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Creating A Virtual Office?
Fubar asks: "My small company of 10 employees is considering letting our lease run out on our office space and is thinking about having everyone work from home (or wherever they want). I have been tasked with putting a plan together to provide voice and data connectivity to each employee. What sort of solutions have you implemented?"
I'm considering the following for providing voice service:
+ Order an extra analog line for each employee
+ Reimburse each employee for a second line on their cell phones
+ Host our current phone system in my home office, add a VoIP card and provide an endpoint for each employee
+ Use third-party VoIP hosting service" What options have you used to create a virtual office, and what suggestions would might you give to anyone else attempting to do the same?
+ Order an extra analog line for each employee
+ Reimburse each employee for a second line on their cell phones
+ Host our current phone system in my home office, add a VoIP card and provide an endpoint for each employee
+ Use third-party VoIP hosting service" What options have you used to create a virtual office, and what suggestions would might you give to anyone else attempting to do the same?
I would create my virtual office in second life but I'd be afraid that giant wieners would run through my lobby and scare away my customers.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Those employees had better be damned dedicated to the company if no centralized physical space exists anymore. You will find yourselves meeting in a lot of places. Maybe just downgrade the space to something like a meeting room you can rent a few times a week.
You could try doing what these guys did
Virtual office to provide income? Check.
Ordering food online through supermarkets? Check.
Netflix delivering entertainment to your door? Check.
Now there's absolutely no reason to leave your house...
Communications:
1. VoIP (something like Packet8) or company-paid cell phone, probably a nextel group plan. Actually, Skype conferencing should work good enough.
2. Workstations - Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services Server. Then you don't care about what their workstations are like and the environment is manageable so you have no backup headaches.
3. In-person lunches at least once a week. It can get really boring to work from home!
I implement virtual offices all the time, so feel free to contact me through my website.
Good luck.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
By isolating people you make social workings of the company impossible. You can't have face to face meetings, you can't casually walk up to someone and sketch a diagram or two, you complicate things that don't have to be complicated. IMO, you will lose far more in productivity than you gain in giving up the office space. How many companies do that? Hardly any; even one-man companies often maintain an office which is their public face - where they have an address, where they meet visitors, where they make phone calls, where they are a business. And at home they are at home - relaxing, reading, having family etc. Mixing work and home is bad. It's even difficult to work at home, where other distractions are present.
I wouldn't do it as many people remote work as goof off work. My experience is at most 25% of the people really work at home, and they are the ones absolutely passionate about what they do. Traits successful to work at home:
If the person can't demonstraight the above at the office, it will only become worse working at home.
So your major question should be are your staff suitable? My guess is some are, and many not. I am going through this with a consultant right now, he shows a low connect time, no results and is precisely a day away from being fired. Be prepared to do this for a lack of performance.
I agree completely. I'm involved a side project that's trying to get off the ground as a legitimate business, and only two of us out of seven on the team are in the same geographical area. We've done audio and video conferencing (Skype seems to work best for cross-platform multi-way audio, nobody seems to do reliable cross-platform video but iChat has given us the best quality for one on one), but it's so much less efficient than being in the same room. Everything is more time consuming over long distance, whether it's via video chat, audio, or text/email. This is making our progress much slower than we'd like.
Unless your team has well defined roles and each person can (and will) work effectively without much discussion, I'd say don't ditch the office just yet. And especially if communication is key to your success, make sure people get into the same room often. There's just no substitute for meeting face to face.
First of all, consider to rent a cheaper place.
Personally, I don't like having my whole office at home. In my case it's not about children or other sources of noises but I don't feel "at work" sitting in front of my PC. I would require a separate (and quite) working room to be productive.
Continuing with noises - if some employees have a quick question they'll call each other. This may be very disturbing.
Next, consider putting in cost for connectivity. Not only phone lines and a phone server, you will need a central VPN server to share files.
Then, think about security. You don't have any control about the employees PCs anymore. I could bet that there are an easy target for malware. Think about that the computers may be used by other people, like their kids. Don't wait for a "Cool I ownz sensitive data of that company - letz put on myspace to show how coolz I am!" to happen.
Last point is, where to meet up with customers? Tell them you not have an office and meet at Starbucks?
Seriously, have a look around for a cheaper office.
Practically though, it requires a notable 'culture shift' which may be hard to accomplish.
You see, an office area, you have several people in the same area. They're talking, and interacting. And if you don't know something, then you ask, and it's ok within seconds. Simple things like 'who should I send this request to', or 'how do I get more tapes ordered for the backup servre'.
