Virtual Office

For the last few years the internet and those whose work relies on it have been abuzz about how technology makes it possible to work from a virtual office. A small business can be based in the owner’s home without losing professionalism and large companies can reap huge benefits from having employees work from home. It saves money on office space and supplies, saves employees from stress and commuting time that bites into their efficiency and the flexibility means that a business can attract the workers who will be best at their job, even if they live farther away or have other time commitments, like most busy families.

Well, someone seems to have bucked the trend. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has told employees that it’s time to return to the office. Mayer pointed out in her memo that informal, unplanned interaction between people in the elevator or in the office kitchen is often the catalyst for the best creativity and innovation.

But she’s gotten a lot of criticism for the decision.  Many say that this kind of inflexibility is what keeps women underrepresented in the highest levels of the work force while plenty of people who work from home tout their efficiency when working without the distractions of an office.

There are clearly pros and cons. The question seems to be whether or not Ms. Mayer is espousing this as a philosophy for life and as a cut and dry permanent policy or whether it’s a decision based on the specific situation at the specific company with specific employees. Mayer is a new CEO coming from outside to a company that’s known for its bloat. This may be the best way for her to see exactly what’s going on up close and she may loosen the policy little by little.

Thanks to technologies like VoIP, online fax, video-conferencing and email, working from home is completely viable for most office workers. But that doesn’t mean that it’s most comfortable or efficient. While some people may get three times the amount of work done at home, others need a built-in working environment with the ability to interact casually and think out loud with their colleagues. There’s no right answer but the question of which will be the default scenario is still up for discussion and debate.

Pushing the answer toward the virtual office side however, are plenty of new technologies still being developed. Team Space, for example, is a program that tries to recreate office dynamics all online. Each employee has their own “office space” labeled on a diagram of a customizable virtual office. There are numerous ways to talk to people and you can “knock” on someone’s “office door” or “close it” for privacy when you begin a conversation, just as you might in a real office. And now it’s available for iPad, yet another development that is contributing to the phenomenon of flexible work space.

Will these technologies be enough to make up for what Marissa Mayer was missing at Yahoo? Weigh in below!

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

The phrase has been going through my head all day as I appreciate the wonders and the pitfalls of working-from-home days. I’ve followed all of the standard advice and after a while I’ve learned that sometimes you just need to follow no advice at all and do what comes naturally. In the past I’ve gotten up at the same time every day, gotten dressed in respectable, but comfortable, clothing and entered my permanent workspace to get stuff done. But without coworker’s intrusions to shake things up sometimes, all but the most inspired will get bored eventually. And with boredom, distraction is allowed to enter.

A quick lunch break turns into a gourmet cooking project or an extended errands expedition. After all, if I’m out already then getting other trips out of the way is the most efficient. I’m just being responsible, really. Turning on music when I notice myself daydreaming, turns into an hour long mission to create the perfect working playlist. All in the name of efficiency.

So today, I tried something new. After sleeping in a bit, I went straight to where the laptop had been left on the couch after last night’s viewing of web TV and immediately dove in. No business-like workspace, no taking off of slippers. No letting the need to be disciplined help me to procrastinate. And the work went better than it has in weeks. I then joined a friend outside a nearby coffee shop where she worked on her laptop and I worked on mine. It was noisy, expensive and I ate a chocolate chip muffin that really doesn’t fit on my diet, but I continued to work better than I have in weeks. The weather was glorious and I’m still holding on to the fact that one muffin is better than the constant munching habit I’d been picking up recently when I have easy access to my own kitchen.

And so by ignoring all the warnings against distracting locales and undisciplined behavior, I got back the glory of the virtual office and overcame some of the pitfalls.

Unfortunately, I also discovered a few more pitfalls in the process. One of the major advantages of working in an office is access to the IT department. But when a personal laptop gets cranky, it’s up to you to figure it out. When I left my wireless mouse behind at home, I discovered just how much one can appreciate a supply closet and how a touchpad can be stubborn in its strange combination of oversensitivity and ignoring your fingers.

