20th September sees Work Wise Week 2010 including National Work from Home Day (24th). This week aims to highlight the significant benefits to employers, their employees and those self-employed for adopting a smarter working policy.
While no one argues that there are tangible advantages to working at home for both employees and businesses – UK organizations, especially within the SME market, are slow to adopt these policies, perhaps because home working has traditionally involved ‘back office’ tasks such as report writing, documentation or filing and where home workers are seen as mostly ‘off-line’.
There are many recognised advantages to the business including: reduced accommodation and energy costs making the business greener, increased productivity and employee retention, decreased level of employee sickness. Allowing an employee to home work with flexible hours also allows that business to tap into a new resource of skilled workers that they would not have had access to, for example working executive mothers.
BT, an early adopter of flexible working, says that UK’s smaller businesses recognise that flexible working policies can positively impact on their organisation, with 65% citing staff motivation and 50% increased productivity as key reasons to adopt them.
There are benefits to the employee as well; such as greater flexibility of working hours, reduced cost and stress of commute and a better work / life balance.
So where does VoIP fit in?
Advances in technology more recently, including the increase of low cost broadband connectivity with increasing speeds and reliability, access to email and internet and cloud computing has meant that fully functional home working is a real possibility even to remote communities.
This, in turn with the adoption of VoIP by businesses, means that home workers can function as front-line staff as if they were in the office, no longer constrained to back-office tasks. As far as other team members and clients alike are concerned, home workers may as well be sat at an office desk.
When working from home an employee’s IP phone (or softphone) is the equivalent of a fully functional office extension.
The benefits being that the home worker can:
- Show their ‘presence’ and see the presence of all their colleagues
- Transfer calls to appropriate colleagues or hunt groups
- Have access to company directories
- Divert their phone
- Set up appropriate ‘follow-me’ rules
- Still be part of the office hunt groups
- Instant message colleagues
- Incur no additional call costs, with calls to and from the office being free of charge – even if ‘home working’ whilst on holiday abroad!
In fact the home worker should feel no different to being sat behind the desk in the office – except they the peace of their home environment and have saved themselves time and money in travel and save their employers office space, business rates and energy costs.
VoIP solutions for small businesses
500 offer two types of VoIP solutions. 500 Premises is our premises-based solution, meaning a business owns the IP PBX system.
The second solution is our 500 Hosted, for businesses that prefer to outsource telephony requirements, instead only paying for their telephony on a ‘per user, per month’ basis rather than the capital outlay. Either function perfectly for home working.
There are advantages to both and the best solution is determined by the requirements of an individual business. 500 is always able to advise.
Work smarter…
Work Wise Week 2010 represents an ideal opportunity to explore how your business can boost productivity and efficiency during these financially challenging times, by implementing smarter working practices.
VoIP takes these work practices a step further, ensuring every home worker is an integrated member of the organisation. Technology is no longer a barrier for flexible home working; it is the enabler of it. It is the time for employers to take the initiative.
If you have any questions or need further information then call us on 0845 0000 500, or alternatively fill in our Contact Form.