This doesn't happen any more if your employees are isolated. Now this isn't always a disaster, but there's some areas of business where I'd be reluctant to let them 'work from home'. The ones where 'deliverables' are hard to measure.
At the end of the day, if you have a programmer, programming, then as long as the necessary work gets done, who cares what hours he does?
But you'll still have the limitation in the social dynamics, where you can just bounce ideas off other people.
IF you're set on going this route though, I'd suggest the following: Instant messaging is vital. It's a stand in for the "Hey, bert, where do I send my expenses" in the office, and as such is invaluable. Email, well, yes, definitely. Proper 'collaboration'. Documents, code, whatever, you don't want a 5way email chain going on. Voice comms. Doesn't matter if it's phone or voip, but it does need to exist. Actually, I'd argue that something maybe like ventrillo or teamspeak is a fairly reasonable option - gives you the ability to chat and 'bond' with your co-workers.
Cost. Well, I wouldn't do it because it costs less. Do it because travelling is a nuisance during traffic hour. Would you create the virtual office if you and your co-workers were neighbours?
Management. Remote working is often not allowed because managers get scared that their employees have other things to do at home. At times/with certain persons they have a point. You can still check what they do with IM/video. Second you can ask them to spend the last 15 minutes of their day to write a small diary of the jobs they did (and check). Second, I would still want to meet my collegues twice a week. Ensure that communication doesn't die in the process.
Technical requirements. I would want an on-demand video link to any of my co-workers. Easy file sharing / networking / vpn / (terminal/X) server.Maybe even an always-open audio line that is dampened. Basically, the technical environment should allow ALL communications that previously existed in an easy manner. Maybe even make some better.
nosig today
Tech support uses it sometimes with remote control yielded by a customer (through their Java client) to check the reported problems with our apps and their system config. One can even look, with customer permission, in real time into remote threads (Dr. Watson style hex dumps), all windows (a la SDK Spy++), apps, dll's, memory heaps (layout and hex dumps). These latter low level features are usually done when tech support guy has to conference in a programmer into his tech support session to help out with some trickier problem. In 1990s, I used to travel to customer locations to do this kind of troubleshooting.
I have set up and supported remote sites and home based telecommuting. Listen to my advice, listen very carefully and save your sanity.
If your organization is large enough then it is likely that you will have a few older desktop PCs that have been or are due for replacement during an upgrade cycle. PCs that are inadequate for Microsoft XP and Office2003 are more than powerful enough for many current versions of Linux, especially for the role of server. Also second hand PCs with the required specifications are very cheaply acquired.
1) Find an older PC, at least a PII 300 with 256 MB memory, to set up as a headless ( no display or keyboard ) server and firewall. A simple web based interface ( or even an external hardware push button ) can be used by the local users to start/stop the server and internet connection. All other maintenance should be handled remotely via ssh, webmin and VNC.
2) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be through the server and connection to the Office should be through a VPN on the server. Use a dynamic IP service for each site so you can remotely log on to the local server via ssh.
3) Install a new IDE hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the drive during the day to resync and repair.
4) Install a DHCP demon on the local server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network. If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware, the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working with full access to files while the the remote administrator fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for your setup )
5) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: partition ( or in the case of Linux the root partition ) for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live Knoppix to copy/clone a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistent partition where documents are stored.
6) Install and enable remote VNC service on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
7) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessible by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundancy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
8) If the network load to the Office is taking up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server. You can also consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best ) wi
Or Ventrillo, loads of servers, seperate rooms, cheap. Sure it's target is a games audience, but in reality its a pure multi-chatroom like VOIP app. You will probably need to back it up with MSN/Mobiles/Telephone etc as it doesn't "ring".
So you think that running Terminal services over some random cable/DSL/fois/Dial-up line to some random colo is a good idea, and tossing in Voip on the connection at the same time. hmm, interesting.
Is that your carefully considered choice for an all-remote office, or just the solution you give everybody?.
What the article submitter really needs are fat-daddy laptops, so that they can all meet at a Starbuck's once a week. Some may just consider reimbursing their employees for individual own purchases. The real question is: do you co-lo your mail server, or use something on the net? Don't forget service contracts on those laptops, and you might consider keeping a loaner handy. 'Off site' file storage almost certainly would be important as well, I would even suggest using a CVS or Subversion server for simple working file storage.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I have a friend whose company is virtual. They rely heavily on Skype and have no complaints as far as I know.
