Use Technology to Work from Home--or Anywhere
By Catherine
BillSavings.com Brief: If you work from home by yourself or manage a team of telecommuters who are spread out around the country, you need to know how to run a virtual office. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of this trend to make it work for you.
Running a virtual office successfully is becoming more and more common. This is a working environment where coworkers are not in the same office. How to run a virtual office is important in an increasingly global economy.
Why is virtual office so popular?
In order to run a successful virtual office, you should understand why it’s so popular. Many reasons contribute to the trend toward telecommuting, working from home, and the virtues of a virtual office. Whether you are opening up your own business or working for someone else, if you are in a virtual office, you probably enjoy your freedom and flexibility. Companies don’t have to reimburse for travel expenses or gas allowances.
Be proactive and think about the following issues in order to run a successful virtual office:
- Prevent isolation. When you are working at home, by yourself, you can easily feel isolated. If you are a manager with several people reporting to you from different locations, you don’t want them to feel isolated either. Prevent this from happening by scheduling meetings regularly, either by phone, chat rooms or teleconferences, so that you and/or your employees are able to interact with each other. Even if it’s only for status updates, you all won’t feel as lonely.
- Develop some discipline. Practice good working habits and encourage those traits in others. It’s a good idea to get up in the morning and shower at your regular time, have a good breakfast and, most importantly, get dressed. Treat your virtual office like the real thing and you will find yourself more productive.
- Keep the television off, set boundaries if family members are present, and stay organized. Make sure you and your workers are properly trained so they can use their laptops and other electronic devices with minimal help.
- Fight the urge to micromanage. If you are managing people from far away, you must trust that they know how to work and conduct themselves in a professional manner. Telecommuting isn’t for everyone. You have to have a certain level of self-discipline and self-motivation to work from home. If there are coworkers in your company who don’t possess these things, then a virtual office is not for them. If you have hired trustworthy and self-motivated employees, manage by mutual faith. Communicate regularly about tasks, assignments, and due dates. Then allow them to get it done.
- Invest in an online intranet. Search online and you will find there are many options for running a private, virtual office that allows you to interact with co-workers more productively.
- Choose an application that allows you to post documents in a simple and straightforward way. You can supply yourself and coworkers with e-mail addresses that support attachments in a way that browser-based E-mails do not. There are also chat rooms and bulletin boards.
- Don’t overdue virtual meetings. Virtual meeting rooms allow co-workers and customers to interact with one another from their own computers. This is a great application that allows those who are invited to join in meetings and keep those out who aren’t invited. It stays private and you are able to share documents, presentations, and websites with all those in attendance.
But don’t go crazy. Remember that meetings, carefully spaced apart, can be helpful, but too many can be a hindrance to productivity. Use it more for those spur-of-the-moment meetings and brainstorming sessions.
- Keep an online calendar. It’s a challenge to coordinate your schedule with coworkers who work all over the city, country, or world. Online calendars take away much of that frustration. You are able to easily share all or parts of your schedule with whomever you choose. Free services where you provide only a small amount of personal information allow you to access and maintain your calendar easily.
- Create different calendars and enter your events into them one at a time. You can make them single entries or recurring events, such as weekly staff meetings. Enter important birthdays and anniversaries in order to keep relations friendly as well as professional.
- You can even merge items between your personal calendars as well as the event and professional calendars. Once you feel comfortable, start publishing at least a month ahead of time. This is a great way to see what everyone else is doing and how productive your virtual office has become.
View and update your schedule from any computer that has access to the Internet. Some even include a to-do list and contact manager. These and e-mail reminders are especially handy if you travel often.
- Speaking of traveling, you can download your calendars into personal information managers (PIM) and smartphones. Managers often require employees to accept or decline invitations to meetings with these calendars and that only encourages them to use it more often. It might take a bit to get them started, but once they do, they will be hooked.
3/30/2009
