How remote working can boost your business

Advantages of remote working

Remote working is a business activity carried out outside the physical facilities of the company. Employees usually use the Internet or remote access to the computers located in the offices is enabled.

Remote working has a number of features, including:

• It can be done from anywhere.

• Allows flexible schedules.

• In most cases, the Internet is used, since online internal communication tools are used to stay in contact with the team and other colleagues.

These would be the most global characteristics of remote working. Next, we are going to focus on its advantages:

For employees:

• They enjoy more spare time. By eliminating commuting to the workplace, they have more time for themselves, and they can make better use of their time.

• Improves life quality. By having flexible schedules and more free time, stress is reduced and life quality is significantly improved.

• They have a greater motivation, since normally when one works from home, an objectives plan is drafted.

• They spend less money, because they don’t need to use any means of transport or eating out.

• They can better reconcile family, working and social life. By having more time, they can spend it with their family or make plans with friends.

For the company:

• By saving the expenses of maintaining physical facilities and the equipment for an office the costs are considerably reduced. This saving can be invested, for example, in recruiting more staff or in raising the salary of workers, so they would have greater motivation and perform their work more efficiently.

• Not having a physical office where they carry out their commercial activity implies that they have the possibility of a greater geographic expansion.

• Normally, since there is not such direct supervision, one works by objectives. This increases the productivity and motivation of the workers.

• Reduces the possible confrontation between workers. Sometimes the environment in the office can be stressful and this can lead to minor conflicts between workers.

• By eliminating the commuting of workers, and the consumption of electricity in the office, organizations contribute to reducing the environmental impact.

Tools for an efficient remote working

To carry out remote working efficiently, different tools can be used:

• One of the most important points when it comes to remote working is internal communication. A fluid internal communication between workers is necessary. There are many tools that allow you to have this communication easily, through messages, voice or video calls.

• A good virtual switchboard is also important to keep track of incoming and outgoing calls. There’s the possibility of keep this control with different tools to get call statistics and make a study out of them.

• Team management. When working for objectives, the team must be properly managed, distributing tasks equally to all workers so that they have the same workload. A very useful tool to manage this is Trello. Each worker would have a profile, and each task would have a card, which the worker could change as he progresses, editing the different columns found on the platform (objectives, in progress, pending review, completed, etc.)

• There is the possibility to virtualize the desktop and application, as well as enabling remote access to the computers located in the office with UDS Enterprise. This solution provides access to all applications, programs and user data, so that they can use the same tools as they have in the company’s facilities from any place and device.

• Another key point would be data storage in the cloud. When group work is carried out, files are shared. It is important to be well-organized and be aware of the changes made by the other people in the group. There are many well-known tools to help with these tasks, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

The goal of implementing remote working is being able to carry out the same activities as in an office easily, from anywhere and at any time. One of the biggest issues is connectivity, since the company has to ensure a good quality connection for all its workers. There are very complete systems, which offer all the tools that we have mentioned for internal and external communication, the control of working hours, the possibility of making video calls, messages and voice calls, both with clients and among workers. The ideal would be to have a switchboard that works completely in the cloud. All these tools would have to be truly easy to access from a browser without the need to download any software or perform any installation.

To sum up, if you’d like to adopt remote working, either for a greater cause such as the Coronavirus crisis, or because you prefer not to work in an office, the key is using the right technology. It has to be a powerful one, so that the employees would feel comfortable, it helps make it easy to carry out their tasks and to facilitate contact with customers. It is essential to choose the tools that best suit your business model to carry out your activity in the most efficient way.

Author: Ana López