You might consider giving people broadband cards for their notebooks if they will be traveling or meeting together a lot.
I'm using a linux server, hosted whith hetzner.de, running an asterisk server for voice connectivity, freenx & nomachine.com clients for terminal services and openoffice and tinyerp (tinyerp.org) as actual productive applications.
My people can either use a voip client / phone to connect to asterisk, or they dial into asterisk with their normal phone and get connected to a call queue (you could possibly connect them to an office phone, but I don't need that)
Works like a charm. The occasional hiccup if their DSL-line has troubles is less than nice, but has proved to be rare enough that I would really recommend this setup.
If you want/need, they could run a local linux, and use the tinyerp client, but then someone has to be responsible for their local setup...
Every business is different, and as a result, the best way to run it will be based on what the business is, and if that will work for you.
Look as customer communication. How do your customers contact you, and if you go to a distributed environment, how will that affect your customers calling in? Do you have a receptionist who answers the phones?
Do most of your employees work in the office, or do they come in to work, but then go out to service their employees while spending only an hour or so in the office each day?
Do you and your employees live in the same area, or do you all spend 30-90 minutes each way driving in to work?
Do customers have the ability to talk directly to the employees? This may sound like a strange question, but not all companies want their employees to be contacted directly, and instead will have the people answering the main number take messages.
Being able to talk face to face with your employees on a regular basis is important here. You also won't be able to see if a new employee is doing things the right way or the wrong way if you let EVERYONE work from home. In some cases though, it makes sense to have SOME people who can work from home, but others who MUST show up at some sort of office.
We aren't completely virtual, we have a head office in London but have some people scattered about the country and the rest of europe.
We have a nice fast internet connection in the main office with a server running Asterisk. That has 2 British Telecom lines going into a Zaptel card in the back. We then also have half a dozen different sip providers and a complex beast of a dialplan that routes via the cheapest for any specific call.
Remote employees then VPN in to our main router to get over SIP and NAT issues.
If you want to go this route you need a second internet connection, as voice calls breaking up (especially on the phone to clients) can look pretty shabby. You'll also want a decent router that has hardware support for VPN's built in (accelerates the encryption part) - we use one of the higher-end Draytek ones, but similar kit from other vendors is available. Once again, get something decent, you don't want VPN connections dropping because your $50.00 router overheats.
Finally, spend some decent money on the phones, not only will they be nicer to use, but the sound quality will often be better than on a no-name "VOIP" phone. We swear by the SNOM ones, they're pricey but look the part and have some neat features.
everyone was not located in the same location... I'd like to see THAT virtual office. I live in a not so tech-savy wilderness and the majority of my jobs are virtual. I would love to work in someone's virtual office (team/company/etc.), or even hire some talent from other locations for my jobs.
I guess Skype and Backpack/SharePoint would be enough in most situations...
Call me a Bitch-Hermit, but I think it really depends on the nature and schedule of your work.
:)
Since you're asking this on Slashdot, okay, maybe you've got some kind of vaguely traditional corporate concept, with business hours, a location, ongoing projects, and all that stuff. In which case, yeah, you probably do need to get together sometimes. And I don't think most products out there are going to scale well enough to do 10-way videoconferencing right now, so "face time" might be hard to get on-screen.
Of course, you could take turns hosting meetings at your houses...
That all said, there are organizations out there that are virtual by default, and only periodically lapse into meat-space on an ad hoc basis. I sporadically help with a team that has about 60 consultants in about 30 countries, with different skill sets and expertise. If something needs to be done somewhere specific, anywhere from 2 to 15 people will fly in from wherever they're based (literally around the world), bust their asses for anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks, and then fly out. In between, it's all e-mail, intranet, IMs and Skype.
This works (perhaps surprisingly) because, I think, when actual work is being done, the consultants are working around each other in person, for anywhere from 12 to 20 hours a day. In between "crunch times," all the newfangled communication tools are good for sharing knowledge and info and basically preparing everyone so they can hit the ground running.
So again, it really depends on what kind of work you're doing, how it's scheduled, and stuff like that.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Hi,
I serve many small local business, many who have some employees that work from from regularly or permenantly.
For telephone, the cell phone makes the most sense. Works anywhere and if you get all employees on the same carrier, you can get free mobile-to-mobile calls, thus reducing the amount of minutes everyone needs. See if you can put them all on a large family plan or something.
For data, DSL/cable at people's homes is great, but a step further would be internet via cell phone/Treo/Blackberry when they are mobile. If you get Blackberry's on one of the above plans, the tethering internet access is often included (some carriers). Depends if they will be sitting at their home "desks" all day or running around more.
