Written by Harry Grant
The idea that a person must go to a physical office where they have a computer and phone to do their job is slowly fading. Neil Shah with the Wall Street Journal states that more than 13 million people work at home at least one day a week. Technology and flexible work structures mean more people will work remotely instead of in a prefab office cube. Companies are beginning to see how this new work culture can benefit them due to the following changes.
Location Doesn’t Matter
When companies looked for top talent in the past, they were forced to bring them to their physical location or settle for whoever they could find locally. When you are not anchored to a physical office, your resources can come from around the world, writes Nick Levitan for Business 2 Community. You can reach out to great people across the planet to contribute to your company’s success.
The Tools Are Where the Employee Is
Mobile devices, fast network connections and cloud-based collaboration tools are available to staff wherever they work. They need not come into the office to have access to the tools they use in their job. Office tools are available through Google Docs and cloud storage through Dropbox or Microsoft Skydrive. Applications that an employee needs,such as customer management through Zoho and address standardization through QAS, are available online .
Employees Can Extend Your Reach
Working from home or virtual office spaces allows your staff to manage a number of tasks from customer visits to account review and reconciliation. A sales manager visits a customer to discuss changes in a service contract and tells them they’ll send them the new contract once they get back to the office to make changes. “Back to the office” could be across the street in a coffee shop, at home, or even in their car.
Redefine Work Life Balance
Employees gain better flexibility when they have the choice of where and when they work. Randy Myers writes in Entrepreneur that employees can integrate their work and life and not see one as affecting the quality of the other. They have higher productivity when they can take care of personal matters when they need to and focus on business at other hours of the day.
Emphasizing milestones and deadlines instead of monitoring hourly activity can increase productivity. In the physical office setting, people are required to be at their top performance from 8am to 5pm. Some employees may work best from 6am to noon or 3pm to 9pm. Flexible schedules let companies tap into the peak productivity hours of an employee.
Preparing for Challenges
Companies using the virtual office concept, flexible schedules and distributed resources do face some challenges. The first is that you’ve now moved your company from an 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday operation to one that works around the clock. Staff will be connecting at various times of the day. Customers a continent away will have better access to the company through it’s decentralized staff.
This means a support structure will need to be in place to manage requests that come from anywhere and any time. A staff member in Manila, Philippines working with a client needs to know how much of a discount they can give the client for a volume order. This might be a decision traditionally done in the “home office” in the U.S. If you’re not prepared for this global workforce, you may lose business, and clients.
