Citrix Online White Paper Sample

The pace of change has accelerated. First the good news: If this realization is creating concerns for you and your organization, you’re not alone. According to the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), “a huge majority of companies foresee an increasing use of virtual teams in the coming years, and more than a third of managers are worried about the development.” Outside of work employees are spending more time interacting with each other using the tools of mobile work (i.e., cell phone, mobile computing platforms, social media websites, Web conferencing, Wiki’s, etc.). The balance between work and personal time is dynamic. The standard 9-5 day job is rare. We live our lives switched on and plugged in. This creates an expectation. People expect work to support a more fluid style of life.

Now, the bad news: If you can’t see it, monitor it, or measure it, how do you manage it? Notice the word “it.” As managers, much of our work is object-based. We interact with people to get “it,” done. Although people are needed to do the work, managers’ performances are measured by the output of people who work with them. Do you remember the classic opening scene in Charlie Chaplin’s silent film Modern Times? In the scene Charlie Chaplin is working on an assembly line. When management decides to increase productivity by installing eating machines, Charlie is the lucky guinea pig. Charlie’s experiment is a fiasco -- imagine food flying all over the place. This caricature illustrates a vital truism. Managers must maximize the performance of employees to help the organization achieve its objectives.