Work From home
Table of contents
Benefits of working from home
There are many benefits of having your staff and yourself work from home.
- Save time
- Save money on transportation and office real estate
- Save money on air conditioning and electricity
- Save the environment
- Reduce the likelihood of staff getting other staff sick
- Safety of avoiding commuting
Required technologies to work from home
In order to most efficiently use time when staff are working from home, you need several well-designed technologies to be implemented to work properly together.
Network infrastructure
You network is the underlying technology for working from home, and it must be well designed and configured to allow access to anything your employees may need access to when working from home.
VPN
Virtual Private Networks allow you staff to access your network from home. All that is needed is an internet connection at both ends. VPNs can be very tricky to implement, and require proper planning to avoid headaches for your staff and your IT support team.
Security
When allowing remote access to your network, security is a major concern that requires a lot of attention. You must ensure to prevent unsafe access to your network and servers and only allowing access to your staff.
VoIP
In order to have seemless communication amongst your staff, you should consider implemented VoIP to allow your staff to have extensions in their home. Without VoIP, you would need to use staff phone lines which have several potential problems.
- phone could be busy
- may not be able to transfer to another phone number
- if you staff call a client or customer, it would display their personal numbers
- you may want an automated transfers for support lines, which wouldn't be possible without VoIP
