How do you, or would you, communicate with employees who work offsite?

Perhaps you have telecommuters reporting to you, or sales reps who work out of offices in other cities. How do you communicate with them?

Lets beginning with the strategic issues: what do you want to accomplish by communicating with them? And, why would they want to communicate with you?

Strategic means youll most likely want to deal with issues like productivity, accountability, and predictability. You want to understand what the offsite employee does, how she does it, and what she will do in the future.

Still in the strategic vein, you will inquire of yourself why she would want to communicate with you: some reasons might incorporate the absolutely need to maintain human contact with the office, to get resources from you, or to work on her productivity.

To return to our sales reps example, you might want them target the certain potential buyers or to focus on high-margin products, From the other side, you might ask them about their needs and discover they need to know about product availability and a competitors new products.

Once you have a clear, articulated data of why youre communicating, you may move to the tactical issues. Issues such as: how often, what issues to raise, and by what means.

Normally, you will find the tactical matters tend resolve themselves if you do a sizeably efficient job on strategy. That is, the answers to tactical questions tend to flow out of the decisions made in setting up the strategy.

Using our offsite sales reps example, you might decide to send a group email once a week, and in it provide information the sales reps want. Youll also add understanding that you want to convey to them, especially understanding about the benefits of targeting and margins.

In addition, youll also call each rep individually once a month to review his or her personal performance. In these calls, youll deal with their individual performance. You will also inquire of about their particular needs and desire, and try to satisfy those needs.

As well as developing strategies and tactics, youll also schedule some evaluations. Periodically, you will sit down and inquire of yourself how well the offsite everybody are targeting and what proportion of their sales come through high margin products.

If theyre doing well, you will stick to the course you set earlier. On the other hand, if performance doesnt meet your standards, then you could look at increasing the number of contacts, and the duration of each contact. Maybe you absolutely need to bring everyone into the office once a quarter, while still maintaining your weekly group mailing and individual contacts monthly.

In summary, as the number of offsite employees and accomadation providers increases, the pressure to develop plans to communicate with them will grow as well. To contruct the most of this communication, initial with strategic issues that define why you want to be in contact with them, and why they would want to be in contact with you.