Since taking the helm of the big maker of ATMs two years ago, Mattes has replaced about 60 percent of Diebold's top 100 executives - with two-thirds of them stationed full time far from the head office.

For Mattes, building a virtual management team is crucial to Diebold’s turnaround.  But with Diebold’s headquarters in Canton, he says, “we were fishing in a small pond.” The type of software experts he craved don’t usually envision themselves relocating to a heartland burg just down the road from Akron, once known as the rubber capital of the world. So Mattes jettisoned the old rule that Diebold executives had to work and live in Canton and lured veterans from “a who’s who of the technology industry,” he says. “We broadened the talent pool substantially.”

As companies move jobs around the globe and videoconferencing and other technology keep dispersed employees connected, managers increasingly are supervising out-of-sight workers. Some 13.4 million Americans, or 9.5 percent of U.S. workers, labored at least one day at home a week in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. And about 40 percent of U.S. professional and management employees work occasionally from their homes, according to 2012 data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

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