Preface

Ten years ago, we published our first book about Virtual Distance.

And what we predicted would happen, did happen.

Virtual Distance has continued to spread around the world. It impacts not only business performance but also families, education, healthcare, and any institution or community where people interact and communicate.

The concerns we had about Virtual Distance becoming an intensifying force pushing us toward an increased sense of social isolation and a reduced feeling of well-being are now mainstream. Discussions in popular media and policy-making circles attest to the concern over the declines that Virtual Distance continues to create.

Our early data documented the impact Virtual Distance has on various key outcomes. Since our first book we've collected a much larger data set of more than 1400 studies covering more than three dozen industries spread over 55 different countries over the last fifteen years. As we report in this book, the additional data confirms and expands upon our earlier findings. The statistical relationships between Virtual Distance and critical success factors are further validated with a much larger sample. The trend data also tell us that Virtual Distance is deepening and the effects are getting bigger. We suggest that leaders regard Virtual Distance as being foundational, rather than tangential to high-level organizational strategies.

Through our collaborations with organizations that employ more than five million people across the globe we can also report some good news. We've found that predictive solution sets put forth in the original work, along with strategies and tactics developed in our consulting and advisory practice since, can dramatically reduce Virtual Distance and improve business results with predictable accuracy. These strategies also open doors into a renewed and felt sense of human connectedness and relationship vitality that enhance almost every aspect of life lived in the digital age.

INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUAL DISTANCE

Simply put, Virtual Distance is a measurable social and emotional disconnect (conscious or unconscious) that arises when we increasingly rely on digitally mediated communication technology. We detail the Virtual Distance Model in Chapter 3 but provide a brief summary here to highlight key points.

As shown in Figure P.1, Virtual Distance is composed of three major factors:

• Physical Distance: Those workplace features that are fixed in space and time like geographic distance, time-zone, and schedule differences as well as distinctions in organizational affiliation.
• Operational Distance: The daily noise that gets in the way of fluid, meaningful communications.

  FIGURE P.1 The Virtual Distance Model.

• Affinity Distance: The issues that block the development of deeper, long-lasting, and substantial relationships built upon shared values and important human interdependencies.

As we'll discuss in greater detail later on, it surprises many that Physical Distance, what we tend to focus on the most, actually has the lowest impact on organizational outcomes. From a quantitative point of view, the extent to which we're geographically distributed, compared to key performance indicators, rarely rises to the level of statistical significance.

It's Affinity Distance that matters most - those aspects of virtual work that push us away from each other as human beings - no matter if we're thousands of miles apart or sitting at the same table.

As Virtual Distance rises overall, and on Affinity Distance most especially, our decades-plus data show that there are some staggering effects (see Table P.1).

TABLE P.1 The impact of Virtual Distance on organizational outcomes.

The first column in Table I.1 shows the impact of Overall Virtual Distance (all three factors combined). The second column shows a comparison of key outcomes with what we found to be the most important element of Virtual Distance: Affinity Distance.

BACKGROUND

Over the last two decades, digital communications have led to gains for both individuals and organizations alike. "Smart" digital devices (SDDs) that enable flexible work have made it possible for people to build lives in which they can better accommodate a changing set of scenarios faced by many: caring for elderly parents, accommodating different schedules for income-producing family members, and making allowances in order for workers to live anywhere.

At the organizational level, companies have been better able to position themselves competitively by tapping talent from all corners of the world, decreasing expenses related to fixed office locations and broadening brand reach by being able to place people on the ground no matter where customers are situated. There is no doubt that the evolution of work in this way is a win-win.

However, that's only a tiny snippet of a much larger story. Many leaders keep clinging to the mistaken perception that geographic dispersion is the source of most workforce challenges leading to an extensive set of unintended consequences. We see them every day.

The past ten years has seen an explosion of articles, new business start-ups, and organizational change initiatives designed to tackle the troubles that surface in remote work. However, this view of how we work limits our optics in terms of the much larger shift in attention among the whole workforce.

Therefore, we emphasize:

The Prime Principle of Virtual Distance

Everyone is now virtual therefore Virtual Distance affects everyone, everywhere.

Anyone who works primarily through an SDD is mediated by machines that

• take the typed, audio, or other sensory input, like the pressure resulting from tapping on its glass front, from one person, then
• turns it into digital signals (1's and 0s) the device can recognize, then
• moves it through wires and other mechanical things, and
• broadcasts the output to other people.

Therefore, everyone working under these conditions is virtual by several degrees in relation to others.

CASE IN POINT

Think for a moment about sitting at dinner in a restaurant, or at home, while people stare at screens - either typing to each other with only a table between them or exchanging tapped-in messages with unseen others.

Even though they're physically sitting next to or across from each other, we all know that this condition changes the nature of our human experience. Even those simply observing this kind of event report they can "feel" the difference, sometimes through the unexpected silence and blinding lack of eye contact.

We can be right next to someone and yet be completely focused on an ethereal "something or someone else" - like a ghost.

So, in this book we define being "virtual" as someone who works under the conditions described in the above scenario and thousands of others like it. In fact, with attention focused elsewhere, geographic separation is simply one possible extension of being "virtual."

The overemphasis on location-based separation has other implications. Rarely do organizations measure the extent to which contradictory or confounding indicators, such as having high employee engagement but low trust, actually impacts the bottom line.

For instance, one of our global insurance clients required 90% of its employees to punch an electronic timeclock at a specified set of worldwide locations. They were quite shocked to learn that Virtual Distance was the cause of a $3 million loss on just one of many strategic IT projects. The C-suite was also surprised when we saved them many millions more over time and improved their competitive positioning. Using the Virtual Distance Index (VDI) assessment, we were able to home in on their specific problems and precisely direct the right resources to provide fixes which then quickly led to a positive turnaround in financial results, employee satisfaction, and shareholder...