Effective collaboration is the key to successful remote working – ultimately, if you can’t do your job as effectively while away from the office then remote working isn’t working.
Here’s why the cloud is key to effective collaboration – along with a reliable conference call provider.
January seems like the ideal month to work from home – dark mornings, dark nights, cold busy commutes – who wouldn’t want to avoid all that?!
But when you work from home, it can be all too easy to blur the lines between work-life and home-life, which can not only kill productivity, but can also make you feel like you never get a break from work.
So here are five top tips to separate business and pleasure.
Ever considered working from home? Not sure how to broach the subject with your boss? Or maybe you’re an employer wondering whether it’s something you can realistically offer employees? In any case, it’s almost Work From Home Week, which means now is the perfect time to find out whether telecommuting can work for you.
If you’re unsure about the benefits of working from home, you’re considering offering employees the opportunity, or even thinking of pulling existing work from home benefits, here’s why you should get involved in next week’s awareness campaign.
As a business owner, you’ll be keen to attract and retain the best talent, and offering employees the chance to work from home is a good way to go about it – not only will your people appreciate the flexibility, it could actually increase productivity.
But before you offer staff the chance to work remotely, you need to make sure it’s right for your business and ease your way into it – here’s how…
If you want to successfully work from home, you need to make sure you have the all the same equipment, apps, and logins you have in the office – there are few things more frustrating than spending half the day trying get things up and running, and constantly phoning IT to make sure you have the right logins.
So once you’ve got the work laptop sorted and the VPN, here are some essential work from home apps to make your work from home life even easier…
We all want our employees to be as productive as possible, and finding the right work/life balance can be key to keeping employees happy – and happy employees are generally more productive.
The trouble is, finding the right work/life balance can be tricky – while having the option of working from home will be enough for some, remote working doesn’t agree with everyone, even though advances in mobile technology mean that working from anywhere is easier than ever before.
So, how can you improve the work/life balance of your employees?
How engaged are your employees? If your staff are kept motivated and challenged, either as part of the work itself or the culture your business is built upon, and feel valued, then there’s a good chance there will be high levels of employee engagement.
Similarly, if your product or service is something everyone believes in and can get behind, then it’s likely that engagement levels will be high and staff will work hard and pull in the same direction.
But what if employee engagement is low and staff appear to lack motivation? Here’s how to improve employee engagement.
Global warming could be a more pressing problem than initially thought. A long-term forecasts from the Met Office have revealed that temperatures could temporarily reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time between now and 2023 – levels we weren’t expected to reach until between 2030 and 2052.
It’s a problem we all need to tackle, and here’s how conference calling can help fight climate.
There are loads of positives to freelancing and working remotely, not least that you can fit your work schedule around other priorities in life – doing away with the nine-to-five means freelancing can be particularly good for parents, who have to factor school runs and childcare into the working day.
A study from Kalido, a professional networking app, has found that as many as half (50%) of all workers are expected to turn freelance in the next two years. It also found that almost two-thirds (64%) of UK-based businesses currently rely on freelance workers in some capacity; and over a third (39%) of business owners predict that their use of freelancers will grow faster than their number of permanent hires in the next five years.
On the face of it, this is great for everyone’s life/work balance, but there’s evidence to suggest that a growth in remote working could lead to an increase in mental health issues, particularly for those who work alone at home.
If you’re a new parent, or you’ve ever had to juggle a job with a baby or a toddler, you’ll know just how much of a hassle it can be.
If you’ve ever worked freelance, had last-minute jobs land on your lap and chase clients for payments, you’ll know how much hassle that can be too.
If you’ve ever done both, it may have surprised you to learn that both can work perfectly together.