NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014 - (Page 28)

T H E R E M OT E O R V I R T UA L O F F I C E More remote workers can mean a smaller main office, so costs for space are lower. In fact, this firm has a few employees who have only visited the office once in more than five years. Employees who live within an hour's drive from the office come in every month or two to attend important training events and employee parties. Not everyone works well on their own. "Managing remote employees can be a tremendous challenge, but hiring the right people and having reporting mechanisms in place certainly makes it easier," Jetter pointed out. "We try to hire self-starting individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit-people who don't need much hand holding and can keep themselves productive throughout the day." Mattson suggests being specific about what remote workers will do. "It is crucial that expectations be clearly outlined to the employee before working out of the office," she stressed. "Providing a clear, concise list of deliverables that can be reviewed before being out-and again upon the employee's return to work-is probably the best way to 'supervise' remote workers. Any reasons for not being able to deliver on the list should be fully vetted so there can be no arguments after the fact." Establish written guidelines including expectations and supervision methods to prevent miscommunication. Boddicker thinks management and supervision are the largest challenges with remote workers. "Are they really being productive and working when they are supposed to or are they overworked?" he wondered. "In an office environment, it's fairly easy to tell if someone is stressed or is being overloaded with work. Once an employee is working 28 perspectives JULY/AUGUST 2014 remotely, it becomes very difficult to gauge their performance or workload." For sales and marketing jobs, production numbers may tell the story but processing type jobs are harder to evaluate. Benefits of Remote Offices Being out in the real world can result in having closer connections to clients, Mattson said. Remote workers may accomplish tasks that might otherwise not get done by saving time through not commuting or taking time off from work for personal business. More remote workers can mean a smaller main office, so costs for space are lower. Offering remote work may make it possible to retain key employees who relocate to other cities or to attract employees with in demand skills who might not want to move from their current location, Boddicker said. Having regional sales reps living in areas where clients are located allows face-to-face interaction to facilitate sales. Disadvantages of Remote Offices Remote workers may have a "feeling of disconnect and not belonging to a team," Mattson noted. She feels having everyone working together in an office gives a sense of camaraderie that can be lost when working remotely. Remote work also poses a greater risk of breaches of information security and makes supervision more challenging. Remote users accessing applications housed at a central office may sometimes experience reduced computer performance depending on the function being performed. "In my opinion, a company is most productive and efficient when all employees work under one roof," Boddicker said. "When a problem arises, the ability to pull a few key people together for an impromptu meeting or discussion to resolve a problem quickly is important. If all the key players are remote, you waste precious time coordinating and scheduling a time to pull everyone together." He is also concerned employees working at home could be distracted by their families, chores, or other household activities when customers call. Some BGA Case Studies National Benefit's emergency plan is designed so if the office building were forced to close, every employee could work from home almost immediately. This was done by virtualizing all production servers using VMWare and replicating them nightly to a tier 4 remote datacenter. "We also built in some redundancy to our IP based phone system so we could continue to have voice service in the event of a disaster," said Boddicker. "Should something happen to our office building, we can restore our production servers at the remote site in a matter of hours. Our phone system can be set up to forward incoming phone calls to staff home phones or cellphones. Users can access all of our applications via a Citrix remote desktop session to our remote datacenter." Since this business continuity plan revolves around having staff work from home after a disaster, National Benefit wanted to incentivize employees to own up to date home computers. To do this, they created a program allowing employ- ees to purchase a new personal computer costing up to $1,000 using an interest free loan to be repaid with 12 months of payroll deductions. Beyond the potential post-disaster remote office, National Benefit has one regional sales rep who always works remotely. In addition, a few staffers work from home part-time on a regular basis, spending their remaining time in the office. Several others work remotely on occasion. Art Jetter & Company has remote offices in Lincoln, NE; Benbrook, TX; Hanover, MN; Maple Grove, MN; and Guatemala City. Their main office in Omaha houses most of their employees and all infrastructure. The Guatemala City office is a small call center that uses the VOIP phone system to make recruiting calls to agents in the United States. "One of the largest benefits to having some remote staff has been the fact that we've completely filled up all of our office space at our main location," Jetter said." If we didn't have the ability to allow people to work from home, it certainly would have impacted our growth potential." Four Seasons allows employees to work from home on an occasional basis only. "When this happens, the employee is provided with a laptop that is already prepared for home use," Mattson said. Employees must demonstrate they have secure home Internet connections to use this work from home option. In addition, they have several marketing wholesalers who work from remote locations. Limited data access is provided so they have what is needed to do their jobs while still protecting access to clients' personal information. A Completely Virtual BGA Firm Blumberg Financial Services, LLC began the conversion to becoming a virtual office in 2002 by using a document management system to minimize the paper in their physi-

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014

NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014
Contents
Chairman’s Corner
CEO Insights
Social Skills
NAILBA 33 Preview
NAILBA Charitable Foundation
Life Happens
The Remote or Virtual Office
Member Profiles
Mooers Award Nominations
Agency Successor Networking Group
Agency Resources
BGAs Leading Technology Through Connections
Reading Ahead
Calendar of Events
Index of Advertisers

NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014