Employees should still have company-provided computers. A huge huge problem is the kids of the employees getting on their home computers and messing things up (spyware, consumer apps, not running updates, etc). Kids have their computer, Mom and Dad have another password protected computer that kids do not use even if just for a second.
I would also recommend still having a server somewhere for backup and to ensure all of the company files are stored in one place. Novell's iFolder product is an excellent choice for getting files synced back to a server with little to no user interaction. It comes in their Open Workgroup Suite package (along with GroupWise for e-mail, etc, etc, the works.) They also have an open-sourced version of iFolder at http://www.ifolder.com/ but last I looked it was somewhat unstable.
You still will have to deal with tech support of everyone's PC (printing, drive crashes, all the regular stuff) so a remote control package that will traverse NAT would be helpful. UltraVNC has a reverse-VNC mode that will work in this way with the user just kicking off the connection and you taking it from there. Also, a software management type app would be nice for patching and software distrribution. Don't want to have to run to everyone's house to install a new program, etc, if possible. Novell's ZENWorks is aaaa decent general purpose management app and something like Shavlik is good for patching Windows boxes.
As others have mentioned, communication is key between employees. Encourage them to meet and/or use those cells phones a lot, especially if they have free mobile-t0-mobile calls they have no reason not to pick up the phone regularly.
The benefits can be great if done right. There's nothing like getting up and walking into the next room to be at work!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
I am totally blown away that so many people responded to this guy's question with anti-telecommuter FUD.
Having been a telecommuter for five years, I think I have a pretty good perspective on the value proposition:
1. Employee retention. Employees that telecommute have cheap golden handcuffs. I could never go back to commuting to a fucking cube farm and, unfortunately, employers that offer telecommuting are few and far between (due to the luddite FUD like we saw on this topic).
2. Commuting is rediculous. I used to spend three hours a day commuting. Lots of people do worse. During those three hours, I am not working and generally unavailable (unless I am driving solo, which means I can take phone calls, but has a huge social impact). Now that I work at home, I am available at 6am for email and chat while I am eating breakfast - that's 8am on the east coast and 2pm for Western Europe. If you include commuting time as work (since it really is), yes I "work" less than a cube farmer, but I am available more.
3. Work shouldn't be social time. If I want to socialize, I will do so with my friends, not my co-workers. I used to hate going to the cube farm because I knew I would have to spend too much time with the idle chit chat at the "watercooler," or worse yet, in my fricking cube. Socializing with your co-workers does NOT make your work relationship better, in fact it makes it much harder to keep people focused on actually working.
3. Face time is not that important. I am a product manager and one could say, of all the telecommutable jobs, being a PM should require more face time. Bullshit. The real problem is that many people in the corporate world do not know how to have an effective conference call. I get stuck on these calls all the time and the worst offenders are the people who work at the cube farm mothership in San Jose. When the call is something I care about, I will lead the meeting. When I am at the cube farm mothership for meetings, they are usually far less productive.
4. Living in a major metro sucks ass. I lived in the Bay Area for much of my life and, while it is an OK place to go for a vacation, I'd never want to live in that shit hole again. I live in the mountains of New Mexico now. It takes me 15 minutes to get to civilization (Whole Foods, restaurants, symphony, airport, etc...). For the price of my awesome spread on 3 acres, I could buy a crackerbox house in the far flung suburbs if I had to work in the Bay Area. I would have to drive hours to get to work.
Giving employees VoIP connected to a phone system is NOT a virtual office. We have many satellite offices and guys that work in more remote areas from home. For that we use Citrix and pay for them to have VoIP (if possible usually through their cable provider) at their house and a printer that they can print to via Citrix. They aren't on our phone system nor do they need to be since they can call all over North America without cost. We pay for their cell phone and all data is hosted at our main office so that no matter where they are, their data is backed up properly. The best thing about Citrix is that Bob out of Dallas, TX can fly to Boise, ID and still have full access to his desktop, data, and portable printer.
"That said, you loose a lot from cutting on the close contact between employees. In that regard, email is better than snail mail, chat is better than email, phone/VoIP is better than chat, video-chat is better than phone and close contact is better than all of them put together."
Right on. There has been a great deal of work done over the last 30 years on the role of communication in technical innovation. Don't dismiss it as "anecdotal." One place to start would be Tom Allen, who just coauthored a book, The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology. Tom is an IEEE Fellow, and the book has a good overview of his work.
