Endless Knots

Telecommuting goal to reduce carbon footprint in Hubei province

Remember my obsession with "green teams" and ideas generated by readers to use virtual meetings to clean up the carbon? Encouraging article in China Business News: "Telecommuting to solve Hubei’s carbon emissions problem." Check out the optimistic last paragraph about the impact of virtual meetings on carbon emissions. (My only nit is whether the virtual meeting carbon reduction is corrected for emissions of the IT infrastructure to support such meetings - a quibble, to be sure):

When the China Mobile Hubei Company recently called on other companies and the public sector to work together on a low-carbon smart city initiative, to turn Hubei province into a “low-carbon area” a dozen companies applauded the idea...

The National Development and Reform Commission selected Hubei, earlier this year, as one of the first group of bases in the country for low-carbon pilot tests.

It did not seem to be an easy job. The province is famous for its traditional concentration of heavy industries and scant regard for the environment, but, emerging telecom developments seem to paint a much more hopeful picture.

In fact, the telecommuting sector has the greatest potential for carbon emission reductions in China, and could save 340 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2020, Guo told the audience of environmental experts, local government officials and company representatives.

In the long run, he said, savings from virtual meetings will increase at a much greater rate – about 623 million tons of CO2 annually – by 2030, thereby cutting commercial aviation emissions by nearly 40 percent...

Enterprise 2.0: Leading Collaborative Teams

Having spent the past two centuries working on this topic, it seemed only  appropriate to organize a panel at Enterprise 2.0. Thus, we've convinced two of our favorite colleagues, Virginia Adamson from Volvo IT and Mike Prevou from Strategic Knowledge Solutions to schlep to Boston and hold forth with us.

We've carried on projects with both Virginia and Mike over the past few years. Each is doing different but related things to make it easier for distant teams to work together. Here's the scoop. Another panel worth attending:

Leading Collaborative Teams: How Volvo IT and the US Army Enhance Performance with New Behaviors and Tools #e2conf41 (Location: Carlton)

Wednesday, June 24 - 3:30 pm–4:30 pm

What happens when enterprises take a broader approach to collaboration? These two organizations—the global technology provider for one of the world's leading enterprises and the knowledge unit of one of the world's preeminent military units—chose to invest in both technology and people. Their experiences incorporate new behaviors that are critical to driving true collaboration alongside new ways to use tools, such as SharePoint. In both cases, unusually high levels of performance have followed from their approaches.

Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge

(Enough already about me)

Jessica Lipnack writes, speaks, and consults about collaboration. Co-author of six books, she is an expert on virtual teams, networked organizations, and social media. A long-term member of the Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board, she stays in touch with a wide network of practitioners and thinkers, including the participants in her sessions.

Speaker - Jeffrey Stamps, Chief Scientist, NetAge

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.**

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.

Speaker - Michael Prevou, Phd, LTC, US Army Retired and Chief of Knowledge Strategies and Innovation, SKS, Inc.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Speaker - Virginia Adamson, Senior Business Consultant, Content & Collaboration Services, Volvo Information Technology

With more than 25 years in the Volvo Group and an Engineering background, Virginia Adamson has experience ranging from product development to business and strategy development. She has worked for AB Volvo, Volvo Trucks and Volvo Information Technology in Greensboro, NC, as well as Gothenburg and Umeå in Sweden. In her current position Virginia provides consulting services to help customers develop collaboration strategies, utilize collaboration tools, and learn to work more effectively across all boundaries whether cultural, organizational, or geographical.

**Jeff at work

Knights and Dames of the round table

This appears to be it, with nominations today of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois) for Secretary of Transportation and Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) as Secretary of Labor. Click, wait for OrgScope map of US Gov to load and open, and you've got the Obama round table of cabinet nominees. You can dive down into the departments, change what you're looking at by clicking on the menu bar, and have a high ole' time.

Or just get used to the new faces here. (FYI, Dennis Blair nominated today as National Intelligence Director--thanks to Siobhan Gorman at Wall Street Journal for that news; still waiting for final touches at CIA, Federal Election Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and FDIC - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and a host of other agencies -- none of which are cabinet-level jobs.)

The real green team

You know how interested I am in green teams, which I first wrote about here almost exactly a year ago (Carbon neutral, or shall we say, green teams).

Now PEBO has gone and appointed one that can really make a difference. Here's the scoop from CNN's Steve Hargreaves's piece, "Obama names energy team, vows new tack:"

The team -- the subject of speculation for weeks -- includes physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner in the newly created position of "climate czar." [Ed. note: One more czar - soon we'll need a Council of Czar(ina)s]

The team also includes Lisa Jackson, a former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, as director of the EPA; and Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor from Los Angeles, as head of the Council on Environmental Quality.

