Remember the article on remote working our London partners wrote a good few weeks ago? The article focuses on the pros and cons of working remotely, including on the challenges managers face when coordinating staff working in different locations.
As a continuation, they recently published a new article, this time about the technology that allows professionals to work from anywhere, easily and cost-effectively.
Quoting:
"Managing staff who are remote from your own location can seem like a daunting prospect, but with clear ground rules and the right set of technologies, more and more companies are realising the advantages a remote workforce can offer."
"Take our company, Marrable Services Limited, for example. Our key staff all work primarily from home, talking over Skype several times a day and working together on proposals and presentations via Google Apps for Business. We use an Internet-based CRM system ... which we can all access and update, and we call upon support services, such as accountancy, PR and Marketing from companies based in London and Nottingham. Most of all, however, we use a remote software delivery company based in Romania (Qubiz) to deliver our software solutions to all our clients ..."
The article goes on presenting the reasons so few companies take advantage of a remote workforce. One of the problems is trust (are our staff really working?), another one has to do with technology, which can be complicated, and finally, we might add that sometimes the issue has to do with company culture.
The good news is that remote communication technology is getting easier to use and more ubiquitous year after year. Almost any "regular" company uses Skype, Google Docs and a cloud data storage service such as Dropbox, so employing remote professionals is sometimes only a matter of will.
At Qubiz, we often use Skype for video/voice communication, the whole Google Apps for Work suite for collaboration & communication, Basecamp for task management and Jira & TFS for project planning & tracking.
Read the whole article to learn about other super useful tools that enable remote collaboration.