People (and in large part, that means the internet) can give you all the advice you want about the correct approach to utilizing a virtual office. At the end of the day, how disciplined or flexible you need to be to make it work is entirely personal. There’s no right answer and sometimes even your personal right answer will change from month to month or week to week. And the beauty of a home office is that it can.

But what won’t change is that you probably won’t have the same resources at your disposal as you would in company offices. Whether you’re a small business owner or just working outside of the offices a few days a week, you can usually make up some of the deficit by careful technology choices. It will never quite be the same as having the supply closet and your friendly neighborhood IT guy, but it can help. For some, that may mean nothing more than the choice of a comfortable keyboard (or a good wireless mouse) while others may be able to take advantage of interesting technologies like VoIP or online fax. Here on Consumer-Rankings we’ve tried to help guide you on making those choices. But for today, my advice is to remember not to listen to too much advice and do what works for you.

We all know how technologies like VoIP, video-chat and online fax make it easy to have a virtual office. Stay at home and set up video-conference when it’s time for a meeting. But here’s a new spin on that: Virtual internships.

Some problems with this immediately jump to mind. When I did an internship, one of the great things that I took away was an idea of how an office worked. Although I was given small, basic level assignments as befit an intern, my supervisors made sure that I was also given insight into the project as a whole and the way the business was run. I was allowed to sit in on meetings that weren’t strictly relevant to me and listen in on conversations with clients, even if I wouldn’t be working on their projects. It was those things, just as much as the work I did, that taught me about the field I was thinking of entering. I just don’t know if you can get those things over the phone and from scheduled video conferences.

Once again however, the question depends on the purpose of an internship. Learning about the field before you enter it is the primary goal for some interns, but not all. Others simply want to build up their resume before entering the job search. This does that, since after even a virtual internship a student can prove that they have handled certain tasks.

Another option is to combine virtual internships with another kind of training. Columbia University for example, provides time management and virtual communication training so that students can get the most possible out of their virtual internships.  Some companies take on regular summer interns, but allow students to continue the work throughout the year from home or college campuses. These students have been able to get a look inside the company and can also add a consistent job to their resume and sometimes even get hired full time by the company once they have finished their degree.

At the end of the day however, even a straight-up virtual internship has advantages, primarily for students who may not be able to afford commuting or living far away from their home or dorms. Although this may not be the ideal internship, it is still better than what would have otherwise been available. Virtual internships are also an opportunity for adults who may already be supporting a family, to learn about a new field or set up their resume for a career switch without leaving their jobs.

Bottom line, I think I have to chalk up another point to modern technology. It’s important to be careful not to confuse an in-house internship with a virtual one. The advantages are not the same and serve very different purposes. But they even the playing field. When the job market is tight, every advantage is important to job seekers and those advantages can come at a cost. I can’t argue with a resume booster that requires nothing more than hard work.

I hate paperwork. I know: who doesn’t? But I differentiate between paperwork that gets filled out at the bank or doctor’s office and paperwork that ends up in my pile of unsorted papers at home. If I can check things off, sign it and hand it to someone else to deal with, I’m a happy camper. It’s when things get stuck in my home office that the problems begin.

Besides my tendencies to procrastination and disorganization, I also run into the simple problem of lack of machinery. I’ve been asked to send signed documents, but without a fax machine or scanner that involves an extra errand to a copy store. With the aforementioned tendency to procrastination, that usually means the task will be carefully avoided for the next month, until the paperwork is now out of date and the process has to start from the beginning.

