documents and pdf creation software to create digital trial notebooks and exhibits for court

-virtual attorneys can draft documents, negotiate with opposing attorneys, and counsel clients from anywhere they have access to a high speed internet connection

This virtualization has been a boon to law firms, clients, and legal professionals who by choice or circumstance live far from the economic centers that create the majority of available legal work. It has, however, also created a potential management vacuum in the firms using virtual employees. Law firms tend to use fewer formal management structures than other businesses of comparable size, and their leaders often rely on informal, ad hoc, directive sessions to guide and manage employees. Leaving aside the issue of whether these typical law firm management techniques are good business practices, the increasing virtualization of the legal workforce renders these techniques much harder - if not impossible - to use.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), for most law firms, utilizing virtual employees continues to make sound business sense. Virtualization widens and deepens the pool of available talent, drives down the cost of talent acquisition reduces overhead costs. In economic downturns, these advantages alone make virtual employees worth considering.

If using virtual employees is a sensible and efficient business practice, but typical law firm management practice is ill-equipped to effectively lead and manage virtual employees, what is a lawyer to do?

Here are five tips on how to effectively manage virtual employees:

1. Use Video Chat

There is no substitute for in-person, face-to-face communication. It's the reason most sales people still travel to customer sites to make a sale. Something undefined and essential occurs (or at least can occur) when people are face to face that digital media has yet to duplicate.

However, digital communication has come pretty far in that direction. In particular, video and audio chat provides a relatively strong stand-in for face to face communication. It makes sense: with email, the people communicating are separated by time, voice, sight and proximity; with chat software, they are separated by voice, sight and proximity; with phone, they are separated only by sight and proximity; with video and audio chat they are separated only by proximity. It’s as close as you can get to being in the same room.

With many laptop computers featuring built-in webcams and with services like Skype or Apple's iChat offering free audio and video chat, the only other ingredient needed is high speed internet, which most law firms and virtual employees already have, anyway. If you need to manage teams of virtual employees working together on the same project, video conferencing offers the same benefits as video chat for multiple participants. There are many vendors and products in this space, ranging from free and simple to very expensive and elaborate.

If you haven't already used video chat to connect with your virtual employees, you will be amazed by how much more immediate it feels than a phone call.

2. Weekly One-on-One Meetings

Part of not being able to wander around to your virtual employees desks means that the interactions and conversations that occur organically with on-site employees must be planned for and scheduled. A great way to do this is to hold standing, weekly one-on-one meetings with your virtual employees. (Actually, you should have these meetings with your on-site employees, too, but that is getting outside the scope of this article.)

Schedule the meetings for an hour in the same day and time slot each week and convey to your employee (and remind yourself) that these meetings are an "A" priority. The agenda for each meeting should always follow the same pattern: check in on the status of open projects; new issues that the employee want to discuss; and new issues that you want to discuss. Make sure that your agenda items go last so that you don't consistently run short of time to discuss the items on your employee's agenda. The purpose of these meetings is to hear about the projects your virtual employee is working on and to communicate with him about any other issues important enough for him to raise.

If you are managing multiple people these one-on-one meetings can comprise a significant time commitment each week - a commitment that lawyers often feel too stretched to honor. The bottom line is that using virtual employees is a tool for running your law firm, in the same way your car is a tool for transportation, and tools require maintenance. If you go too long without changing the oil in your car, you will suffer the inevitable expensive and time consuming consequence of a blown engine, which is why most car owners bother to change the oil in their car. Not because they like the waiting room at Jiffy Lube.

Managing virtual employees is the same: if you do not perform regular maintenance (in this case, weekly one-on-one meetings) you will suffer the inevitable expensive and time consuming consequence of turnover and diminished performance.

3. Invite Virtual Employees to Firm Events

Depending on how geographically distant your virtual employees are, another way to help keep them connected to you and your law firm is by including them in firm events. When a casual firm outing to lunch or happy hour spontaneously generates, it is very easy to overlook the employees who are not sitting in the immediate vicinity, even though they may work from a home office only 30 minutes away.

