With the recent snow days across England I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss what cost the weather brings to businesses. The news mentions figures of up to 500 million pounds a day loss to the UK economy, what can we do to reduce this figure?
Using IT there are ways that you can continue to work even if you are not in the office. Firstly if you have a good telephone system you can have calls diverted through to mobiles or even through to VOIP extensions running from home handsets or even laptops, this can allow staff to work from home. Fusion use an Asterisks based VOIP system and also Microsoft Lync server for our telephony, both these products allow you to have a versatile communications system that can easily cater for acts of god!
Once you have sorted out your telephones the next part of the puzzle is to work out how you are going to provide access to your office systems remotely, this can be done via numerous ways. We could use a VPN, Remote Desktop, Citrix, Direct Access or even a mixture of these technologies. Essentially all these technologies enable you to get access to your office over the internet, this means all you need is access to the internet to work, be it over broadband or 3G data dongle.
Personally as a director of Fusion I have a home office, I can work from there just as effectively as I can from the office. In fact I would probably argue that I get more done working from home as there are not as many distractions, that said I also like to keep myself in the loop in terms of day to day issues that I probably wouldn’t know much about unless I was in the office. With Microsoft Lync and phones with cameras we can now still have face to face conversations when we are not in the same city or even country for that matter!
Would you like to make your company weather proof? Or do you suffer from lack of connectivity to the office? Give us a call we are always happy to discuss your options.