Yesterday, Mashable posted an article with a number of solutions to this problem. These included a number of mobile apps to let you scan documents by taking pictures of them with the camera built into your smartphone. Not only would this solve my equipment problem but these apps are full of great extra tools that might also help with organization. Here are just some of the great things they do:

• Integrate with Dropbox, Mobile.me, Evernote, Google Docs
• Digitize and touchup handwritten documents
• Scan business cards and import the information to your contact lists and LinkedIn account
• Image editing
• Text search within a PDF
• Online fax
• Categorize receipts and coupons and even create expense reports
• Secure email

It’s this kind of thing that makes me consider getting a smartphone. But for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to get an iPhone as a gift this holiday season, Mashable did suggest one more option. Doxie is a portable scanner which looks like a shiny black stick with a slit through the middle to run the page through. It uploads directly to the Cloud and can be accessed by most computers and mobile devices.

Whether or not this kind of thing is enabling my procrastination habit, I have to cheer for it. Here is yet another technology that allows me to avoid changing out of my slippers.

If you check out the VoIP reviews on Consumer-Rankings.com you’ll see some pretty impressive features. Some providers offer toll free numbers, hold music, conference calling and even free fax services. These professional features can make you feel like you’re talking to an important executive in a downtown office, when in fact it’s a small business owner sitting at home in his pajamas. The technological beauty of it is, you get the same service and small business owners don’t have to scrape together rent for a fancy office.

Now a bigger business is turning that around. Plantronics, a California company that makes wireless headsets, has set up their office on the assumption that telecommuting technology can replace coming in to work in the morning. In fact, in their new Santa Cruz office, they haven’t even bothered putting in enough desk space for everyone employed there. Instead, there are giant screens all around the office.

The office is designed so that telecommuting can easily replace any interaction you might have at work. There are rooms set up for small meetings, large meetings and “focus rooms” for working alone.  There are even screens in the cafeteria, I assume so that employees can join their coworkers for lunch.

Plantronic’s European division made the switch to encouraging telecommuting when government orders came in telling them to reduce their carbon footprint. It must have worked out for the best because the Santa Cruz office is doing it in order to make employees more efficient and let them work in the environment that is most comfortable for them.

At first, this sounded great to me: I could get errands done when I needed, work out in the middle of the day and waste no time traveling. On the other hand, mobility makes it difficult to draw the line between work and personal life. Although for me personally, the bigger fear would be that putting on shoes would start to feel like an imposition.

In 2011, one could say that fax machines are a thing of the past; and they would have a point. Who wants to use so much paper anymore? That’s why so many businesses are switching to online fax services or E-Fax. E-fax is a service that allows you to send and receive faxes through the internet (digitally) without the use of an actual fax machine. For companies trying to keep up with the technology today or a company that’s going “green” this is a great service to have. I’d like to take this one step further. How about having your E-Fax service connected to your mobile devices? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send a receive faxes while away from your PC?

A Smartphone, net book, tablet or laptop are all mobile devices that come with 3G and/or wifi. Once you are connected to the internet with these devices, you will have the ability to send and receive faxes through these mobiles. Why is this so important? The first reason is because we are not always at the office or near an actual fax machine and sometimes thing are pertinent. Having E-fax on your mobile device provides you with the liberty to work from home and be away without the stress that you can’t be reached. Say you have a client that needs something urgently but still uses a classic fax machine. They can send you a fax from their analog source (classic fax machine) and you can receive the forms digitally. Secondly, it’s a cost efficient way to communicate with your customers. With a conventional fax machine, you need paper, ink and toner which can add up. You also won’t have an extra phone line to pay for. Since E-fax is sent digitally through the internet, it won’t take up your phone line as it would with a classic fax machine. You are still able to talk on you mobile while receiving or sending a fax. Having your online Fax Service “mobilized” is something you won’t regret because it will save you time and money. Isn’t that the bottom of business?

Few would argue that the primary goals of a virtual PBX are to provide a small business owner with a professional telephone answering service and to reduce the costs associated with other useful telephone services. But in developing and marketing today’s virtual office services, many companies have masked these fundamental goals by offering a laundry list of ‘fantastic’ features that may detract consumers from determining which services they really need. As savvy consumers and business owners, however, it is our obligation to see through these marketing ploys, so that we don’t overpay for services we really won’t use.