Over time continually failing to include virtual employees to these informal get-togethers contributes to a feeling by everyone in the firm that virtual team members are somehow less a part of the office than the people who physically show up. Employees who feel less a part of the team often respond by behaving as less than part of the team and in short order the small sin of omission of not inviting them to lunch becomes a firestorm of undesirable work behaviors.

Even if your virtual employees are too far away to include in informal outings, take pains to invite them to events at the firm at least quarterly. If you don't already have quarterly events, this is a great opportunity to start the excellent practice of holding a day-long, all-hands on deck meetings each quarter. Invite all of your employees, virtual and on-site, spend the day reviewing performance and planning ahead, and cap the meeting off with a party or social event.

4. Daily Check In Meetings

I know, you started rolling your eyes when you read the part about hourly meetings each week; you began writhing in your chair when I suggested you have a day long meeting each quarter; now the suggestion of daily meetings is too much to bear.

I understand. I don't like meetings either. I would rather do almost anything than sit in meetings. Here's the thing, though: once you decide to hire your first employee, you have decided to change your job description to include "manager." Being a manager means managing. Managing means interacting with the people who report to you. It's that simple.

The good news is that your daily meeting with your virtual employees should be a lightning fast one. Just a quick check in to make sure everyone is on the same page for the most important things for the firm to get done that day. Any prolonged discussions that arise out of the daily meeting should be taken "off-line" and dealt with in the weekly one-on-one, or sooner if the matter is vital. If it takes longer than five minutes to do these daily meetings, you're doing them wrong.

Since these daily meetings are so brief, it is okay to hold them only over the phone as a time-saver. They should be set at the same time each day and ideally, at the very beginning of the work day before the first client arrives or the first calendar call at court.

5. Manage By Numbers

The previous four tips have all involved interacting with your virtual employees more closely to help you and they stay well connected. This last tip is different; the yin to all that relationship building yang is for you to manage by the numbers.

Each of your employees should have certain measurements, or metrics, of their performance that allow you to measure how productive they are. The metrics will vary from position to position, firm to firm, and practice area to practice area. The traditional metrics that most attorneys have drummed into our skulls are hours billed, hours collected, and the resulting realization rate.

If these are the right metrics for your virtual employees, great. If not, you are going to have to decide what activities or results can be measured that provide the best dashboard for monitoring the performance of your staff. In the beginning, it can be very challenging to find metrics that are mission critical, quantifiable and easily tracked. You may begin with some stutter steps of metrics that are too hard to collect, too hard to measure, or just too random. Some examples of metrics are performance on client satisfaction surveys, time to successfully close small transactions, and percentage of initial consultations which turn into paying clients. The key is to find and use the right metrics for your firm and your employees.

Finding the right metrics for each of your virtual employees is an exercise that is well worth your time. Once you have them, the metrics provide a concrete, objective performance assessment which will provide a great counterpart to all of the subjective, relationship-oriented management you have been doing. The real power of these metrics is that when you come to a point with a virtual employee where you are uncertain of his value to your firm (say you have a virtual attorney who is really great at writing agreements and negotiating, but an unsettlingly high percentage of his clients hate working with him); your metrics will provide a clear, unflinching look at the ways in which he is providing value to your firm. Or not.

Think of metrics as flying a plane. In good weather, pilots can operate the aircraft by looking out the windows, a process called visual flight rules. In heavy fog though, looking out the window yields no helpful information. In these situations pilots have to operate their planes using only their instruments, a process called instrument flight rules. If you are not qualified to fly under instrument flight rules, you can't fly in bad weather.

Your metrics are the instrument flight rules for managing your virtual employees. When you are really unsure of how to proceed with managing an employee, without good metrics you won't know which way is up.

Conclusion

Virtual employees can be a great addition to a firm's workplace, but they require different handling than the faces you see every day. The lawyers who master the skills to make virtual employees efficient and happy members of the team, though, will have a distinct advantage in their own, ongoing search for excellence.

Comments

[Dave C]

Great article Erik.

We see more and more virtual employees or consultants becoming the norm in many industries.
I have a related post on managing virtual team members (especially non-employees) here:

http://blog.myclientspot.com/2009/06/how-to-manage-a-virtual-team-member/

[melrose]

The tips is very helpful to me. Thanks for sharing this to me. This will really help me in managing my virtualassistants company,