So guess what? We've added them to the ever-growing map.

And here are their faces with their organizations, all in one little picture. Clockwise, Lisa Jackson at EPA; Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality; Carol Browner (welcome back, EPA head during Clinton administration) at Office of Energy; Climate & Environment; and Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy ("Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has headed the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004"). Go PEBO Green Team!

What to wear for your next teleconference

Stella, who's suffering from a debilitating injury (to a telecommuter - she broke her finger), reminds us in a recent post to dress for success while telecommuting. Lose the PJs, kids. Now that those working from home are plagued by the omnipresence of webcams, they/we just can't get away with the comfies so easily anymore. Here are her tips. I guess I say thanks, Stella. Sorta. (But fast healing to you.)

What 1000 people want to know about virtual teams

I had the pleasure earlier this week of presenting Leading Virtual Teams: Managing People at a Distance, a webcast (now available on demand at that link) sponsored by the American Management Association. No stranger to webcasting, I was astonished at how many people showed up for the session - 1000 - the limit for such events with the system AMA uses.

Here's how it worked: several weeks ago, I was at AMA to work with the team putting the finishing touches on its new virtual teams course for which I've been the subject-matter expert. During the noon break, Terrence Seamon, who directs AMA's management education portfolio (and keeps Here We Are. Now What?, a wise blog), and I trundled down to AMA's audio recording studio, where he interviewed me while I held forth through a set of slides, which, through the miracle of technology, you can download here.

Then, this past Wednesday, Oct 8, as heralded in this previous post, I called into the studio while the able AMA folks webcast what we'd recorded. Those logging in could see the slides and hear Terry and me talking; I, meanwhile, was on the phone with the AMA people, who were making sure that everything was working smoothly. I could see the "control screen," so to speak, in Adobe Connect, the technology that made this possible, meaning that I could see the participants' screen, see their questions as they were being posted, and see the long list of names of those who'd logged in. Honestly, I thought about 30 or 40 people would show up. When the numbers started turning through the hundreds - and I could scroll through the names to see the organizations people were coming from, I was thrilled.

As we got closer to the end of the recording, Terry, David Summers (the producer), and I, along with Doug Sohn, Kevin Lee, and Angela Reba, who also were in the studio, chose the five best questions to answer. Not best in that the other questions weren't good but most general - and the ones that seemed to come up more than once:

1. Is there any specific limit to the size of a virtual team?
2. Are face-to-face connections not necessary anymore? My own experience is that, once I had face-to-face meetings, my virtual relationships were hundreds of times better than without that personal contact. As humans, are we not needing face-to-face especially in the anonymity of the internet?
3. What are best practices for establishing and building trust on a virtual team when the team members will never met?
4. Is there a noticed trend in 'adaptability' across industries? i.e., is a virtual team successful faster in a software development company vs. a company that is not necessarily known for using technology?
5. Can you give us an example of "creating heat" in a conference call?

Then, when the session was over, Doug sent me all the questions people had submitted, along with the feedback from participants, which, in a more than hackneyed phrase, made my day.

The longer list of questions is fascinating and bears sharing, which is why I'm posting it here. AMA has asked me to answer these questions, which I intend to do, and will share that as well once "we" get around to doing so. Meanwhile, take a listen. I know some people who wanted to attend who couldn't get in due to the "sold out" (technically, it was free) nature of the event but, bless the interwebs, here it is. Please let me know what you think. Here, then, the longer list of 33 questions, which I've culled and edited from a still-longer list. Thanks, everyone!

Questions from 1000 Attendees

1. How do you tell people nicely that they are just talking too much?
2. How do you get management to trust that if you are a remote worker you are REALLY doing your work?
3. What is the best way for a virtual manager to manage conflict between members of the workgroup?
4. How can you "level the playing field" when it's just 1 or 2 people who are not co-located?
5. What are the ways to make performance appraisals effective when done remotely for the virtual team members?
6. How do you introduce the concept of virtual teams to a company that is used to face-to-face meetings?

Time to retire those "war rooms"

It's hardly a shock when you think about it, what with the general state of travel, cutbacks, and four more obvious state-of-the-world dilemmas: Virtual teams are on the rise. According to a new survey from Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), "more than two-thirds (67%) [of companies surveyed] foresee their reliance on virtual teams mushrooming in importance. In companies with more than 10,000 employees, the virtual team concept jumps to more than 80%."

According to Mary Key, i4cp’s leadership "pillar" director. “What it foreshadows, however, is the greater need for the development of virtual leadership skills. I expect more and more corporations will put more effort into developing this skill set internally.”