Still, while many virtual PBX features may seem extraneous, there are some ‘extras’ that can be surprisingly useful. Here are 5 virtual office features that can contribute greatly to the professionalism and efficiency of any small business.

1. Call recording. Even if you think that you’ll never need to record a call, you may be amazed at how useful this feature can be when making verbal agreements- and making sure that they are implemented properly.
2. Calling cards. You may not be traveling a lot (or at all) for business right now, but even for the once a year that you go on vacation, having the ability to use your virtual PBX service from anywhere can really be useful, and can save you money on your travel phone bills.
3. Call logs. While you may not be concerned about using your call logs to keep track of your minute usage, call logs can be useful for looking up lost or misplaced phone number of people that have called in- or that you’ve called and need to contact again.
4. Call handling rules. Sure, it’s nice to forget about work when you’re away from your desk. Unfortunately, small business owners often don’t have that luxury, as a missed call can mean lost business. When set up properly on your virtual PBX, call handling rules enable you to reroute your business calls to your cell phone, your home phone, or any other phone that you desire, so that you are always available when your clients need you.
5. Email and SMS voicemail delivery. It may be easy to press the play button on your answering machine, but that requires standing near the machine. With email voicemail delivery, you can receive messages from your virtual office service wherever you have internet access, which is incredibly convenient for small business owners who don’t spend much time sitting at their desk.

Congratulations, you’ve decided to open up a small business! Whether it’s your first foray into the business world or you’re an experienced entrepreneur, you’re probably already thinking about startup expenses and the costs associated with financing a small business.  With so many factors to consider, small business finance can be extremely stressful (if not downright overwhelming).  Fortunately, there are many new services and technological advances that can keep small business expenses to a minimum.   Here are five of our favorites- we hope that they’ll help you launch a successful and financially stable business.

1. Virtual Office Services. Most businesses require a voicemail, a fax machine and a telephone plan.  They may also require multiple extensions, an auto-attendant (automated “receptionist”), conference calling and other upgraded phone service features.  With a virtual office package, all of these services can be purchased for a low monthly fee.  If you want to create a professional image without spending a fortune on individual services, a virtual office should be on your list of necessities when financing your small business.
2. Do-it-Yourself Websites. These days, every business needs a great-looking website.  And, while you can hire an expensive design and programming team, there are also many websites that enable business owners to build their own website at a significantly reduced price.  Do-it-yourself websites can support everything from ecommerce platforms to artistic portfolios and can enhance the professionalism of any enterprise.
3. Online Backups. The last thing any business owner wants to worry about is losing vital information in a computer crash or chance act of nature.  Keeping an online backup is a great way to protect your business’s important information.  If your company doesn’t have many files from its inception, you can begin with a free online backup service, and expand to a paid subscription when you’ve amassed enough files.  This can be a great way to save money while making sure that your data is protected.
4. Reliable accounting. If you’re the creative genius behind your business but aren’t strong in the math department, you’ll need a reliable accountant that can help you keep your facts and figures together.  Depending on the scale of your business, you may want to hire an accountant who can explain the necessary processes and filings with you.  If, however, you are starting as a solo enterprise, you can take advantage of online accounting software that can keep your books balanced and, hopefully, ensure that your company will become profitable.
5. Stationery and printed materials. No matter what type of business you’re in, you’ll probably need some sort of printed materials.  Personalized receipts, business cards, and even shopping bags can help a business markedly advance its branding efforts.  And yet, while personalized and printed items can be expensive, they don’t have to be.  Ordering these items online can save the business owner money and time, as it eliminates the need to travel to and from the printer’s office.

Is there another business expense that you considered a critical when financing your small business?  We’d love to hear about it!

