Slashdot Mirror
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'd agree with this. It's not exactly the same, but I'm a uni student and studying by correspondence this semester. I was getting credits and distinctions on campus, but am thinking about pulling out because I can't get any work done studying like this. It's much, much harder working by yourself. VOIP and IM doesn't cut it.
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.
VOIP and IM doesn't cut it.
And yet despite your anecdote virtually every collabratively made open source software continues to exist.
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 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.
An employee must be either a co-owner of the business, or an angel, to efficiently work from home. I have employees who need constant supervision to work at the office even; at home they'd be surfing pr0n all day long - and you can't monitor them, and you can't prove anything. Hard to fire in such conditions; the employee may file a lawsuit against you and win - because it was *you* who set up the work this way.
Not everyone hates their job. If you have only "employees who need constant supervision to work", then you or your company is probably the real problem. I mean there are people who do a conscientious job cleaning toilets or collecting garbage.
Bullshit.
I've telecommuted now for almost 8 years, from 2000 miles away from the office I used to work in. The team I was on used to be 14 people.
We are now down to two telecommuters.
A team of 14, reduced to 2. Literally. This is not an exaggeration, nor am I making shit up.
Costs to my company? One analog phone line, and I cover my internet access, which then uses a VPN to connect securely to my systems at work. I administer systems, write documentation, and every few months am pulled onto some other project to do additional work. Occasionally I have to call a guy to physically power cycle a system. This has happened three times in 8 years.
Some people - I have heard - cannot work from home. They cannot discipline themselves (I've heard), or have other problems. There are also jobs which are not appropriate for telecommuting.
For many of us though, there is absolutely zero benefit to us going into an office, being distracted by smalltalk every 15 minutes by people walking by our cubes. Mostly, you lose the unnecessary chitchat. Some people miss that. I don't. My social life is outside of the office anyway. The kinds of conversation people have in offices tend to be fairly vapid anyway (when not work related) since no one wants to disturb a hypersensitive corporate culture or bring up anything controversial.
The key to telecommuting employees is learning how to manage them. If you cannot manage people remotely, that's an issue with your supervisors that can be rectified.
A centralized tracking system for work needs to be implemented with regular process updates. Regular conference calls for sync up, brainstorming, and discussion need to occur (there are three of these per week for me, one each for a different project I'm working on). Everyone who telecommutes also needs to be on our company-wide internal IM system as well as e-mail. We have a centralized database which tracks work requests - people in three countries can submit work to us through this single system, and we have a record of every request going back to 1998 to refer back to. Since most of our conversations are via IM or e-mail, there's a paper trail for everything. This is invaluable. People may whine about this at first (having to type everything), but in time, you come to rely on it. I have every important conversation from the past 3 years available to me, and not a single post-it note hanging up. Our ducks are *in a row*.
There's very little note taking and confusion because, based on our situation, things are typed up to be e-mailed. Then, there is a paper trail. Nothing gets lost in little "drop by the cube" conversations. Everything can be referred back to. All important documents are archived centrally.
In short, telecommuting for me has meant:
(a) Occasionaly longer or stranger hours. If you look at the workload of my team and what we're left with in terms of personnel, I have become as efficient as about 4 or 5 office workers (as opposed to 7 since our workload has decreased a little). I'm not saying this is typical or this is exclusively the result of telecommuting, but the reality is, we were 14 people in offices, and we are now two working from two different time zones. This requires occasional after hours work. But it's in my own home. I don't have to get out of my jammies and go down to the office because all of the remote access facilities are available from my home. Beyond which, if something has to happen at 3 AM Sunday morning, I'm far likely to be available for that, sleepy and in my aforementioned jammies, than I would be to drive down to the office. In several cases, I volunteered to do work that other people would have had to do, which for them would have involved driving in. If I can do something easily from home, I'll be glad to do people a favor this way, and have.
(b) Alienation. 8 hours of silence each day tends to be a lot, depending on ones personality. But imagine how much work you can potentially get do