In addition to actions that management need to take to set the context for effective distributed work, employees themselves need to embrace responsibility for increasing their own capability to work effectively at a distance from their co-workers and collaborators. In this inaugural edition of The Collaborative Individual, I review the news from September 2007 and look for common themes and insights. I welcome your feedback.

Personal Responsibilities
Distributed workers need to embrace strategies to keep themselves motivated and thus ready to perform their tasks appropriately. Mike had eight ideas for doing so, including going to work somewhere else where there are people around, participating in virtual water cooler conversations throughout the day via Twitter and similar tools, use strategic napping to refresh yourself, and break big tasks into smaller ones to increase the urge to finish. While there is nothing particularly unique or special about these recommendations–even traditional office workers need to follow many of the ideas–distributed workers have to embrace the personal responsibility for seeing them done.

The need for personal responsibility definitely extends to the realm of being effective in communication. Consider the example that Daniel relates:

As I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into print, an employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail message that stopped me in my tracks. I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail exchange about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: “It’s difficult to have this conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound exasperated.” At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once she identified this snag in our communications, I realized that something had really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

What the lady in question did right was to recognize there was a problem and do something proactive about it. Rather than letting the breakdown in communication go from bad to worse, she named the problem, highlighted it to the other person who could participate in its resolution, and after doing so, was able to move ahead. And more than merely addressing a tactical problem in communication, she co-created an experience to guide her (and now others) in the future when faced with similar dilemnas.

Build Relationships
Distributed workers need to master the skills of engaging with others and building relationships with co-workers even when in-person work is not possible. Lisa wrote that “the key to telecommuting situations is connection, engagement, and relationship. An invested employee works hard and is more likely to exercise good judgment“, but beyond the management aspects of that, there is a certain set of steps that individual workers can take and need to own.

Pick up the phone and call a co-worker when there has been too much electronic interaction and you are feeling disconnected.

Express an interest in both the work and lives of others.

Learn what you can about the strengths of other people and what they believe they do best, ie, what’s their passion.

Clip articles of interest to others and send them off with a cover note (and by email it’s very painless to do, but it doesn’t mean that we all do it as often as we should).

Again there is nothing really different about all of this, but with fewer opportunities to work together in person, it is more important to do these things. The distributed worker has less opportunities to show that they are a real person by consequence of being away from others in body, and so must use the tools at their disposal to portray humanness and collegiality through acts of kindness initiated from a distance.

Know Thyself
Finally, and yet fundamentally, individuals need to understand themselves, and whether or not remote work is compatible with their personality and cognitive composition. The research commissioned by Cisco described five personality profiles that were conducive to a more mobile (and thus distributed) workstyle, with the recommendation that managers need to recruit carefully for high mobile work roles. That is undoubtedly correct, and individuals should explore in advance whether such arrangements will actually work for them or not.

In line with this counsel, Randy points to a set of parameters noted by author Alice Bredin:

“You should consider your ability to: resist distractions, manage your time, set limits on work, and deal with challenges. You also need to determine if you are internally or externally motivated and if you are an over- or underachiever. Know what your virtual office skills are before you try to sell the concept to your employer.“

He, too, has some pointers for undertaking a critical self-evaluation of ones ability to be success in a remote work situation.

Conclusion
There you have it … three key insights on the collaborative individual from the month of September: (1) accept personal responsibility for making it work, (2) build relationships, and (3) know thyself.

How are you going as a collaborative individual? What do you need to improve on over the next month. Please share.