The virtual office – where clients, customers, suppliers and partners interact with your business as though it has an office location, but in practice your employees are working remotely - is an increasingly appealing idea. Not only has it been essential through lockdowns, but many businesses will want to continue operating this way into the future, as it can be a significant cost saving on office spaces.
Having a sustainable and effective virtual office environment requires the strategic use of communications and IT. Importantly, it also means minimising the risk of downtime. The more your business operation relies on technology to communicate and collaborate, the greater the cost of downtime. At Reliance Communications, we have a long history in assisting companies with making that shift, and here are a couple of key learnings that we’ve taken away from those projects.
1) Make sure the phone system is of a high quality
The quality of the phone system is critical to the success of a virtual office; you need to make sure that customers, clients, suppliers and co-workers are able to get in touch with the right person when they need it, while still creating the perception that everyone’s working in the same office.
To this end, you should look into a hosted PBX solution that has automated call routing and forwarding, as well as cloud-based management and analytics so that the performance of the phone system can be monitored.
Another feature that defines a high-quality hosted PBX solution is if it can be integrated with Microsoft Teams and your CRM. Bringing all of your organisation’s data together is a powerful tool that will help you optimise your processes and better engage with your customers.
Speak to Reliance Communications for setting up managed phone systems to meet your business’ growth objectives.
2) Move as much as possible to the cloud
Just as you moved your productivity solutions to Microsoft 365/Teams or GSuite , to allow your people to work on documents in the cloud, you can move many more of your business processes, too. For your virtual office to be as efficient as possible, you need to minimise the number of manual processes within your workplace. This means adopting cloud solutions for billing and invoicing, using cloud-based storage solutions for sharing documents, and adopting productivity tools that can assist with workflow management. Many of these tools, from Dropbox and Google Drive through to Slack, have free options. Others will generally incur a monthly cost, though at the benefit of not having up-front pricing for licenses and new editions.
3) Get your collaboration in order
With the right phone system, you can allow your staff and customer to communicate freely. With video conferencing you can hold remote meetings. But this isn’t quite the same as having a fully collaborative virtual environment. You want to be looking at tools like Microsoft Teams, not only for the video conferencing ability, but for the way that teams can enable document sharing, minutes record keeping, scheduling, and other collaborative exercises.
Reliance Communications can assist you with making the most of your Microsoft Teams experience. Talk to us today.
4) Build the new way of working into your culture
With virtual organisations there is always the risk that employees will start to feel isolated, or potentially burn themselves out by working well beyond the hours a structured office environment generally allows. As such it’s important to consider the company culture when setting up a virtual office. Make sure you set specific office hours (so employees don’t need to answer calls from customers deep into the night), and make sure there are opportunities for the social interactions that happen around the water cooler too.
5) Make sure your security is up to date
It goes without saying that the virtual office involves a lot of work online, and that means that security should be paramount. Be sure to use VPNs and other high-grade security tools to protect your communications, and make sure you keep the anti-viruses and firewalls up-to-date on all computers. Contact Reliance Communications for any questions that you may have regarding security – there’s no reason that your communications can’t be secure, but you do need to adopt some best practice.
Remember: Reliance Communications has a long history in helping with virtual offices and the communications that underpin them. Contact us today to set your business up for a dynamic, virtual future.