Bottom line - to get innovation you need your people talking to each other, and the only way this will happen effectively is to have them physically close together so they will run into each other and talk.
1. get a colo box
2. install a terminal server on it, IE LTSP type stuff, maybe VNC, maybe windoze box with terminal server. Also load up the usual web email etc, and also hook up a Jabber server.
3. install Asterisk on it
4. hire VoicePulse to get it phone service
5. Get each worker an IP phone. For those that often work at home, use Snom or AAstra, Grandstream if you're cheap. For those that are always on their laptop use a softphone like EyeBeam or SJphone, or maybe a WiFi phone (make sure it has encryption support). If you want to go all out, get everybody EyeBeam and a webcam so you can video chat. However keep in mind that softphones aren't great unless you have a headset connected 24/7, and even then they are still not as good as a real IP phone. Now get everybody connected to the terminal server.
That's the easy part. Anybody can spend money on crap. The key is making it work.
You will need employees who are DEDICATED to your company. When there is no office, there is no boss over the shoulder, so it is very easy for a non-dedicated employee to waste tons of time.
Keep everybody coordinated. Forums can be a good way to do this if people read them, a daily teleconference or at least group chat can work well. Some have suggested meeting physically once a week but I don't think this is needed if you keep your team coherent. If everybody knows their task and you have good communication, you could run the life of the company without ever meeting some of the guys.
--IronHelix
"In the end, you loose on communication, on the volume of information you transfer and big-time on efficiency (its much more difficult and time and resource consuming to make a phone call/open a chat, than to turn your head to your colleagues and announce "Hey, I locked the sources for XYZ on my machine")."
:)
I have a solution for that, but I'm waiting for the patent to come through.
I pretty much agree with both posters. However I still think the pro side is still not thinking very far outside the box. Look at some of the suggestions posted, and look at how people interact. A virtual company is quite possible but it will need lots of planning and work to pull off successfully.*
*I should also point out in this brave new "knowledge" economy IP will be even more important than it already is.
I realize you're going for a funny, however there's only two reasons to have a real office. One is for those circumstances were only a physical location will do. The other is technological, were everyone doesn't have a 24/7 broadband connection, and online environments aren't realistic enough. This will gradually change, and gaming technology will contribute some of the pieces (cooperation is part of some games).
I'd use Skype with video for most of my VOIP needs. It's free, easy, and it works.
No, I will not work for your startup
The company where I used to work full-time (and now telecommute part-time) has gradually evolved in this direction. Today the "office" is one sublet room downtown with some servers in it. Someone goes in a couple times a week to collect the mail. She's the only one person who's even still in the same town; the rest of us have spread all over the place (for instance, I'm living 9500 miles away).
It was VoIP that really facilitated the diaspora. We thought about using Asterisk but decided that the cost-benefit ratio of running our own phone system was not favourable - nobody wanted the responsibility of keeping the CEO's phone working. So now we're using Nuvio, which has been quite good but not perfect. The pluses:
A few minuses:
Overall I think the virtual office is working. There are some slackers, of course, but that's always going to be the case. Mostly people find themselves being more productive than they were before. I know I do.
Also, it's allowed the company to retain people who otherwise would have quit because their spouse got a great job somewhere else, or they wanted to spend more time at home with their children. One of the most solid employees is a stay-at-home dad.
The amount saved on office expenses makes it easy to fly people in on those occasions when face-to-face really is necessary - big client meetings and so forth.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Wow, lots of good responses to this one. I've been telecommuting for years, and based on that I'll add two points.
First, and most important: It's vital that managers are able to create and update real, honest production schedules. I've found that most middle managers in the traditional offices I've worked in are not able to do this. Instead, they use the interminable meetings, and annoying walk-around oversight. Good managers should be able to set goals and milestones, monitor progress toward them. To achieve this, workers need clearly identified objective milestones. Someone upstream mentioned bug tracking system aging. That could work. Or simple spreadsheet based empirical schedule development works too. Once you've gotten your management off of behavioral monitoring and onto actual management by objectives with honest schedule development, it's possible to successfully manage remote workers.
Second, one needs to get the legal issues clear. Basically, there need to be clear understandings, written understandings, on the dispostion of the remote equipment, the workplace, and who's responsible for accidents and incurred liabilities and expenses. This is wide ranging and can be as simple or as complex as necessary for your organization.
Good luck. Breaking free of requiring everyone to trundle off over the highways every day can be a major reduction in overhead, and offers tremendous opportunities in morale, cost savings, and work satisfaction.