Editorial Review:
Praise for Uniting the Virtual Workforce
"Uniting the Virtual Workforce offers much-needed guidance on how to navigate the largely unmapped territory of virtual work environments in the global economy. The authors do an outstanding job of presenting how organizations should address the challenges of virtual workforces so as to reap the huge potential benefits of increased growth, productivity, and innovation."
-C. Warren Axelrod, PhD, Chief Privacy Officer and Business Information Security Officer, U.S. Trust, and author of Outsourcing Information Security
"Lojeski and Reilly bring us something that readers of business books so rarely get-no nonsense practical guidance on how to manage distance, especially where it most often serves as an impediment to working effectively.Ê If you interface with widely dispersed team members who rarely see one another and communicate by virtue of impersonal electronics, you may expect to find this book provocative, counterintuitive, and above all, exciting. It gives all of us who have to struggle, while working with talent stretched across distance, hope, that maybe there are ways to do this right!"
-Patrick J. McKenna, author of First Among EqualsÊ
"A must-read for global corporate executives who manage geographically dispersed job sharing teams. Practical strategies for preventing productivity loss and optimizing innovation. The authors pull no punches in showing the real downsides to the virtual work phenomenon; they have done a great service for us all."
-Jeff Saperstein, author of Creating Regional Wealth in the Innovation Economy
"Uniting the Virtual Workforce charts the course for competing in the twenty-first century by tapping into the powers of virtual work. Any manager who ignores the virtual workforce is underperforming, and any company or organization that does not appreciate virtual work is already at a competitive disadvantage. Karen and Dick have tapped into a key ingredient in the recipe for global growth."
-Jerry MacArthur Hultin, President, Polytechnic University, and former Under Secretary of the Navy
"Authors Sobel Lojeski and Reilly have provided a useful primer for the harried executive striving for productivity improvements while seeing the workload expand and the workforce disperse. Using conceptual definitions of Physical, Operational, and Affinity Distance to describe the multifaceted dimensions of building teams of people to work effectively together, the authors construct a very powerful set of metrics for a manager to improve the capability of his or her workgroup, no matter where it resides or how it is composed. The book is rich in anecdotes and specific studies that illustrate the concepts in an engaging, pertinent, and easy-to-understand manner. In an age of outsourcing, offshoring, and decentralizing groups of people who have to get things done together, reading this small book will repay itself many times over."
-Charles House, Director, Media X Lab at Stanford University, and former Director of the Societal Impact of Technology, Intel Corporation
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
A valuable asset in any kind of organization 2008-09-03
Working in a large, US-based corporation that has taken an accelerated path toward globalization in the last three years, I have come to realize that our ability to work together effectively across distance and across silos is key to our success.
I have read several books on the topic of global teamwork, and while I have learned a lot from each, this one above others does a great job of pulling all the relevant elements together into a single, coherent model that I find myself refering to again and again when I look at global teams in the company.
I have found the approach presented here very helpful in the sense that it goes beyond theory and provides tools and processes that can be put into practice, including tables, lists and worksheets.
The following aspects are presented clearly:
1. The importance of virtual distance and the impact it has on the team's bottom line
2. How to analyze virtual distance in a team
3. How to identify critical areas of improvement
4. Suggestions on how to improve in those areas
The model and process are building on extensive research and this is a refreshing approach, looking at other books on the subject that seem to be based mostly on anecdotal experiences.
Even though the title implies the model presented here is specific to global organizations, I would say it an asset to anyone working in any kind of organization above a certain size.
I think this book is a great read, whether you are a part of your company's HR organization or just leading in a distributed setting.
Highly recommended.
Not just for business executives... 2008-07-11
This new addition to the Wiley Microsoft Leadership Series provides an updated perspective, not only for business leaders, but for executives, managers and leaders of all types of organizations. Whether we work in public libraries or for Hewlett Packard, communication in the digital age is a challenge!
Authors Lojeski and Riley present a timely, innovative response to workplace teams. Their virtual distance model cleverly intertwines the threads of physical distance, affinity distance, and operational distance into a visual shape that helps to understand the broader picture of today's workplace and its impact on work success or failure.
The reader learns about the history of the notion of teamwork. This context is not only relevant to corporate society, but all societies where work is done, both the private sector and the non-profit and government sectors. The discussion of pre-Industrial Age teams and Guilds to the teamwork models of today conveys a chronology of the past that helps to put the workplace of today in clearer perspective. The authors state: `...it is no longer possible that virtual workers build emotional ties to one another in the ways that people have done for centuries. The loose organizations of the Digital Age are not usually built for this purpose." This is a thought-provoking insight encouraging all leaders to take more responsibility for bridging the "affinity distance" gap.
Overall, I recommend this work to all readers currently in the workforce, not just managers, not just students, not just academics. This is a book that "takes the reader aside" to reflect on where we've been in the workplace, what we're grappling with now in the digital age, and what might be our path into the future.
Remarkable Insight 2008-06-13
Having worked for the better part of my career with widely scattered teams with and without the benefit (??) of technology, I can attest that Virtual Distance is real. I experienced it as well when working in a building with over 200 cubicle-mates. Authors Karen Sobel Lojeski and Richard Reilly have finally put a name to the problem businesses have been struggling with for years. As they so aptly point out, we are still reaching for the old paradigms and they are not working. There are other books available that attempt to address this problem without fully understanding the complex ramifications. This is the book to read. Virtual Distance is not limited to the workforce, it is an issue that affects the very core of our interpersonal relationships.
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