My wife runs our company from 1700 miles away, as I did before she took over. We use the phone, email and pcAnywhere to log into the computers. In “interesting times” someone needs to visit once every 6 weeks or so. When things are running smoothly we can visit as infrequently as every 4 or 5 months.

Ron Hart runs a company in southern California from his home in the northern part of the state. He goes down every two weeks.

Stephen McDonnell goes into the office one day a week.
How about you?

When telecommuting started to become an issue, you’d hear the argument that managers can’t manage if they can’t see what the employee was doing.

That’s pretty much gone by the wayside due to the fairy tale about the shoemaker and the elves, (or was it Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives?) Anyway, the point is if you can’t tell how well someone’s doing by looking at their results, then you aren’t really managing them – you’re just taking attendance. Like how did the shoemaker know what the elves did all night? He didn’t see them do it, but he saw the shoes!

But, as in most business situations, the real world isn’t so simple. Now comes this post by a manager who calls himself Rands about how hard it is to keep a software team on the right track when someone is remote and you can’t bump into them in the hallway . And he asks for feedback from those who’ve been there.

Many of the comments he gets apply specifically to a software development situation. But it must be said that relationships can’t be built by email alone. And as Peter Drucker came to say, you often don’t know the objectives so you can’t manage by them.
I’d love to hear your experience either as a manager or a managee.