Today I booked a trip to the Ukraine – my first appointment to devirtualize my workplace. I’m going to meet someone that I’ve never met (or even spoken to) but have been working with for years.

In a few weeks I fly to Kiev then take a 6 hour train to Kharov which is right on the Russian border and where I will meet Yurii. We’ll spend a day trying to work (I say trying as we’re not actually sure we’ll be able to communicate face to face – so far we’ve just managed email and text).

(My fall back plan, should we completely be unable to understand each other, is to find a corner, log into Skype and text like we always do!)

Then I’ll turn around and head home.

In a few days I’ll show you some of the things we’ve been working on.

I’ve been a virtual worker for over a decade and I still find it somewhat mystifying. At a personal level I’m motivated by the quality of life it gives me – closeness to my family mainly, and the chance to manage my time over the day. I expect that’s the same for many people and that’s no surprise.

What I do find surprising is how stable, robust and effective it seems to be. Orthodoxy tells you that we need face-time and daily communication to build cohesive, functional teams – without it people get off message, do the wrong thing, waste time and generally are not that effective.

I can imagine that for many types of work this is indeed true. But for a lot of what we do it doesn’t apply. We seem to have stable and effective teams without the face time, without the daily communication. In fact, it’s more surprising than that – most of our team members have never met. Ever. And in many cases, our team members don’t even talk to each other. And more surprising yet, many have never talked to each other. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet they still churn out high quality, professional output that, for example:

• Is circulated at the executive level of Fortune 100 corporations
• Is used by brand managers to guide new development investments
• Is used by consultants in client presentations
• etc.

There is no magic to this – we work hard to find the right people (detail focused, experienced, driven by quality…), ensure high standards (poor performers don’t last) and have managers that rigorously check our work. And we communicate a lot via email and instant messaging and yes, sometimes by phone.

And we benefit from very low churn rates (2-5% at last estimate), which means we don’t need to spend time and money retesting and retraining people. The people we have are motivated to work with us (probably for similar reasons to my own but hopefully also because we pay a fair rate, provide interesting work and they see we are easy and honest to deal with).

For all this, I still find it surprising that year on year and on a weekly basis I work with well over 20 people that I’ve never met or spoken to. Some people I’ve worked with just for a few months and for others it’s a decade.

So I’ve decided to change things a little and get to meet (and talk!) to some of my ‘colleagues’. In coming months (and probably years) I’m going to visit some of the people that I work with to get to know them better. I’m not sure what this will achieve.

Perhaps I’ll get to understand virtual working better and maybe improve how it works. At a minimum, I hopefully won’t screw up something that works! Anyhow, stay tuned…

In recent month’s I’ve noticed some things are changing with our business. At first I thought they might be ephemeral but I no longer think so. To state the very obvious, things are getting more global – a change we’re seeing in a number of ways.

First, we’re doing more work in foreign languages. I just totted it up and worked out that we commonly work in about 20 languages, including most of the European ones and many of the Asian ones too.

Some of this is driven by requests for overseas research as companies in our traditional markets (the US and Europe) look farther afield for opportunities, investigating markets, local companies and competitor activity generally. We find companies are also looking to emerging markets for inspiration, innovation and ideas on new trends they can exploit back in their home territories. All of this requires that we track news sources in foreign languages and bring insights back into English.

Perhaps most interestingly, for the first time we are being approached by companies overseas (in Japan and China mainly) who want research on Europe and the US. Topics vary but they cover the usual range of competitor intelligence issues – consumer trends, innovation, market size and growth rates, competitor activity and the like. Clearly, the tide is slowly starting to turn.

There is an upside for us in all this as growth in foreign language work is one of the reasons 2011 is, so far at least, going well for us. Q1 is up over 30% on last year and the 5-year CAGR is now nearly 25%.