Telecommuting is not really a much used term these days. Telecommuting means someone who works most of their hours at home and then ‘commutes’ into the office for meetings etc.
Remote work implies that all work would be completed from home without coming in the office at all.
Is Remote working effective?
A number of studies have shown that remote working is very effective and results in greater productivity. There are usually less distractions and it is also a great time saver as you don’t have to commute into an office.
We certainly think that remote working works as most of our work is completed remotely. This enables us to respond much quicker to any customer queries and provide much faster fix time ensuring a customer has as little down time as possible.
Advantages and Disadvantages of remote work
Advantages
Cost – there is a major cost advantage to working from home both from an employee and an employer viewpoint.
Employer costs are lower because they can have smaller offices and with some of the innovative virtualisation solutions we offer then there are significantly lower hardware costs. For example we have deployed windows desktops using virtualisation for some our customers whereby each employee can log on to their own desktop but instead of having 10 desks with 10 computers, monitors and associated peripherals they have 1 or 2 servers (failover backup) which supply the same 10 windows work spaces. The overall running costs and cost of ownership of running 2 x servers is also appreciably lower than running 10 independent desktops.
Employee costs are lower because you don’t have to commute into an office and often pay parking charges, or public transport fares. The time savings are also appreciable. There are many other cost savings with remote working for example reduction in child care fees
Convenience
If an employee has child caring responsibilities or has to look after an ill child or relative then without remote working they would usually have to take unpaid leave from work. This could have financial consequences for the employee and for the employer, as they are missing a valuable member of their team.
An employee is more likely to stay long term
An employee that can work remotely from home because of the many cost and convenience advantages of remote work is liable to be much more relaxed and therefore happier in their employment. Remote working will also let them deal with any of life’s complications or changes of circumstances that can occur that could potentially put their employment in jeopardy.
You will have more time
Due to the time saved by commuting to and from an office you will have considerably more time. Working from home will also usually mean that there are less distractions and thus the time is more productive. In a lot of jobs you can also time shift the work to when it is more convenient for you and fit the work around your home life and responsibilities.
You will feel healthier
Many studies have shown that moving from an office environment to a home environment can often be less stressful. So that means a greater level of mental health and also that happier staff tend to be more productive and the quality of the work tends to be higher. So therefore a win-win solution for both employer and employee
Disadvantages
You could potentially run the risk of feeling isolated
If you are used to working in a busy office then switching to a home environment may get to you. While this was may have been true in earlier years when the remote work solutions available where much more limited than they are today, current remote working solutions and practises including the use of video conferencing and fast and extensive messaging apps, it is not usually now the case.
You are responsible for staying on track and completing the work
This is probably the largest disadvantage to remote working and requires discipline and motivation on behalf of the employee to ensure that required work gets completed to a required quality and time frame.
Do I need to be a technical Guru to set all this up?
Our remote access solutions allow you to log on to a computer desktop at the office, whether that be a physical desktop or virtual desktop, and work as though you were sat in front of your work computer.
Our remote solutions can also offer the options of remote printing and file transfer so that, if you need to review a document you can either download it to your own computer or print it to your own printer. So you could for example read a document or do research from anywhere, whether that be sat at home or sat in a park or a coffee shop.
All our remote access can be installed remotely by our experienced engineers and are very user friendly. Usually the most you would need to do would run a program and enter some user credentials and then you are connected.
What remote working has meant to us as a company
Most of our engineers are veterans of the industry some entering the fledgling computer industry 30+ years ago, so have worked with computers since the early 8 bit computers and the public availability of the internet in 1990. They have also worked for a number of large computer companies such as Unisys (Merger of Sperry and Burroughs) prior to forming their own companies 20+ years ago. Then we come to present day when PJR Micro has changed to be a mostly remote services company.
Over the past 5 years or so the majority of people now have access to fast enough data connection speeds to make remote working and remote support practical.
There are many benefits to us of remote working and remote support the main advantages are-
Cost and Time
As we are now able to offer the majority of our services remotely the costs and time savings to us as a solution provider are considerable. We are therefore able to pass these savings on to our customers meaning they have a more cost effective and efficient service. This also means that customer problem resolution time is significantly reduced and thus any downtime. What this means to a customer is that their computer equipment is more reliable and more efficient and therefore can generate them more revenue.