What common business practice will horrify our kids someday?
Answer:
THE OFFICE.
Work will be where we want.
Remember when we had to work in offices?
“We can’t let our employees work from home, or they won’t work hard.” Managers tell me this often, at which at point I tell them to fire those employees immediately. If the only thing that is preventing someone from devolving into a Netflix binge-watching slacker is the physical geography of your office, you’ve hired the wrong person.
In 20 years, we’ll laugh at the idea that work could only be accomplished in a cubicle after a soul-crushing commute and aggressively terrible break-room coffee.
The office will never completely die, and face-to-face interaction will forever offer things virtuality cannot, but the office will transform into an occasional reconnection point, not a five-days-a-week destination.
Instead of saying, “I’ve got to go to work,” we’ll say, “I’ve got to work,” and then we will– wherever it is that we find ourselves.
–Written by Jon Acuff @ acuffme.com, Originally posted in Time Magazine’s Question Everything series, Acuff is a career expert and the author of Do Over.
Productivity is Not Directly Proportional to Hours Worked
If business owners need additional incentive to allow employees to work remotely, then the good news is that research shows that productivity is not directly proportional to hours worked. Instead of acting like the productivity police and grilling employees about wasting time at work, Human Resource departments should be focusing on-
- Meeting deadlines and performance metrics
- Responsiveness and availability during business hours
- Manager, coworker & customer feedback on quality of work and collaboration initiatives
How to Ensure Productivity When Working Remotely
The first step to ensuring employees are being productive when working remotely is by providing them with the necessary systems and applications to do so. This includes a teleworking business phone system that includes wifi desk phones and softphones, chat, presence, call transfers, extension dialing, voicemail (voicemail to email, voicemail transcription), SMS texting, video conferencing and web collaboration, virtual faxing and mobile apps.
The teleworking business phone system should also satisfy the management side, so Admins can run call and messaging reports, review call recordings, and review complete transcriptions of chat messages.
How to Implement a Teleworking Business Phone System for Remote Employees
ACC Telecom specializes in teleworking business phone systems, including cloud business phone systems that specifically allow employees to stay connected to the office and clients any where- at any time. Our VoIP and cloud based business phone systems transform your mobile device into an extension of your office desk phone and offer similar features such as:
- Mobile app for iOS or Android
- One-touch Buttons for Call Transferring to Coworker Extensions
- Instant Messaging (IM) & Group Chat
- SMS Text Messaging
- Presence w/ status updates
- Video Conferencing and Web Collaboration
- Business Conference Calling
- CRM, E-mail & Fax synchronization
- Business Visual Voicemail & Voicemail Transcription
- Unified Communications & Unified Messaging
- AI capabilities
- and more!
Learn how ACC can help your employees become even more productive by learning more about our virtual business phone systems.
ACC Telecom is a leading provider of voice and data communications and surveillance solutions for Maryland, Washington DC and Northern VA, with recent expansion nationwide with our VoIP National Accounts Program. Over the span of multiple decades, ACC Telecom has specialized in business phone systems, security camera systems, low-voltage cabling, overhead paging systems, carrier services, contact center software, mass/emergency notifications systems, and so much more. Please contact ACC Telecom to request service or a quote for a new cloud based phone system.