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?
Let's start with
strategic issues: what do you want to accomplish by communicating with them? And, why would they want to communicate with you?
Strategic means you'll probably want to deal with issues like productivity, accountability, and predictability. You want to know what offsite employee does, how she does it, and what she will do in future.
Still in strategic vein, you'll ask yourself why she would want to communicate with you: some reasons might include need to maintain human contact with office, to get resources from you, or to work on her productivity.
To return to our sales reps example, you might want them target certain prospects or to focus on high-margin products, From other side, you might ask them about their needs and discover they need to know about product availability and a competitor's new products.
Once you have a clear, articulated understanding of why you're communicating, you can move to tactical issues. Issues such as: how often, what issues to raise, and by what means.
Normally, you'll find tactical matters tend resolve themselves if you do a good job on strategy. That is, answers to tactical questions tend to flow out of decisions made in setting up strategy.
