< Virtual Work: How Far Away is Too Distant?
On July 10th a headline flashed across my alert bar. It read, “Long Distance Relationships Are More Difficult” [http://hbdm.harvardbusiness.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=071009].
At first I thought ‘what the heck is that supposed to mean’? If you’re dating someone, that may or may not be true – it depends on the people. And in the workplace – well – that’s a whole other story – as Virtual Distance tells us. People can be half way around the world but if Virtual Distance is low, than productivity and innovation can soar, helping make virtual teams, great teams. But the opposite can also true. People who sit literally right next to each other, who have high Virtual Distance between them, can be unproductive and even harmful to innovative efforts, evidence that extinguishes the most tepid of promises made by digital age collaboration cheerleaders.
In any event, my curiosity led me to open the message. I found it reported in “The Daily Stat”, a Harvard Business Publishing outfit. So, I read further. After finishing the eight-two words, I was almost sorry I had read it at all. The first sentence reads, “Working remotely causes 243% more workplace relationship problems (e.g. lack of trust and misrepresentation of information) than working in the same place.”
That such a claim was reprinted was quite disappointing, shocking even - although my trusted cynical mind knows that we have moved beyond pithy headlines for the sake of reporting news and replaced the catchy titles with ‘headline whoring’, now the modus operandi for many media outlets these days.
This report is just nonsense. No one could ever say with any accuracy at all – especially when the full research study remains curiously impossible to find – that this kind of relationship exists. It is simply false. In the over 10,000 pieces of data that I have collected over the past seven years (under rigorous research conditions and with expert knowledge used to decipher statistical relationships among the complex issues at play in the virtual workforce) I can say, with absolutely zero hesitation, that the claims made in the report cited are not ‘facts’ at all. They are simply bumbling stabs at statistical showmanship to support the idea that being near is always better than being far away. And the Virtual Distance data provides undeniable evidence to the contrary.
It’s not that I don’t think face-to-face interactions can dramatically improve communication problems and help to build trust. However that’s not what the report says – it says working remotely CAUSES 243% more workplace relationship problems than working in the same place. Tell this to the married couple, living in the same house, who are getting divorced because the husband can’t get off his smartphone long enough to sit down and eat dinner with his children. That’s high Virtual Distance residing in just a few hundred square feet. Or how about the manager who sits right next to one of his team members but won’t talk to her directly and will use only email – making her feel as though she might as well be on the moon!
But not only is this report insane, it’s sending the wrong messages to the managers and strategy makers trying to grapple with real challenges in a world changing rapidly each and every day. Can being in the same place help to make people more productive? Yes – in some cases, under certain circumstances. Can the use of collaboration technology boost innovation between far-flung team members? Yes – in some cases, under certain circumstances. Virtual Distance is what makes the difference. And Virtual Distance – the combination of physical distance, operational distance or those day-to-day issues like hyper-multitasking that keep us from paying attention to one another, and affinity distance - those things like value misalignments and a lack of feeling interdependent on one another, is what really matters. And the Virtual Distance Index, a set of quantitative, reliable, and transparent metrics can be used to support the claim that when Virtual Distance is high, trust degrades, miscommunications rise, and overall performance and innovation erode – no matter what the GPS says about where people are located in relationship to one another.
So, how far away is too distant? It depends on how psychologically connected we are to each other, especially when we face a screen instead of a human being most of our work day. And that depends on how we feel about each other, not the spaces in between.