Teleworking: It's green, makes sense & saves money

Teleworking: It's green, makes sense & saves money

With the price of gasoline fast approaching $5 a gallon many workers are taking a hard look at the cost of a long commute to work every day. Since your employees are your most valuable asset it can make a lot of sense to offer some sort of remote or “teleworking” option.

Fortunately, with the flexibility offered by today’s VoIP technologies, these solutions have become both cost-effective and relatively easy to deploy.

What do we mean by “teleworking?” The term can encompass many different applications. I’ll limit this discussion to a couple of the more basic applications which allow people to work remotely. I’ll point up the potential benefits of solutions that permit workers to perform their daily tasks from home and cover some solutions that allow a user’s wireless device to become an extension on your company’s network.

EPA figures indicate that if just 10 percent of North America’s workforce teleworked just one day a week, we could conserve nearly 5 million gallons of fuel per month. Recent SMB surveys undertaken in the United Kingdom indicate that 65 percent of small businesses cite a 50 percent increase in staff motivation and productivity as a result of having instituted flexible work arrangements.

Furthermore, nearly 40 percent of employees surveyed indicated a willingness to forgo pay increases in favor of the ability to work from home a few days a week.

Teleworking can reduce the need for unnecessary corporate travel by keeping teams, workflows and the communications devices that support them connected. More advanced solutions can manage all communications from one application including presence, instant messaging, telephony, video, and messaging. Implementing teleworking solutions can literally allow your company to “meet globally, stay locally.”

Do you run a call center? Globally, 6.5 million contact center agents generate 9.2 million tons of carbon dioxide by commuting, the equivalent of 6.2 million acres of forest. Contact center teleworking solutions can allow companies to scale their contact center without increasing overhead. Companies can now recruit new agents outside their geographic area of operation.

Part-time call center employees would no longer have to deal with the hassle and expense of a commute to work for just a few hours a day. They could simply log in via a home broadband connection and a PC and work just as if they were in a traditional call center environment. You may even be able to eliminate the physical call center entirely.

With a VoIP phone in the employee’s home office, he is literally “on” your network. Calls are sent directly to that person’s extension and handled just as if they were in a traditional work environment. Access to company voice mail is likewise unaffected by the physical location of the worker. Calls can be transferred to other departments or staff, conference calls can be made, and with VoIP no additional phone company cost is incurred by using these applications.

You’re simply dialing an internal extension number and not a traditional “outside” telephone call. To a VoIP network, the actual location of the dialed extension is irrelevant. As long as the extension is on your network, the system doesn’t care if it is down the hall, across the street, on the other side of the country or the other side of the world.

Another related teleworking application is sometimes known as a “Road Warrior” feature. Several VoIP providers offer this application. Basically, what these do is make any telephony device, such as a cell phone or a Blackberry, an extension on your company’s network.

When someone dials your employee’s desk number the call is automatically forwarded to whatever device that worker happens to be using. This sounds like a basic “call forwarding” feature. But on a VoIP platform, the device functions as if it were the phone on your worker’s desk back at the office.

Your “Road Warrior” can place the call on hold, transfer the call to another extension on your network, or use almost any other feature you designate. Missed calls are sent to your company voice mail network, not the cellular voice mail.

Your customers only need be given one number to contact your “Road Warrior”. The days of business cards with three or four numbers on it to reach one person are over. This can lead to fewer missed calls, increased revenue, higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention and an increase in your bottom line. In today’s highly competitive business environment those are very good things indeed.

In short, teleworking offers very real, tangible and quantifiable benefits not only to your employees but also to your customers and your bottom line. It also offers a way for you to show that your company is making a serious commitment to conserving our natural resources while improving the quality of life for your most important asset; your people.

Finding good employees is hard. Keeping them can be harder. Teleworking can help you do both.

Bruce Elmore is a communications consultant with Telcom Innovations Group in Itasca. He has been in the telcom industry for more than 10 years and is a seasoned “Road Warrior” himself. Contact him at belmore@ask-tig.com or at 630-616-4252.

Posted on Sunday, July 27, 2008 (Archive on Sunday, August 03, 2008)
Posted by jstoltz Contributed by jstoltz

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