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Blog posts tagged homeworking
Three ways to make home workers more productive
August 01, 2013
Earlier this year, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer banned employees working from home, on the basis that it hinders productivity.
However, a recent poll by The Guardian found more than 70% of respondents would prefer to work from home. Moreover, an experiment (PDF link) by Chinese multinational CTrip last year found working from home led to a 12% increase in employee performance.
For smaller businesses, home working is a viable option that can prove beneficial, increasing employee productivity and cutting costs. However, to make home working practical and effective, business owners need to put the right technology in place.
Here are three ways to get your home working technology right:
1. Provide good IT support
When you're working from home, common IT problems can seem harder to overcome. There's nobody else around to ask for help, which can make employees feel isolated.
However, a bit of forward planning can help you provide effective help to home workers. There's some good advice about supporting remote workers here on IT Donut.
You can also look at professional support systems available to small businesses and home workers. For example, One Call Fix, supplied by Knowhow for PC World Business (the company I work for), acts as a direct point of call for IT support, guaranteeing access to a network of experts with a no fix, no fee promise.
2. Use more mobile technology
Your business can transform its operations by becoming more mobile.
Laptops, netbooks and tablets can all help boost employees’ productivity by helping them complete more work outside the office. Ultrabooks, very thin and light laptops, like the high-end Chromebook, are portable while maintaining a screen large enough for viewing detailed documents.
Tablets offer similar advantages, along with apps to help your business run efficiently and professionally.
3. Look into VoIP
Voice over IP (VoIP) allows you to place telephone calls over the internet, meaning a telephone number need no longer be tied to a landline or location.
With VoIP, your telephone number can follow you wherever you are. Skype is a good, popular VoIP system through which you can place audio and video calls.
You can also use a service like Google Hangouts to host virtual meetings.
What to do next
Home offices are varied and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
This means that before you invest in technology for remote and home working, it is important to seek specialist IT advice to make sure you are using the best tools for your requirements.
By selecting the right technology and choosing the correct IT support, businesses can ensure they improve performance levels and cut costs.
- Key home working questions answered
- How to introduce homeworking in your business
- Providing IT support for mobile workers
Jeremy Fennell is managing director of PC World Business.
Yahoo! Is this the end of home working?
February 27, 2013
One of the hazards Yahoo is saving its home workers from. (Image: dougwoods on Flickr.)
More businesses than ever are embracing home working. Until last week, it even felt like the argument over whether home working is beneficial had been won.
But then a leaked memo revealed that one of the web's trailblazers - Yahoo - is shifting back to a more traditional working environment.
Yahoo's change of tune
AllThingsD.com broke the story by publishing excerpts from the company memo:
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Painfully awkward as this is phrased, it means every Yahoo get to your desks stat!
For a company that once led the way but has bounced from problem to crisis in recent years, this seems like an astonishingly backward step.
That's because these days, home working isn't the preserve of software engineers working in cutting-edge roles. It's something nearly everyone in an office-based role can do.
The new culture of flexibility
The ability to work flexibly from home is closely tied to business technology. That technology has reached a point where saying "our IT system can't support it" is no longer a valid excuse.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The shift to cloud computing means it's just as easy for workers to access data from home as it is when they're in the office. There's no need for complicated virtual private networks so staff can log in remotely.
What's more, there are plenty of collaboration tools that can keep your people talking even when they're in different locations.
Home working still has limitations
That's not to say home working is for everyone. For instance, try doing your job as a tree surgeon or dentist from home and see how well that goes.
And while it is possible to operate a business where everyone works flexibly all the time, most companies encourage staff to spend some time in the office. It helps build a feeling of togetherness. This seems to be why Yahoo is clamping down on home working.
But really, if your business mostly involves people using computers in an office, it's likely many of those people could do their jobs every bit as well from home.
They might even work harder and save you some cash on office costs. Isn't that worth thinking about?
Could telecommuting get more out of your staff?
February 03, 2011
Research conducted at Brigham Young University has delved into data from over 20,000 IBM employees across 75 countries, with surprising results.
Employees who telecommute (or work from home) not only balance work and personal life better than ‘standard’ office workers, but they manage to work more hours too.
The researchers identified the point where 25% of employees report their work to be interfering with personal or family life.
In some cases, workers who utilised a mix of flexitime and telecommuting were able to work 50% more hours per week before hitting that point. That amounts to a whopping 19 extra hours work over the same seven-day period. Aggregate this over a year and you’ll run out of work for your staff!
So what is telecommuting?
Telecommuting is an arrangement which gives your employees the freedom to work where and when they please. This gives them big flexibility in their working lives, can remove the daily commute and ditches the idea of having a centralised place of work. It's all reliant on a technology network which allows an employee to work anywhere, at any time.
As a business owner, not only can you get more out of each of your employees, but you can also enjoy significant cost savings. Here are just a few benefits of telecommuting:
- Diminished office costs
- Lower travel costs
- A larger talent pool to pick from (telecommuting enable carers, parents and disabled people to be employed more easily)
- Reduced absenteeism.
Couple these benefits with higher employee satisfaction and it is hard to see any downsides to telecommuting. However, they do exist.
Telecommuting caveats
If your employees are to really benefit from telecommuting, they need flexi-time too. Because without some flexibility in working hours, most of the benefits of telecommuting are removed. You simply replace the effort of getting to work at a set hour with the effort of getting to a place of your choosing on time.
You also need to think through how to handle management and performance reviews. To assuage fears that employees would simply abuse the power to work remotely, a results-based system needs to be in place. Instead of individually monitoring employees, their work and goals must be measured solely by results.
You have to trust your staff. Any mistakes in implementing this kind of management style could have an adverse effect on employee productivity. After all, what is the point of getting 19 hours more work a week if they get half as much done?
Have you tried telecommuting?
Implemented correctly, telecommuting can be positive both for you and your team. As someone once summed up: 'work is something you do, not something you travel to'.
So how about it? Do you know of any companies or people that enjoy a telecommuting system? Or do you know someone who struggles and would prosper more in a structured office environment?
John Sollars is MD of Stinkyink.com
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