Take your business out of the office.
Tools to take your business out of the office
Being engaged in business used to mean staying wired in at the office eight to twelve hours a day. In the modern day, this is completely untrue. Often the most efficient workplace is spread far and wide and always on the go. Today you can completely unplug from your desk with just your laptop computer and 4G modem. The freedom to work out of the office and even on the move is a huge advantage gifted to modern business. A simple mobile phone tether is enough to work from anywhere in the world.
Adding Accountability to Remote Work
Today, businesses are embracing digital technology to enable productivity anywhere, any time. Yet ensuring accountability is a stumbling block to widespread acceptance of remote work. Recently, COVID-19 has forced many businesses to transition quickly to working from home. Even bosses concerned about lack of control over absent employees had to make the change. Former opponents to remote work may have discovered the benefits of this approach. Employees certainly may have enjoyed the opportunity and want to keep doing it.
The good news is that technology and products are even better today for managing remote teams. Overall, employers need to trust their people. This is true whether they’re working on-site or from home. Still, for some supervisors, trust is easier with remote monitoring abilities.
Joint calendars are a common starting point. Microsoft 365, Google’s G Suite, and other tools allow staff to share calendars. People can still schedule personal appointments and keep those private, but the joint professional calendar lets everyone on a team stay in the know. Managers can go online to track sales meetings, client presentations, or team sessions.
Project management software is another way to see what co-workers are doing. Teamwork, Basecamp, and Trello offer a central location to see a project come together. Employees can access secure software from any location to share files and interact. Individuals can set deadlines and create tasks to improve accountability and responsibility sharing.
Business-based internal messaging software also keeps everyone on the same page. These communication tools typically provide one-on-one messaging and group chat. It’s easy to send a quick note asking someone for a status update, or just check in. Some tools also allow individual and team audio calls as well as video conferencing. Top contenders are Slack, WhatsApp, Skype for Business, or the Facebook and Google Hangout work chat apps.
Go big enabling collaboration among employees with cloud-based office software. Microsoft 365 and G Suite enable many users to go online and work on the same things at the same time. This solution also lets managers easily view shared documents and verify progress. It’s even possible to invite clients or other external partners in to view folders. For security reasons, you may want to limit their access to “view only.”
Securing Remote Work
Security is another point of friction for businesses allowing remote work, but the technology is keeping pace there also. Even so, you’ll want to educate employees about cybersecurity best practices. Requiring antivirus and malware upgrades, limiting external sharing and enabling multifactor access will help make remote work viable, reliable, safe, and secure.
The Right Tools for the Job
The most important part of working on the go is ensuring you don’t lose touch with your team. Maintaining total collaboration between team members can be tricky. Luckily, there are tools that will help you to stay on top.
Microsoft 365
It provides the traditional tools and support of Microsoft office, but adds remote team collaboration and cloud support too. Files can be saved into the cloud, worked on, and accessed anywhere for review. At one time, remote working meant taking a copy of a file somewhere else to work. Changes to the original weren’t reflected in the remote copy and at least one version was destined to be lost forever. Software packages such as OneDrive allow the entire team to work on a single centralized file saved to the cloud. Whether you edit on a beach, plane, or train; your team in the office gets the same version you do, at the same time.
It is also a cloud solution, which helps your remote workers work smarter and faster. G Suite is a secure and simple-to-use cloud platform. Moreover, it is worth the investment: you pay per user for a comprehensive solution.
Remote Working with Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Office. With a subscription, you get both the desktop and online versions of apps you already know. This includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and more. Microsoft 365 enables collaboration in many ways, on desktops, tablets, and smartphones. For example:
Outlook — primarily associated with email, but also lets you share notes and files
Teams — a hub for instant messaging, video conferencing and calls
SharePoint — an internal content management platform that lets you customize team sites where you automate workflows and share resources
Yammer — a social network connecting all the users in your organization
OneDrive — allows users to share and co-author documents securely
Working in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office Apps you can collaborate simultaneously. There’s no need to email back and forth. In fact, you can even see different people creating and editing together in real time.
Teams: Microsoft Teams at its core is a chat program. But it does so much more. On all your devices, both iOS and Android, Teams allows “channels”. You can have company-wide or small task group channels. Or use a separate channel to instant messaging to a single person. You can also invite clients or customers into channels to join the discussion. Additionally, you can set up security features that filter what they can access. You don’t want them to know the ingredients to your secret sauce! Within Teams channels users can share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Teams also integrates with other software. The options include Zendesk customer support, Asana project management, or Zoom video conferencing. Using Teams in Office 365 creates a streamlined platform for remote work.
