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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'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.