Karen Sobel Lojeski

Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski is Chief Executive Officer of Virtual Distance International (VDI), a company designed to help organizations create meaningful, satisfying, productive workplaces where people and institutions can thrive in the Digital Age. At a time when many people are working virtually and communicating with their colleagues primarily through e-mail and other computer-mediated means, Karen and her VDI colleagues have created a much-needed methodology for measuring Virtual Distance - a psychological gap that grows out of a heavy reliance on electronic communications - and improving productivity and innovation over distance by reducing its effects. Virtual Distance can be just as high among collocated workers as it is among those who work thousands of miles apart making the need for Virtual Distance management an urgent imperative. For these reasons and more, Karen and VDI have built a solution set to achieve improved results among the virtual workforce. Prior to launching VDI, Karen spent 18 years in corporate America. She held leadership positions at Stratus Computer, Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank N.A., and Mercer Consulting Group. She was Chief Operating Officer for Prolifics, a JYACC company, and Vice President of North America for Xansa. Karen holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and recently completed her Ph.D. at Stevens Institute of Technology where her dissertation, "Virtual Distance: A New Model for the Study of Virtual Work", won the award for Best Dissertation of 2006. She is a professor at Stony Brook University in the Department of Technology and Society in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and is a Visitor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, a 'collaborator' at Stanford University's MediaX Lab, and a Presidential Fellow at Polytechnic University. Karen is the moderator of the Virtual Work Forum at CIOZone.com, a new social networking site for CIOs as well as a columnist and contributing editor for CIOInsight magazine where she writes on the subject of management and leadership in the changing world of work in the Digital Age. Virtual Distance and her groundbreaking work on making improvements to innovation and productivity have been featured in a number of major business publications and TV appearances including Business Week, The New York Times, Entrepreneur magazine, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and elsewhere. Karen is the author of Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise. Karen's clients include major worldwide Fortune 500 organizations as well as large governmental and non-profit associations. She is a highly sought-after keynote speaker on the topic of improving performance, innovation, and leadership over distance in the new world of work.

• #1. Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Improve Productivity, Innovation and Leadership by Managing Virtual Distance

  Virtual teams are pervasive in the Digital Age. Individuals working together connected mainly through electronic communications are the mainstay of today's corporate workforce. Whether separated by oceans or simply a dry-wall, most professionals rely heavily on email and other collaboration tools for a majority of their interactions. But managing the myriad of challenges this brings is not trivial. Until now, many of the issues around communication problems, cultural differences, and the lack of a shared physical space and work context have been addressed using tactics based on prior experiences or expectations. But do they work? Can the effects of virtual workforce challenges be seen, measured and therefore acted upon in a more precise and methodical way? Up until now, this seemed unlikely.
  
  But Sobel-Lojeski and Reilly have changed all of that. Their book, "Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise" takes the guesswork out of understanding virtual team and collaboration obstacles. They have discovered Virtual Distance - a breakthrough model which describes a psychological gap that grows between people who work mainly through electronic communications. Virtual Distance can be measured, quantified, and revealed so that targeted solutions can be implemented.
  
  Sobel-Lojeski has found Virtual Distance to be prevalent among distributed as well as collocated workers. And while physical distance can certainly contribute to Virtual Distance, it is not the main cause. Virtual Distance is fueled by operational distance - the things that create day to day struggles like multitasking and competing priorities and most importantly by affinity distance - the stumbling blocks that get in the way of developing close relationships.
  
  Using Virtual Distance metrics organizations can finally hone in on specific obstacles to virtual team success. Using her proven methods of Virtual Distance Indexing, Virtual Distance Mapping, Critical Relationship Pathing, and Virtual Distance Management Planning Sobel-Lojeski brings specific, measurable and tangible solutions to problems which up until now have been anything but clear. When companies act using these tested tools and techniques - good things happen:

  • Innovative Behavior gets better by 93%
  • Trust among co-workers improves by 80%
  • Project success rates improve by 50% or more
  • Leader Effectiveness rises by over 60%

  
  
  Her engaging speaking style, myriad war stories and case studies, and her energy and optimism leave audiences ready to go out and tackle these issues with a renewed sense of energy and optimism.

• “Great presentation today at the Worktech event. . . . I think the 'people' side of mobile or flex work is the greatest challenge. From my point of view, I would have loved to see you present for the entire afternoon session. Virtual distance goes a long way in identifying the challenges of managing a geographically diverse organization. Great concept!”
  Workplace Strategy and Major Projects
• “Thank you so much for your time yesterday. Your history of this space, and the lens of virtual distance, will be of great interest to the members. Your statistics about the impact of virtual distance on innovation were especially vivid.”
  The Research Board, Inc
• “I think that those who work on teams that are not co-located (which is pretty much everyone) are quite clear in knowing that the world is different now . . . and they are ready for solutions, not just more discussion of the existence of the problem. I think that being able to put virtual distance into more concrete terms will help our project managers (or leaders closer to the work) to be able to put this elephant in the room into the more numerical / data driven terms that upper management expects. I think that timing for your presentation could not be better.”
  AT&T Project Management Center of Excellence

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