OneDrive: Working on premises, your users always had access to the business file server. OneDrive is the cloud equivalent. Yet, since it’s online, it’s always accessible. Microsoft’s hosts the file storage to let you access and share work files from all your devices. Employees can even work offline. Any changes or edits to files automatically upload when you next connect. Share OneDrive folders or files with external partners as well. Again, you can secure access with limits on who can see what and specifying what actions they can take. You can even set up automatic revoke access after a set time limit.
Microsoft 365 & Business Security: A Microsoft 365 subscription protects from viruses and cybercrime. It also offers ways to recover your files from malicious attacks. Microsoft 365 apps update with security patches without any effort on your part. Plus, Outlook scans email attachments and checks links for viruses or phishing scams. OneDrive helps you restore files, so they’re not held captive in a ransomware attack. Microsoft 365 also lets users encrypt email, prevent forwarding, and secure sensitive files. Enjoy business agility and flexibility with internal and external users. Migrating to the cloud isn’t as simple as pressing the “start” button. Still, our tech experts can get you up and running quickly and with ease.
Remote Working with G Suite
We recommend Google’s G Suite to enable business collaboration and communication while working remotely. The advantages? Enhanced productivity, flexibility, and transparency, all without sacrificing security.
Productivity: G Suite provides access to Docs, Spreadsheets, Forms, Websites, App Scripting, and more. Using G Suite, internal and external users can collaborate and see changes made. This simultaneous, real-time collaboration saves on emailing documents back and forth. Avoid the inefficiency of someone having to correlate different versions of a document. Further, G Suite provides a single dashboard. Users can access the creation tools, as well as email, calendars, and Google Hangouts. People don’t have to keep several different applications open. It’s all available in a single, integrated solution.
Flexibility: G Suite is available on any device, iOS or Android. All your remote workers need is a working internet connection. With this cloud-based solution, you can let them log in to G Suite and get everything done in one place. Everyone can: share access to the business Google Drive, use Google Cloud Search to find the needed files, synchronize work calendars on Google, easily hop on video calls or chat in Google Hangouts. Google even touts a “99.9% service level agreement.” Google maintains its systems while making its applications continually available, which means “no scheduled downtime or maintenance windows.”
Transparency: With G Suite, all the business data lives in one place. Users can share files but still control access. Your IT admins can decide what access to allow remote or guest users, and they can secure that access from within the G Suite Admin Console. With G Suite audit logs, IT admins can review actions taken by users. The logs provide information about what resources were used, by whom, and when. This can help with cybersecurity, plus it provides peace of mind that people are complying with procedures remotely. G Suite offers reporting for international information security controls, accounting, financial services, health privacy, government, and payment card industry standards. At the same time, although you are using G Suite’s services, your data doesn’t belong to Google. All personal information and intellectual property remains yours, even that meme you made about the “joys” of home schooling.
Collaborative Working
The key to remote working is the ability to collaborate in a digital space with everyone at once. Modern software such as Microsoft 365 allows all team members to be working on a single document at the same time. Whether the project calls for killer spreadsheets, expertly crafted documentation, or a knockout presentation; everyone can pull together and hit it out of the park. Even when you’re not working out of the office or busy on the road, collaborative software can help to power your team working locally too.
Admin Done Remotely
Modern software has impacted the way in which we do bookkeeping and accounts too.
Similar to being tied to your desk in years gone past; accounting software was once stuck solidly in the desktop too. Previously, batch runs of calculations were required to provide reports on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Today, cloud computing has opened up ways to speed up business in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
Cloud-based accounting packages such as Xero or Quickbooks Online allow for your accounts to be done remotely. Moving the resource and strain out of your firm takes it out of sight and out of mind.
Security and maintenance of your accounts databases, for example, falls to cloud professionals instead of your business. Rather than waste company time on submitting documents and calculating taxes they are done in the cloud and submitted to you instead.
Make your Accounts Work for You
Maintaining your accounts is made as simple as logging into a single portal. This tool allows you to take both your admin and your work out of the office and keep it on the go.
By the time your accounts are due, your accountant simply has to log in remotely and pick up where you left off. By the time taxes are due the work is done and you can get on with the important things.
Getting work done out of the office and on the go is a huge boost to productivity. Modern technology enables you to keep team members up to speed, continue collaborating, and even stay on top of your accounts from anywhere in the world.
Give us a call today at 305-400-0992 to talk about how we can help you unwire from the office.