| Mentoring is a funny one. It's much easier to mentor somebody who is local to the city, especially where the article implies a scenario where workers who telecommute are the exception rather than the rule. However, I find that within field organizations (Sales, Services and Support), where working remotely is the norm, mentoring is easily achievable by spending quality, productive time in-your-virtual-face. Personal (i.e. non-intimate but beyond strictly professional) relationships can still be formed (and often do) but simply take longer. Also, mentoring shouldn't be done over email, but over the phone and via WebEx/GoInstant. As you point out, email is the worst possible medium to mentor somebody. In our organization, if you attempt to pass off emails as 'mentoring' then you're in for bummer ratings during your quarterly calibration and review sessions. To answer your original question, a few things that may be missed by team members who occasionally telecommute: 1) Sense of time and punctuality: The sense of time is important because people aren't generally wired to think about different timezones or lunchtimes when scheduling meetings or dialing out. And punctuality usually suffers when you don't make a conscious effort to always heed your 10-15 reminder warnings. 2) Picking up the phone: Onsite staff never seem to have a problem picking up the phone and talking to somebody (even for 10seconds). Maybe it's the close proximity and the option of being able to saunter over in case the phone call doesn't work out. Or the proximity of the lunch room or water cooler. But once these occasional telecommuters are home, it's as if they go into hermit mode and default to pure email. The irony should be obvious -- when you're working remotely, you should usually rely MORE on ad hoc phone calls vs. IM/emails to maintain the sense your sense of connectedness. 3) Productivity: This is the least reliable and is more tightly correlated with how social somebody's job needs to be in the office, but I often find that productivity drops for occasional telecommuters because they haven't been conditioned to fight against the usual distractions at home, such as losing track of time while in the zone (#1), napping & surfing (tied at #2), television/movies (#3), chores (#4), etc. You'd think that somebody would be MORE productive when they're in the zone and not answering IM/email/phone, and I'd answer that for a narrow subset of jobs this is true; but the majority of tasks often involve interaction with other parts of the organization or with customers, in which case all-day zone marathons are a net productivity killer when more than 2 people wasted their time waiting/pinging/fretting/bottlenecked by you. The above 3 problems typically only happen to staff that only occasionally work from home. Regular remote workers typically don't exhibit the behaviours above because these slip-ups are more noticeable to other staff (both remote and onsite) when they happen on a regular basis. EDIT: grammar |