The Record, Hackensack, N.J., At Home Column

By Teresa M. McAleavy, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

May 10–Christian Schwartz knew cloning himself wasn’t an option as he launched a business from his Jersey City home while earning a master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University.

So he opted to use remote conferencing to connect with classmates at the Washington, D.C., campus. The system the students used — Genesys Conferencing — allowed them to hash out projects on management strategies, talk about the Dow, and dish about the class.

“Since a lot of us weren’t always in D.C. because we were traveling, it was just fantastic,” says Schwartz. Schwartz, who did attended Rutgers University as an undergraduate, owns Local Latin America LLC, a business that connects Hispanics in America to Latin America-based Web sites.

Genesys, a videoconferencing company with locations in Vienna, Virginia, and Montpellier, France, also connected Schwartz with an expert personality profiler who gave him insight into how to better manage his video-conferencing techniques. To help customers master the nuances of its tools, Genesys has teamed with Palm Springs-based RembrandtAdvantage, a human resources company that does personality and performance assessments.

“The profile was great because it helped me consider what conferencing practices I should use,” says Schwartz. “I needed to know when to slow down, or when to not interrupt others. — There’s a lot of value in the diagnostic.”

RembrandtAdvantage Chief Executive Officer Michael Santo, who grew up in the Princeton area, says learning to connect and interact with people remotely is a top priority for telecommuters and companies doing business globally.

“Decades ago, companies spent billions on teamwork initiatives when we only had face-to-face contact,” Santo says. “Now it’s all about bringing all those soft-skills [communicating well and not dominating the discussion] we used around the boardroom table to the virtual environment because that’s the new mechanism of communicating.”

Denise Persson, vice president-global marketing for Genesys, says her company formed a partnership with Santo a year ago after a user survey indicated seven in 10 workers want better-organized meetings and businesses in general want to save more time |and money on traveling for meetings.

“It’s always in our interest to be able to give recommendations on how to make virtual meetings more effective,” Persson says.

“No one is going to be able to escape the technology, so it makes sense to learn to make the best use of it.”

At Home appears Thursdays. If you want to share your story about working from home, e-mail mcaleavy@northjersey.com.

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