The first of this month I wrote about Virtual Organizations. It was inspired by a tweet from a friend from high school days, Barbara Healy. That tweet was in response to an article she had read about the return of the Non-Virtual Organization. Here are the relevant links:

The Return of the Non-Virtual Organization

Virtual Organizations…Or Not

Virtual Organizations…Or Not – Followup

Those posts led to some interesting discussion and some new acquaintances with folks who work in that space. I have been following the work that Socialcast is doing and I am just more and more impressed with that product by the day. I also got to meet Jerome Breche from TimZon and they too have a very interesting solution for the virtual workforce. It’s a video discussion solution with a Gmail like interface and it is very slick. I can see organizations who employ virtual workers gaining a real competitive advantage with this product. You can find out more about it here: TimZon.

What has spurred this post, and given me the cahnce to catch up on virtual working, is an article from yesterday’s BusinessWeek Is There a Virtual Worker Personality?. It’s a very well written piece that documents the rise of the virtual workforce and some of the problems that have come along with that growth. Here’s a quote from the article that will give you a hint as to it’s flavor.

“Indeed, what is to some a broadband Nirvana is to others a Sartre-esque exercise in alienation. “I’ll be candid with you: If I work at home for more than two days, I feel a bit isolated,” says Cisco European Marketing Manager Tim Stone. “I tend to go to the office a couple of days a week just to have human interaction.”

And this from the guy who markets all that Cisco gear that’s supposed to make the virtual Valhalla happen.”

Cisco has a big presence here in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area so this got me even more interested in the story. Apparently all of the psychologists and other professionals who conducted the study expected to find that average virtual workers were introverts. Turns out it’s the extroverts who do better in the virtual setting. Ooops!

After reading this and reflecting a bit, I’m not surprised. All of the virtual workers I have been around who thrive in that environment are indeed mostly extroverted. And, for the most part I think, very comfortable with themselves. After all, when you’re “the office” you’d better like spending time with you or there’s big trouble brewing.

Read the article if you have the time and let me know what you think about it. If you’re a virtual worker, are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you like it? Do you yearn for a few days at the office each week?

One of yesterday’s posts, Virtual Organizations…Or Not, has generated some interesting email, Twitter tweets and DMs. As such, there are a few questions I’d like to ask to further that conversation. Questions I really should have asked in the first post but I didn’t want it to drag on. Feel free to answer and post your thoughts in the comments, via email or via Twitter or FriendFeed (@greggvm).

That should get us going. I can think of several more questions that are pertinent to this conversation but I’ll save those and post them after we see what people have to say here. If there are any questions or suggestions you have, or would like to see asked, please send those on. I’ll post results I get outside of this blog in the next posting on this topic.

I’m going to post my experiences in the first comment (is that allowed?). I’ll be speaking as a virtual worker, which I was in the mid 1990s. I may even post one on what it was like as a supervisor of virtual workers, which I was for almost 15 years. Thanks for sharing your insights!