5 Ways to Stay Organized With a Work-from-Home Workplace
With the economic shift from going to work daily at a job site to people finding ways to work from home, one of the solutions for many small business owners has been to hire virtual assistants and other workers to work in virtual office settings. Virtual employees are an excellent way to expand your business and get assistance with the various tasks needed to successfully run a business; from office assistants to sales associates, virtual offices are a way to keep overhead down. However, one of the challenges to this business structure is staying organized and employees on-task.
1. Use Virtual Calendars
Many office programs offer virtual calendars that can be utilized by groups. One way to manage your virtual employees is to schedule tasks and assignment deadlines using this technology. A virtual calendar is one way effectively conduct project management. It allows all parties involved know what their deadlines are and what tasks are needed to complete their assignments on time.
2. Have Regular Staff Meetings
One of the things that many virtual offices suffer from is lack of communication between staff members. Working in a virtual office can be somewhat isolating for staff because they do not have the regular interaction with other staff members. You can use virtual meeting technology that allows your staff to see each other on the screen and use chat functions to ask questions or participate in a meeting agenda. It is also helpful to have regular staff meetings in order to announce upcoming important events. Additionally, virtual staff meetings help make the working environment more “real” for staff members.
3. Assign Deadlines
Many people find it hard to work without hard deadlines and an idea of specific expectations and metrics to determine success. When you assign tasks, include hard deadlines for completion. If it is a large task that you are assigning, assign benchmark milestones that break the assignment into smaller manageable segments.
4. Utilize Email
Email is an excellent method of regular communication for virtual office members. Daily or weekly emails that outline deadlines and tasks are helpful to keep employees on track and aware of tasks and expectations. It is important to monitor email regularly in order to answer questions or address issues that may come up across the work day to help virtual employees with their assignments.
5. Utilize Chat Technology
Another method of communicating with your virtual employees is to utilize chat functions that may be available to you. Have regular office hours scheduled in which you expect your employees to be available for you to talk to and for you to be available to answer any questions they may have or to offer clarification on assignments. Encourage your staff to talk to you in order to avoid misunderstandings or miscommunication that lead to wasted time, effort and money.
Running and working in a virtual office definitely has advantages over the traditional office. In many cases, business owners are able to save money by not having to provide office space and access to technology that virtual staff members provide on their own. While working in a virtual office can provide many benefits of freedom for employees, it is important not to forget that you are still running a business and have certain expectations and needs for professional conduct. Provide venues for staff to communicate with you and each other regularly, be clear about assignments and deadlines and be willing and flexible to address issues that may come up while staff members are completing their assignments.
About the Author: Stacy Gianakura writes for Brainloop, a company specializing in secure document sharing and online collaborative solutions
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Home Office Or External Premises? – That Is The Question
Many people, perhaps you are one of them, have started their small business at home — or plan on doing so. I’ve done it several times in the past.
You can easily set up a home office in a bedroom that’s not being used, or if what you provide is a product, then in the garage or cellar or basement. Sometimes a shed that’s decent can also be used as long as it’s dry. A large enough and well-organized kitchen can be licensed and then utilized for special dessert recipes or other food products! Read more
11 Ways to Manage Working From Home
May be I am not the only person here who used to shuffle through the early morning traffic trying to get to the office. Remember, it didn’t just end there; There were a lot of demands; rushing to open your office in the morning, paying the rent and other operational costs, meeting business appointments or working 8 hours every day for a boss and ask for a permission to attend your child’s first concert. Read more
3 Challenges Faced By Work-From-Home Entrepreneurs and How To Overcome Them
For those who wake up early every morning and commute to work, fulfill their work duties, and return to their humble abode the thought of working from home can present an appealing picture. But the lure of working from home, although attractive from the outside looking in, can present a greater challenge than following the conventional work routine.
5 Tips for Happy Home Working
Working from home can be the perfect option for many people. It can offer fewer travel expenses and a more flexible schedule. Working from home can also have its challenges and keeping focused and motivated can occasionally be tricky. Having worked from home myself for a number of years, I thought I’d put together a quick checklist for productive home working. Read more
How to Manage a Business Without Stepping Foot in an Office
The costs of managing a business from a traditional, physical office are numerous. Small business owners must factor in all of these business costs when calculating their bottom line:
Rent, insurance, utilities (including gas, electric, water and sewage), parking, Internet, phone, and cleaning
By choosing to manage your business from your own home, you can eliminate many of these costs and enjoy the freedom of setting your own hours and working in a familiar environment. Since you already rent or own a residence and pay for many of the aforementioned services, managing from home will allow you to free up more financial resources for your business, allowing you to purchase computers, project management software and wireless mobile devices.
