Today's benefits of remote working

Despite the sighting of green shoots, hopefully heralding the beginning of an economic recovery, the business environment remains tough. Senior executives of organisations of all sizes, across all sectors, continue to have sleepless nights as they wrestle with how to cut costs without lowering levels of productivity and efficiency which may well lead to diminished customer service. How can they increase profitably ensuring their business has a good platform from which to make sure it comes out of the recession in the best possible shape? How can they be seen to be operating in an environmentally friendly manner? How can all of this be achieved without making cuts in staffing levels and keeping staff morale high?

Offering staff the option to work remotely or flexibly can play a key role in helping achieve all of the above.

With the rise in remote and flexible working there has been a fundamental shift in management attitudes around how you manage and monitor staff you can't see. It is now accepted that there really is no drop in productivity and efficiency from staff who work at home and many in fact are more productive as they spend more hours working rather than travelling to and from the office.

By allowing your staff to work remotely and flexibly from home, you are reducing the number of staff coming to the office every day. You are then able to cut operating costs by reducing the need for expensive office space and the associated running costs i.e. business rates, heating, lighting, cleaning, etc.

By reducing the need for your employees to travel to work, you are cutting the number of cars on the road and associated CO2 emissions. This helps to highlight that your business is operating in an environmentally friendly manner and that you are aware of the need to reduce your carbon footprint. This is especially important in view of the Government's recently launched (15 July, 09) UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy with the core objective of ensuring that British businesses and workers are equipped to maximise the economic opportunities and minimise the costs of the transition to a low carbon economy.

Transport represents over 20 percent of UK CO2 emissions and is rising fast, so radical changes in how we travel to and from work are essential.

By eliminating the time your employees spend commuting to the office every day, you are helping them to increase their productivity and efficiency ensuring continued high customer service and increased profitability.

By reducing costs through your remote and flexible workers you are eliminating the need to `let people go'. This coupled with allowing employees to work from home with the additional benefit of helping them to improve their work life/balance will help to keep staff moral high.

In addition, remote and flexible workers can play a key role in keeping your business operating smoothly should the current health situation deteriorate, and it becomes necessary to restrict the time spent in public places or for people to be quarantined.

Of course, in order for remote and flexible workers to maintain and often exceed levels of productivity and efficiency you need to furnish them with the business communications tools that allow them to operate just as if they were in the office.

This is where today's audio and web conferencing and collaboration technology comes firmly to the fore. Cost effective conferencing and collaboration solutions allow your remote and flexible workers to `meet' and collaborate with colleagues, team members, customers or suppliers regardless of location, just as if everyone was located in the same room. Your remote and flexible workers can now hold meetings on the hour, every hour without leaving their desk.

No expensive `kit' is required. All your remote and flexible workers need is access to the humblest of all of our business communications tools, the telephone. The plain old telephone provides the audio conferencing element and for the web conferencing piece, allowing the real-time sharing of information i.e. spreadsheets, a presentation, a contract, sales forecasts etc, all that is necessary is a PC or laptop and access the Internet. What could be simpler?

Most corporate telephone systems allow conference calls but the audio quality is usually poor, the number of participants will be limited and there is also the problem of tying up telephone lines preventing other staff from making outgoing or taking incoming calls. A simple solution is to deploy the services of an audio and web conferencing service provider.

The service provider will issue you with a dial-in number to access its service and personalised PIN numbers that enable entry to your audio conference calls. For participants to join, the host simply e-mails them with the time that the conference call is to take place with the dial-in number and the relevant PIN number. If you need to share documentation with participants (and how often do you attend a meeting when this is not necessary?), then you will need to add web conferencing capability to the audio call.

Web conferencing is added simply by the host giving the participants his or her web conferencing URL so that information can be shared live over the Internet. Web conferencing eliminates the need to e-mail meeting participants the documentation to be shared, or to continually ask if everyone is looking at the same slide or page.

Remote and flexible workers who work from their home office and who regularly use audio and web conferencing technologies to hold internal virtual meetings will soon see the value of holding external meetings with suppliers or clients without leaving their desks. This again helps to reduce operating expenses by cutting the costs associated with business travel that require a long car or train journey or plane trip. We are not talking just about reducing the hard costs such a fuel, wear and tear on cars, the cost of a train or plane ticket, hotel and subsistence etc, but the hard to quantify soft costs around the unproductive dead time spent travelling. Dead time spent sitting in a traffic jam, waiting at an airport when planes are delayed or just standing in what appear to be endless security lines.

By reducing business travel, you are once again helping to reduce CO2 emissions. The ability to promote your company as deploying Green IT solutions is quickly becoming a powerful marketing tool.

Today, it is also quite possible you are finding that instead of offering your employees the option to work remotely or flexibly, they are coming to you and requesting this. Government legislation, extending the right to request flexible working to parents of children up to 16 years of age came into force on 6 April this year, potentially leading to an extra 4.5 million people requesting the ability to become mobile, remote, flexible workers.

Small businesses in particular may struggle to grant `reasonable' requests from their employees unless they have ensured that the technology is in place to enable flexible workers to be as productive as if they were in the office. Flexible workers will almost certainly have access to a telephone and the Internet enabling them to hold audio and web conferences with whoever they need to. Their home office simply becomes a `virtual' extension to their main place of work.

Senior executives who understand that their remote and flexible workers, when equipped with audio and web conferencing business communications tools, are an extremely valuable asset which will help their businesses to survive the recession, can sleep more soundly.

www.meetingzone.co.uk