More and more people are working out of offices far away from their parent company. In fact, some suggest that telecommuting is the future of work, where “having remote and virtual employees is not only a way to get things done round the clock, without commuting, hard-to-find skill sets but is also a way to meet the needs of employees who don’t want to or can’t live near the mother ship.”
If your small business is ready to increase its virtual culture, or take virtual working for a test drive, here are ten articles to help you get started:
1. Virtual Leadership: How to Lead Virtual Employees
There are various characteristics and leadership styles of effective business leaders. Some of them include: creativity, honesty, communication, confidence, inspiration, and a sense of humor. Effective leaders also use their body language, voice, and the sheer weight of their presence to leverage these things their benefit.
2. How Solopreneurs Can Benefit from Virtual Assistants
It’s easy to understand why solopreneurs are often reluctant to bring on new hires. The concept of “I’ve done okay so far on my own” looms in their minds. However, with the availability of virtual employees, risk can be minimized while the upside can be tremendous. Let’s take a look at two example.
3. Conduct Virtual Meetings with These Six Fresh-faced Videoconferencing Tools
In today’s on-the-go business landscape it is not uncommon for your team, clients, or suppliers to be located in different zip codes — or even multiple time zones. Therefore, when it is important to stay in touch, online videoconferencing tools for teams are the best way to facilitate collaboration with ease. Virtual meetings are essential for startups that want to meet face-to-face with anyone, anywhere and save thousands on business travel.
4. Telecommuting Is The Future of Work
In many companies I partner with, a certain percentage of employees work from home or are virtual employees – contractors or long-term freelancers. The percentage varies (ASTD, SHRM), from 30 to 45 percent, which seems consistent with what I hear from the HR practitioners and leaders that I collaborate with. It seems inevitable, then, that working from home, or being a virtual employee, is an established trend, Yahoo!’s action to limit remote employees notwithstanding.
5. Virtual Startups: 5 Ways to Make Long Distance Relationships with your Team Work
Long-distance relationships aren’t easy. Especially when it comes to business. But if you’re committed they can work; especially as your building a solid business foundation, which starts with a few steps — mainly, recruiting fresh new talent and accommodating the rock stars you’ve already hired. I’m familiar with the concept, because my husband and I initially spent a full year apart (for our careers) before deciding to launch our business.
6. How Employers Save on Telecommuting Employees
On the surface, telecommuting might appear to only benefit employees. After all, people who work from home have a non-existent commute, save oodles of cash (upwards of $7000 or more annually!) by not having to shell out for transportation, office attire, and have a decidedly better work life balance. But telecommuting also offers big savings for employers, too. Here’s how companies can save—in time, money and more—when their staff telecommutes.
7. Business Paradise: How to Manage Virtual Employees and Live Anywhere in the World
Wouldn’t it be great to hire a virtual staff? I thought so too, and that’s why I decided to build a virtual team. Developing a staff of virtual employees is a great way to improve staffing, gain access to hard-to-find skill sets and enable you to work from anywhere in the world. In fact, many businesses (large and small) are now seriously considering (and implementing) remote staff to solve their problems.
8. Get Things Done: How to Hire and Manage a Virtual Team
Are you up to your eyeballs in tasks that need to be completed? If you’re not careful, a long to-do list can keep you from focusing on what’s really important – growing your business. Thankfully there’s one simple way to get more done: Hire freelancers. An army of skilled, freelance “virtual” professionals can be found online. The Internet has become a virtual workplace, where many entrepreneurs find and employ the exact skills they need for a quick project or long-term work, with minimum commitments and no office overhead.
9. The Third Wave of Virtual Work
In this article we describe how each wave came about through a confluence of shifting employee priorities, evolving employer imperatives, and emerging communications and collaboration technologies. With experts projecting that within a few years, more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually—that is, through rich electronic connections from sites of their choosing—it is important to understand the transformation under way.
10. Virtual Offices: Is Working Remotely Good for Business?
The concept of virtual offices certainly sounds great on paper, offering businesses the opportunity to operate without a permanent office premises and therefore dramatically lowering their operating costs, boosting profit margins. However there are a couple of challenges: you’ve got to create a team spirit with employees working remotely and also ensure that they stay motivated enough to put in 100% whilst working independently.
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