I was talking to my sister today about the OracleWorld user conference in San Francisco.  She is a longtime B-to-B marketer who recently set up John Chambers' keynote address at the conference (ironic, since she was formerly on the PeopleSoft user conference planning team before Oracle rudely took them over).  I was watching his presentation, and he had a great definition for the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0: "Web 1.0 was about transactions.  Web 2.0 is about interactions."  I thought that was a great way of putting it, and it doesn't just pertain to the Internet.

For a twenty-three year old company, Cisco is doing a great job of staying on the cutting edge.  Today's workplace is so much different than the business environment of just ten years ago, and their recent TelePresence release is yet another response to these changes.  No longer does every person on a business team need to work under one roof.  Even small companies have telecommuters, geographically-dispersed teams and multiple time zones and languages within their workforce.  I am a firm believer that these types of organizations can be just as effective as their single-office predecessors.

The team that I lead at WhatCounts consists entirely of telecommuters.  Each of us is set up with a home office, a VoIP phone, a laptop, etc.  Sure, there are a couple of challenges that arise from this type of arrangement.  It's more difficult for me to build a cohesive group and to perpetuate our team culture, and inter-team communication is a bit trickier.  But, those are not issues that are unique to distributed workforces.  As businesses grow, they all have to find ways to perpetuate their culture and to facilitate rapport-building between people and teams.  Virtual offices merely catalyze the need for these ingredients much sooner in the company's maturity.

Of course, the advantages of a dispersed team greatly outweigh the negative aspects.  When I look for someone to join our team, my search is not limited to a particular metropolitan area.  I have the flexibility to find the best and brightest people that I can successfully recruit.  Our pound-for-pound productivity is much higher than our traffic-battling counterparts.  Our business costs can be much lower than our rent-paying competitors. 

It certainly takes a devoted and creative team to make it work.  Here are some tips I have learned (and am still trying to master):

• Wage war on information silos.  If something is valuable for the team to know, make sure it is documented and posted right away.  We have found Intranets, wikis, Salesforce.com and message boards to be extremely helpful.  Useful information that lives in someone's head or on someone's local computer is like a cancer that must be eradicated.
• Communicate victories often.  Sometimes it's lonely in a home office.  Knowing that someone out there is succeeding is immensely valuable fuel for one's fire.
• Availability is crucial.  This is something I am currently struggling with as the team grows.  When someone on my team needs to talk to me, it's my job to be there for them.  It's too easy to fall into the "quicksand of inactivity" when you're waiting for a bottleneck to open up.
• Know which communication method to use.  (I could blog about this point for weeks!)  IM someone to ask if they have time for a phone call.  An unannounced call to a home office is like the "drop-by ambush" in an office without the luxury of having your door closed when you're busy.  Email people, but be cognizant of the fact that they can't possibly respond thoughtfully to 200 of them a day.  Do what you can to streamline each other's lives and the whole organization will benefit.
• Convene when you can.  We try to mix-and-match the teams that we send to trade shows to allow everyone to get to know each other and we try to bring people to the home office whenever possible.  An analogy I learned a long time ago likens your home office to a barbecue and each team member to a piece of charcoal.  Charcoal can only stay fired-up for a limited period of time before it needs to jump back in the barbecue.  On that note, ask yourself...is your office more like a barbecue or a Sub-Zero?  What can you do to make its environment "hotter" with energy?

Overall, the age-old question about art imitating life or life imitating art is also valid in business.  Is Cisco responding to business conditions or creating a new world in which we can work?  Either way, that world is certainly getting smaller by the minute.