Virtual work, but we need you onsite

Nine Shift relates this story about a reader who had applied for a job developing ‘virtual’ learning:

“I wanted to share with you something that happened to me last week. I found an interesting position listed on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s jobs listing for an Instructional Designer to work with faculty at a large online university. Even before reading Nine Shift, I had toyed with the idea of teaching or working in some way with education online, so this sounded like a great opportunity. And, I reasoned that it could easily be done online (even if the ad was not specific), since the faculty the incumbant for this position would be working with would be exclusively online faculty. But, just to be sure, I contacted the HR Department at the university before sending in my documents. I was contacted back almost immediately (which was refreshing) and told that this was an onsite position and not an online one. It struck me as odd that even the people doing online education are not willing to see what could be done and are still requiring some jobs to be located on campus that could easily (and more effectively) be done by telecommuting.”

Many companies are developing products and services for clients all over the world but they may never meet their clients face-to-face. However, the urge to be able to watch over employees and keep them in one place/time zone seems to be hard to overcome. This mentality is also evident in the command-and-control systems (like time tracking to the minute) that these companies use.

Smaller companies and free-agents are starting to give these companies a run for their money. We’re not there yet, but we’re honing our virtual work skills every day.

I do a lot of virtual work and have done projects completely online. Our project teams embrace any tool that can help us, such as:

• Skype — for instant messages, presence monitoring
• eGroupware — for formal collaboration
• Gmail — for transferring large files
• Marratech — when we need real time video and document sharing

All of these applications are free and/or open source. We use them because they work and we don’t need an IT Department’s permission to use them either. We have also embraced virtual work because we can’t afford to spend all of our time traveling (especially traveling to the office). Free-agents have figured out how to use the Internet to make us more effective and get things done cheaper and faster. So far though, the corporate world still seems to be looking for clock-punchers who can be monitored close at hand. The situation doesn’t seem to be changing too quickly …