Thinking about getting a VOIP phone for your small business, but still not sure?  Why not take a step back, and consider the hidden benefits of having a virtual office service or even just a VOIP phone; the ones that don’t pertain directly to your business but can still be a tremendous asset in your life.  There are so many ways in which running your business is stressful, time consuming and challenging- if the perks can present distinct advantages to your home life, why not enjoy them?  Of course the hidden advantages of having a virtual office may not be immediately obvious, but that’s why I’m here to help point them out.

My favorite benefit of having a virtual office is the inexpensive or free international calls to many countries, depending on the plan you choose.  This may not sound like a necessary feature if your business is domestically-based, but if you have friends or family overseas, you can use your business VOIP service to connect with loved ones without overpaying.  Why wait for a tragedy to strike before reaching out to those you care about?  With the ability to make free international calls to loved ones, you’ll restore that part of your life that you may not have even known you were missing.

Another distinct advantage of having a virtual office for your business is the ability to receive and send online faxes, even if you don’t have a fax machine in your home.  While many individuals don’t see the need to invest in a fax machine for their own home, there are often times in which it is necessary to share data for personal use.  By investing in a virtual office service for your small business, you’ll be able to utilize the online fax services from your home as well- so you’ll no longer need to stand on line at the copy shop in order to send or receive a fax.

Surprisingly, having a toll-free number can also offer a unique advantage for family use, because it can be used by children who need to call home and may be out of area, such as away at sleep away camp.  Why send your child to camp with a cell phone, when you know they can call you from any landline or pay phone?  Similarly, calling card abilities can enable your child to call home from for free from anywhere- even if you don’t have a toll free number.  Having calling card abilities which enable you to use your VOIP service to make calls from anywhere can be extremely useful for those who travel regularly and aren’t excited about using up their cell phone minutes while they’re away from their regular phone.

There’s no question that virtual office services offer fantastic services for small businesses- but the advantages to the business owner’s family should not be overlooked.  Why spend money on these services at home and in the office, when your virtual office services can be easily used for occasional private use?  Even the comfort of knowing that you have these services available is extremely worthwhile- and you may be surprised at how often you actually enjoy them!

Few would argue that the primary goals of a virtual PBX are to provide a small business owner with a professional telephone answering service and to reduce the costs associated with other useful telephone services.  But in developing and marketing today’s virtual office services, many companies have masked these fundamental goals by offering a laundry list of ‘fantastic’ features that may detract consumers from determining which services they really need.  As savvy consumers and business owners, however, it is our obligation to see through these marketing ploys, so that we don’t overpay for services we really won’t use.

Still, while many virtual PBX features may seem extraneous, there are some ‘extras’ that can be surprisingly useful.  Here are 5 virtual office features that can contribute greatly to the professionalism and efficiency of any small business.

1. Call recording. Even if you think that you’ll never need to record a call, you may be amazed at how useful this feature can be when making verbal agreements- and making sure that they are implemented properly.
2. Calling cards. You may not be traveling a lot (or at all) for business right now, but even for the once a year that you go on vacation, having the ability to use your virtual PBX service from anywhere can really be useful, and can save you money on your travel phone bills.
3. Call logs. While you may not be concerned about using your call logs to keep track of your minute usage, call logs can be useful for looking up lost or misplaced phone number of people that have called in- or that you’ve called and need to contact again.
4. Call handling rules. Sure, it’s nice to forget about work when you’re away from your desk.  Unfortunately, small business owners often don’t have that luxury, as a missed call can mean lost business.  When set up properly on your virtual PBX, call handling rules enable you to reroute your business calls to your cell phone, your home phone, or any other phone that you desire, so that you are always available when your clients need you.
5. Email and SMS voicemail delivery. It may be easy to press the play button on your answering machine, but that requires standing near the machine.  With email voicemail delivery, you can receive messages from your virtual office service wherever you have internet access, which is incredibly convenient for small business owners who don’t spend much time sitting at their desk.