Recently in Telecommuting Category

Many business people have questions about the proper etiquette to use when hosting or participating in a conference call. While many have weighed in on this issue, there is no one set of definitive rules governing proper conduct of a conference event. We would like to offer the following suggestions as guidelines for consideration by anyone required to host/moderate or requested to participate on a conference call.

Guidelines for hosts / moderators:

Video conferencing continues to gain currency as organizations are forced to constantly wring more efficiencies out of smaller and geographically distributed staffs. Conferencing in general is an effective alternative to travel because it eliminates cost and time lost in transit. Video conferencing provides some benefits that other types of conferencing (audio and web) do not, particularly the added intimacy and sense of expression that comes from the participants actually seeing each other onscreen.

Video conferences are an extremely effective form of communication when they are conducted well. Conversely, they can be an unintelligible mess of distraction and garbled communication if best practices are not followed. There are several forms of video conferencing available in the marketplace today including handheld and desktop device based methods as well as room-based video conferencing. The best practices below are intended for room-based video conferencing although many of them apply to the other forms as well.

Best practices are as follows:

We think it's important to provide some perspective to the discussion about Marissa Mayer's decision to quash Yahoo's teleworking policy. It appears that telecommuting is alive and well, at least at other employers in the Silicon Valley, as evidenced by a Silicon Valley Business Journal Survey of Valley Companies.

Earth Day is an annual event that has been observed on April 22 every year since 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Don't worry, that isn't a setup to preach about the importance of doing your individual part in observance of Earth Day, although there's nothing wrong with that.

Earth Day is one of those events that most of us have heard about, but find easy to forget until someone or something brings it to our attention again. Let's face it — every day we all have to prioritize the competing demands for our attention and energy. And lately, there certainly hasn't been a lack of important challenges and issues confronting every person and every business.

Looks like we were just slightly ahead of news trends on the subject of Telecommuting with our January and February blog articles. Thanks to Yahoo's recent policy memo, obtained and published by tech blog All Things D, the subject of telecommuting has suddenly jumped to the forefront of news for many leading general and business media news outlets.

If you are looking for recent industry trends and data on work-place telecommuting, look no further than the July 2012 article in the Industry Market Trends (IMT) blog at ThomasNet.com News: Working Together by Working Apart: The Telecommuting Culture by Ilya Leybovich, which very nicely summarizes a wealth of data on telecommuting from many different sources, including an Ipsos/Reuters poll of over 11,000 people in 24 countries, including the United States. Here is just a small sampling from that January 2012 survey that reflects impacts on worker efficiency and employee morale:

One of the ironies of the vast amount of online information available to help managers and business owners is that with so many sources, it can be difficult to keep up with the most recent information on any given subject. A recent article at smallbiztrends.com provides a summary of some of the latest findings on the benefits and challenges of telecommuting. Topics covered included cost savings, workplace efficiency, employee job satisfaction, the latest in work-at-home trends, establishing data security for remote workers, and a lot more. There are also links to the information sources if you want to do a deeper dive. The overall message is pretty clear - if you are willing to take the right steps and safeguards when enabling telecommuting within your workforce, it can be a win-win for both you and your employees who would like the option to work remotely.

Two Rivers offers a wide range of tools that are designed for your remote work force, including Audio Teleconferencing, Web conferencing, and Video Conferencing. To find out more, and let us help you choose the right service for your team, contact us today.