Does your business phone system promote teleworking?

Winter weather, increasingly deep potholes, rising gas prices and distracted drivers can all make the daily commute not only a grind but also a gamble.  Imagine your employees signing onto e-mail an hour earlier because their morning commute is from one room in their house to another, or signing on at all during a winter storm.  Imagine the competitive advantage you would have when your employees are available to customer calls during a snowstorm while your competitor’s employees are stuck at home.

Teleworking is becoming more common, and more businesses are testing the waters because the benefits are just too numerous to ignore.  Employee productivity and satisfaction tends to rise with telework, and this means you retain valuable employees because you offer a benefit that they may not find elsewhere. Telework also lets you recruit talent from a more diverse and a wider area; in fact physical and geographic limitations can disappear, and this means your hiring options increase. Absentee rates and office costs decrease while the work day and service reach of your business expands with telework. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

Some employees don’t succeed when teleworking because the office offers a quieter environment for them to work than their home, or because they lack the self-discipline to work without supervision.  Some companies don’t succeed because they fail to set guidelines and policies around communications and responsiveness. Ultimately though, the barrier to telework for many organizations is technical.

Successful telework requires remote collaboration, and this means having a versatile multi-modal communications system.  Your employees need to be able to easily communicate both individually and in groups so you need a business phone system with free conference bridging.  Your phone system needs to be able to forward calls; a hosted VoIP phone system can put you in control so you can direct calls where you want them. And remember that diverse talent you were going to recruit from a wider geographic area? You need a business phone system without geographic limitations. VoIP technology lets you hire a teleworker in another state without worrying about incurring traditional long-distance phone charges.

Technology can offer business advantages like a remote workforce, meaning a smaller overhead because you don’t have to maintain a large office. VoIP technology can also offer business advantages like lower business phone costs, greater connectivity and features such as voicemail to e-mail, or an online customer portal.  If you’re thinking about telework for your business and wondering how a VoIP business phone system can help, contact us and we’ll help you get started.