If the stereotypes of sales jobs addressed earlier true, salespeople would be expected to travel extensively, live on big expense accounts, spend much of their time entertaining potential clients, and consequently have little time for home and family life. Such a situation represents a lack of balance between one’s work life and family life such that work is encroaching on family-work-family conflict. Again, this is not an accurate description of the working conditions encountered by most salespeople. Some selling jobs require extensive travel, but the majority of salespeople can secure rewarding use of computer networks, e-mail, video conferencing, and the like, the trend for more than a decade has been for more and more salespeople to telecommute. That is, they work from a remote or virtual office such as out of the home and seldom even travel to their companies’ offices.
For all the advantages and attractiveness of telecommuting to the salesperson, as well as the efficiencies and cost-saving aspects to the sales organization, operating out of a virtual office does create a challenge for keeping the sales force fully socialized to the culture of the organization Leadership 2.3 illustrates the benefits and organizational challenges a virtual office environment can create.