Befriend natives near and far

"Don't be content to sit where you are located and let things happen," advises Ellerman. He sets up regular trips to other sites and organizes meetings with people both above and below him in the company. "The challenge of any large global organization is that we are interconnected, and many times we are interconnected in ways that we don't even realize or understand," he says. "If I'm at another site, I take time to grab a beer after work and delve deeper into discussions about what's going on." This gives him more information to put together a bigger picture about what's happening in the company.

"You have to be resourceful and use your networking and marketing skills," Ellerman says. "If you sit back and wait for your career to happen, it will happen, but just not with you involved."

"You have to have connections and people to sponsor you, or you can kiss your career goodbye," says John Spencer, CIO at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and a former consultant at both Computer Sciences Corp. and IBM Global Services.

"You have to very actively manage your relationships" with colleagues both at headquarters and your own location, he says. "If you're out there as a lone ranger, you'll never go anywhere."

"It's almost like an exercise in marketing, but in this case, you're marketing yourself," says Laroy. "It's important to document what you do and what your accomplishments are and to make sure that on a regular basis, [that information] gets into the hands of those managing your career." Even though he is not required to do so, Laroy sends his various managers monthly status reports, which he says they use when pulling together his year-end performance review.

"If you wait to see what is required and just do what's required, you sell yourself short," he notes. "You have to let people know what's going well and what's not going well. It all boils down to communication. It's a way to make sure the people you don't see every day are working for you."

Signaling the boss

Fifteen years ago, when management expert and best-selling author Jaclyn Kostner was writing her doctoral dissertation on geographically dispersed work teams, the No. 1 issue affecting remote workers was career implosion. The cause was a woeful lack of communication.

"When you're out of sight, you're out of mind, and your career won't do well," says Kostner, now president of Bridge the Distance, a Denver-based training consultancy specializing in remote management and virtual teams. "Today, despite all of the new technology we have and a global economy that is changing drastically, there's still a ceiling for people who work remotely," she observes.

To help workers break through that ceiling and communicate more effectively with their managers, Kostner came up with CARE, a model that precisely lays out what information remote employees should regularly communicate to their geographically dispersed managers. It includes these four elements:

- Changes in project status, working hours, partnership agreements and anything else that affects performance.

- Accomplishments, both team and individual.

- Requests for tools, personnel and anything else they need to be more effective.

- Environmental details that can affect productivity in the remote workplace.

"What you're trying to do with the CARE model is communicate the details that your remote boss can't see," says Kostner. "Write down the key points before you pick up the phone, and send a bulleted e-mail after the call." A big part of managing your career as a remote employee, she says, is "getting smarter about communicating about what you're working on and the results you're getting."