there's more of us

homeplaceofthefuture daily log 4838

Walking into a room, random events or even someone else's house with yesterday's clothes on is just normal course of business here in the homeplaceofthefuture. Family & friends love to joke about how many black t'shirts I have....and we'll keep that a secret. The idea of uniform I thought was only funny in my inner circle.

Imagine my good fortune yesterday when I walked into someone else's house with my uniform on and struck up a conversation with my kids friend's dad - come to find out he's a virtual employee too for a much larger and even global company. I always wondered why he was the only other male in the drop-off zone at our school!

We had a good time commiserating about how organizations in this world do not know how to handle their virtual employees and the work from home lifestyle aka 'uniforms'
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• Regular meetings, check.
• In person events, check.
• Letting your employees travel to meet each other to team build, plan for the year or work on strategy, check.

These are just a few of the things companies should be doing to build loyalty with their virtual workforce. Companies may save money by not having us sit in a stuffy office somewhere, but they should at least have programs/policies in place that encourage employees to get together occasionally and not when it's just to fly in and present to a client and leave.

Face to face meetings on a regular basis to team build will in turn make us more productive. Imagine how many emails (here we go again...) and calls that could be avoided by a quarterly  team meeting to talk about all issues and plan for the next quarter. Revolutionary thinking for some I know! That productivity could be channeled to actually doing work and not spending 6 hours out of 10 on the phone everyday....I'm just saying.

I left his house encouraged that other virtual employees get it and look to better themselves and their companies as we navigate the future.