Step 1: Prepare to Manage Multiple Work-From-Home Employees
Managing several employees without the luxury of a central office can be a difficult task for any beginning entrepreneur. For this reason, it’s important to ensure that your home office is technologically capable of handling managerial tasks. If you own an older laptop computer, or if you don’t own one at all, now is the time to buy a latest-generation laptop with plenty of hard drive space, RAM and a fast processor. Consider purchasing a large external monitor, which will give you additional screen real estate for multitasking. Solid-state drives, or SSDs, offer fewer moving parts, enhanced reliability and reduced access times when compared to traditional hard disk drives.
Today’s business world is managed on-the-go. To keep pace, it’s important to invest in mobile devices such as a smartphone or an iPad. These devices, when paired with wi-fi coverage and the 4g network, allow you to manage your business regardless of your current location.
The 4g network, which serves as the successor to the slower 3g network, is becoming more widely available in many areas of the country. 4g coverage, which offers speeds comparable to those of cable and DSL, can be used to provide Internet connectivity for your computer, mobile phone, or other devices such as the iPad. For a variety of different options, 4g reviews will help narrow down your choices, and supply you with a good place to start.
Step 2: Invest in Online Project Management Software
You can choose between two popular online project management programs which facilitate the management of your company’s workload. These programs include Central Desktop and BaseCamp.
Basecamp is a project collaboration tool that allows you to manage your projects and employees from your home computer or mobile phone. Basecamp emphasizes ease of use at a low cost, with packages starting at $49 per month including a free 30 day trial. The most basic Basecamp package, entitled Basecamp Plus, allows you to simultaneously manage 35 projects with 15 GB of storage and unlimited users. According to surveys conducted by Basecamp, over 98% of Basecamp users said that they would recommend the program to others. Basecamp is available in multiple languages, making it perfect for those managing international businesses from home.
In comparison to Basecamp, Central Desktop offers enhanced functionality at the cost of potentially higher monthly fees. The most fully-featured version of Central Desktop, entitled Enterprise, is ideal for companies with 20 or more online employees, includes over 100 GB of storage space, and allows for unlimited workspaces. Enterprise, which costs $299 per month, includes state-of-the-art security features such as TLS encryption, off-site data backups and the ability to manage IP restrictions. More basic features such as file sharing, online spreadsheets, discussion forums, online calendars, online diagrams and MS Office integration are included in each edition of Central Desktop, including the free Basic package.
Step 3: Obtain Free Business Software
Next, you’ll need to obtain free business software programs such as Skype, Gmail and Dropbox. These programs are designed to facilitate business management communications and file transfers.
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. When you register for a Gmail account, you’ll receive an email address and approximately 7.5 GB of online storage space.
Skype is a popular communications tool used for text-based chat, video chat, voice chat and screen sharing. Skype, which can be downloaded from www.Skype.com, is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS. You can call other Skype users for free, or make calls to land lines and mobile phones for as low as 1.2 cents/minute with a monthly subscription.
Dropbox is a free program designed to facilitate file sharing. When you and your employees install Dropbox on your business computers, you’ll have access to 2 GB of shared storage space. The Dropbox folder will appear as any other folder on your hard drive, except that anyone with the proper administration privileges will be able to access its contents. Additional storage space is available for a fee.
Step 4: Find Employees and Consider Outsourcing
At this point, all of the technical aspects of managing your business from home should be in place. From here, you’ll need to find employees to staff your business. You can accomplish this by using job posting sites such as Indeed.com and elance.com.
First, direct your browser to www.Indeed.com and click the Employers link. From here, you may click on “Advertise a job” or “Advertise many jobs.” You can then create a job posting, including the job title, name and location of your company, and a job description. You must also enter your job budget, which represents the maximum amount of money you’re willing to spend on advertising for the job through Indeed. After completing this process, Indeed will highlight your job posting as a sponsored link in their search results. This will make the job more visible to job searchers. This service follows a pay-per-click advertising model. You’ll only be required to pay when someone actually views your job posting.
