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?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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.
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
As someone who is working at home right this second -- albeit not as a regular arrangement, but just because I can't get into the office this week -- I have to second the loss of productivity. I feel like I'm out in my own little world... things go on without me, and I don't get informed of things like service outages. The only reason I know there are other co-workers out there is because I occasionally get an email asking me to call back a customer that called into the office.
That and I seem to find myself reading slashdot a lot more than I do when I'm in the office..
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.