I don't know what a leadership pillar is but I agree with Ms. Key that the need for greater virtual leadership skills is very great indeed. We're wrapping up a project where we've been working with a crack team charged with developing a handbook for leaders who have to work in this new way - across organization, culture, timezones - AND with peers. Command and control, obviously, doesn't cut it in situations like this so what's a "virtual leader" to do?

For one thing, get rid of those long-standing war rooms, skunkworks, as per the scent that arises from people working in windowless settings dressed in flip charts and armed with magic markers. "Don’t look now,  but your project team meeting room is virtually disappearing," says the Institute for Corporate Productivity's press release.

Again, I agree. I'll come back to this in the weeks to come but will leave it here for now. Our team decided to focus on three verbs in the handbook--Communicate, Collaborate, and Develop--laying out simple processes for each that are natural to leaders.

For the telework skeptics

Kurt Cagle's "Is Telework the New Face of the Agile Workforce?" is a love letter to all those wondering whether people who work at home are: 1. actually watching Oprah; and 2. thereby burning up a whole lot more watts. Say it ain't so! He does in a piece worth the clicky:

...Sun's ergonomics people connected P3 International's Kill A Watt meter, a portable power meter that can connect into a workstation, onto both their internal computer systems and the participants home (or mobile) connections. What they discovered was that teleworkers consumed about 64 watts per hour, while their office counterparts consumed more than double, 130 watts per hour, just on their equipment.

Yet the vast benefit came in slashing the commute. The energy costs involved in running office equipment accounted for less than 2% of the total carbon footprint for an employee, while almost all of the rest, 97%, was involved in the commute to and from the office each day. By reducing trips to the office to 2 ½ days a week, a typical employee managed to save 5,400 kilowatt hours per year, according to Kristi McGee, senior director for Sun's Open Work services group.

Can we afford to meet face-to-face?

Granted the source has a vested interest in this startling data but, even setting that aside, me'thinks there might be some ground truth here in regard to our ongoing interest in green teams. Thanks to Michael Sampson, I've been alerted to Elissa Hunter's Sept 2, '08 article in Business Travel News Online, Meetings In Profile: Verizon Drives Remote Meetings, wherein a Verizon employee says that face-to-face meetings are not only more expensive than virtual ones--but they are astonishingly more costly, as in "five to 35 times more."

"Let's face it, we have to be cost-conscious and environmentally smart, so that needs to be mirrored in the way we travel," said Debra Goldmann, senior specialist for Verizon Travel Services. "We took a look at how much people actually spend for a certain type of meeting versus how much they would spend for a virtual meeting. We found that a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting."

The article goes on to explain how Verizon is chewing up its own phone lines (which I guess is the proper phrasing as analagous to a pet food company eating its own dog food), with senior execs "actually stopping their face-to-face staff meetings in favor of an immersive video experience. Aside from the financial savings of not traveling, they save so much time by not having to bring everybody to one location for what could be a two- or three-hour meeting," according to another Verizon official.

"Flex your force"

Wonder where this all is going? I just came across "Flex Your Force: Building Your Virtual Office," a very forward-thinking interview with Sun's VP of Open Work Services, Anne Bamesberger. I love that it's from last year, which doubles the forward-thinking quotient here...and that I got to it from an alert set to my name, which linked to a comment I'd made (referencing the green teams theme here) on an HBR Online article on the carbon footprint of work.

Bamesberger has a startling stat: There are approximately 60 million knowledge workers" in the US alone ... well suited to operat[ing]" in "an Open Work environment," meaning they move around, have suitable collaborative spaces to convene in, and are equipped with excellent IT support and HR policies. Bamesberger figures that merely 5 million of them "are supported by a formal strategic program. The remaining 55 million are becoming more distributed on a daily basis, but being unsupported, they have unprotected, sensitive information with them. If they are running around with mobile phones that nobody is supporting or managing, how do you protect the enterprise IP?"

Whatever you call this new style of work, it's an epidemic. Recently, we've been working from a chicken coop on an island that has no bridges, roads, or stores while engaging in conference calls, sending those all-precious documents, scheduling meetings, and generally acting like we're all dressed up and in the office, i.e. we have high-speed internet, allowing us to watch the political conventions and the news on the very same screens where we're typing. This is all entirely different from the way it was even a year ago.

I'm glad to see Sun pushing at this from so many directions. And they have been for years. We profiled Sun Teams in our book, Virtual Teams; Jonathan Schwartz was in the first handful of CEOs to blog (corporately, Sun has skadzillons of blogs) ; they're doing virtual worlds stuff for collaboration; getting good results from telecommuting...and now this very good thinking from Ms. Bamesberger. All organizations need to regard this new way of working as intrinsic to their strategies.