Consider using a site such as Elance.com, a productivity hub that allows you to outsource your work to freelance workers around the world. The workers registered at Elance.com specialize in a variety of areas, including web design, programming, content writing, administrative support, finance, engineering and legal administration. Simply post a description of the work you need completed, as well as your budget. You’ll then receive bids from potential employees, along with their payment requirements, experience and references.
About the Author: Michael Cash is a twenty something freelance writer and internet consultant residing in western Michigan. When he’s not coaching people out of 1990s era web practices, amateur astronomy and hiking take up his time. A completely random fact about Michael is that he used to “ghost hunt” as a youngster.
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Work From Home…Can You Juggle?
When I started my first business I literally set up my home office at the kitchen table. I laughed about it, how cliché, but the kitchen table was rarely used to eat dinner at, and more commonly just held the mail we never looked at, so the space was available. I quickly found out how hard it was to run a profitable business at home. My typical day looked something like this:
6am – Wake up and quickly get coffee and start checking email before the rest of the house begins to wake up.
6:10am – Party’s over, the house is awake and now it’s breakfast time, hair dryers going at mach 3, Barney that purple cartoon thing blaring in the background, and constant tugging at my knee accompanied by “daddy look at this, daddy do that, daddy, daddy, hey daddy”.
7:30am – House is quiet again as everyone is in there proper places, work, school, preschool, etc. Now where was I?
9:00am – Unemployed friend stops by because he knows I’m home. Doesn’t seem to mind that I’m trying to make some calls while he is jabbering on about, well I’m not sure because I am trying not to listen.
12:00p – Friend wants to go to lunch, I accept because I’m not getting much done anyway, although this means I’ll be paying for the two of us.
1:00p – Back home, alone and it’s quiet. I make some calls, answer emails, and make it out for a necessary meeting
1:30p – Cell phone message from significant other stating that I need to go pick up one of my offspring. At least I got through the meeting.
2:00p – Back home with said offspring.
3-5:00p – Intermittent work between the purple dinosaur and whiffle ball in the back yard.
5:30p – Significant other arrives home, she’s had a long day, and wonders what I planned for dinner. Nothing?, she asks…”Well you’ve been home all day I thought you would have thought of something”
6:00 – 9:00p – Family time.
10:00p – Everyone’s asleep, time to get some work done and get ready for the next day and start all over.
If you are a small business owner who works from home, that routine has to sound familiar. So, is there a better way to manage both home life and business life when they both share the same space? I think so, below are some tips to help manage the tetter totter of a home based business:
- Have a Detailed Plan
It’s tempting to treat working from home informally, since nobody’s watching over your shoulder. Write a detailed business plan that includes not just projections for the business itself, but also specifics on how you’ll manage working from home. This includes laying out a regular work schedule and describing in advance how you’ll handle specific scenarios, such as if a friend or relative calls during working hours or your child interrupts during an important phone call. You might even designate a time during the day or evening for household tasks, errands or recreational activities you’d otherwise be tempted to do during work hours.
- Let EVERYONE Know Your Plan
As much as you adhere to your own grand plan, it’s not always easy getting other family members or friends on board. They might see you as accessible and available to run errands, chat or do chores since you’re conveniently based at home. It’s often just a matter of letting family know your regular work hours and that you expect to be working during those times. It’s okay to let the kids know “Daddy is working, and unavailable”.
- Find Your Own Space
Where your office is located in the home can play a big role in how distracted you become. Ideally, office space should be removed from the hustle and bustle of the home and in a separate room, with a door that shuts. This usually makes the kitchen table a non viable option. Perhaps a spare room, or some other space you can close off from the rest of the world is an option…the key is being able to shut out the outside!
- Outsource Duties
One way to stifle the urge to do non work tasks is hiring someone else to do them. Particularly for home-based entrepreneurs with young kids, getting in-home childcare for at least part of the workweek or taking kids to day care occasionally can keep you from being torn between work and home responsibilities. You may want to consider outsourcing some of the home chores such as cleaning, this can free you up to work on your business and alleviate that feeling that you should be doing something else (vacuuming) instead of working on your business.
I think by doing the above you’ll reduce many of the stresses and strains faced by the small business owner who works at home. If I had to pick only one, getting your own space that is secluded from the rest of the house provides the most bang for the buck. Once you are free to concentrate, you’ll be amazed by how efficiently you work and how much more time you have during the day to answer the “Hey Daddy”.
