How to Manage Virtual Employees

EVS is a heavy user of free technologies that increase the frequency and ease of internal communications. Client Executives use FreeConference.com, Skype, and MSN Messenger to interact with their peers, managers, and with the service delivery team. The Operations staff uses MSN, Cisco VoIP, and Avistar with many clients. As an example of how integrated the company is, a recent client query in Europe was solved within 15 minutes by a combination of the Indian research team, an Evalueserve intellectual property specialist from California, and an EVS local sales manager from Europe working together through a conference call.

With every new client, EVS faces the challenge of training him on how to manage his new offshore partners. Only about 25% of its clients ever visit their operations center in India, China, and Chile. Daigle discussed how EVS addresses the client education challenge: "First, our sales model is based upon an ongoing involvement to help our clients smooth out the issues of an offshore delivery process. This, to my mind, is our 'secret sauce'. At EVS the Client Executive is in the lead, instead of simply handing off a project to someone else. That's why they're called Client Executives and not salespeople.

Importantly, they lead with an ongoing respect for the analysts doing the project. This is key: if the Client Executives act too bold or arrogant, they will lose the support of the operations team. If they don't stay involved, the inevitable problems involved in conducting projects from several times zones away will emerge, and the clients will walk away -- often without saying anything. They will just leave." One of the clichés of corporate life (visible in many Dilbert cartoons) is the tension between salespeople and manufacturing. EVS faces this challenge exacerbated by distance.

Daigle continued, "The other element or 'training' we provide to clients is the model we present while we are engaged with them and the operations team. In short, we model respect. We go out of our way to show that this offshore team is not a sweatshop, but an intelligent, earnest, hardworking group of professionals that have earned and deserve our respect. Respect is contagious. When the clients see us behaving this way, it has a big impact on how they think of our company, and the way they treat our analysts."

Unlike a more established firm, EVS is building its culture as it goes along. We asked Daigle how he inculcates his Client Executives with his culture and approach when he sees them in person so rarely. He responded, "The key is hiring -- the best advice I ever got in this area was to 'hire people that you'll like working with.' We don't have to be best friends, but their personality has to be a match. In a sense, given this, our culture was built on day one. If you talk with the four senior managers, our basic demeanor, ethical principles, and respect for people is pretty similar. I think our culture embodies this: many EVS employees have shared this same point of view with me over the past several years."

Although Daigle is correct that hiring people who think like you may expedite culture-building, there is also a very significant downside in the long term -- you run the risk of creating a homogeneous culture with a homogeneous client base (although with over 1,000 clients, EVS has so far been able to effectively diversify its revenue streams.)

To get new employees up to speed, EVS uses a buddy system. For the first six months, it assigns a member of the operations team to connect with a new Client Executive and initially introduce him to the operations team. That buddy is tasked to be available to help out on an as needed basis: to find people, negotiate issues and learn about a particular capability.

Operations staff introduce themselves to new Client Executives with self-photographs and a brief conversation. EVS is now considering encouraging operations people and Client Executives to more systematically share a broad range of background information (things like family background and hobbies) with one another before working together. As readers of The Virtual Handshake know, significant academic research shows that the exchange of some basic personal information significantly expedites the operations of virtual teams.

More importantly, EVS has built a sales support structure that removes as much administrative (non-selling) work from the Client Executives as possible. The marketing support team is built with a 1:1 ratio, i.e., the equivalent of one full-time marketing support professional is available for every salesperson. EVS's marketing support infrastructure has been so successful that the company productized it and now sells this infrastructure to external clients. Client Executives can be particularly enthusiastic about this product because they have a personal involvement as customers of it every day. More generally, positioning Client Executives as internal clients gives the, more credibility in the external sales process.

Offshore service providers have shown that many critical business processes can be delivered remotely. In EVS's case, not only is the service delivery virtual, but the entire management approach breaks the traditional paradigm of renting expensive office space in an expensive capital city. Although most businesses are not in an industry as inherently virtual as EVS's, almost any firm can learn from their model.

DISCLOSURE: Evalueserve recently acquired David Teten's Nitron Circle of Experts.