A large number of the organizations these days have offices in more than one geographical location or have teams that do not share the same physical address. With the world becoming flatter every day, the work force collaborate and offer their services many times remotely over the internet.Many a times such type of workforce is termed as “virtual workforce”.
We, at BizMerlin, researched 10 such organizations, which have employees scattered at multiple locations, to find out how they communicate with each other.
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Email – This one got 10 out of 10. All of the organizations that we researched used email for their formal and corporate communication. They simply cherished it because they can communicate back and forth with the entire workforce at once by sending out an email to everyone in an established contact group. Responses can come back to the whole group or to the sender privately in the same manner. Users can send documents, photos, videos and audio files as attachments through the emails. In addition, whole conversation is available for review in the mail program. Flags and reminders can be set for the action items. They can be easily merged with their to-do and their calendars. It serves quite a lot.
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Skype – Out of 10, 3 used Skype on an average 40-50% of their time for communicating with their off site team members. They liked it when they wanted to have discussions over something.
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Instant Messaging – For quick chats, IM’s work really well. Instant Messaging clients provide a list of which of your contacts are currently online, so that you know if someone is working at their computer or not, and are available to discuss an issue or answer a question.
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Voice calls (cellphones or landlines) – Mobile technology has forced us to be answerable anytime and to be able to make phone calls from almost anywhere, at any time. 7 out of 10 organizations preferred their virtual workforce to use their smart phones for voice, text, email and instant messaging.
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Open source workspace – Google and many others have created a virtual online workspace where documents, calendars and other items for collaboration can be shared with a group. This allows the whole workforce to contribute to a schedule or keep track of a task list. Only 2 out of the 10 organizations used this.
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Go To Meeting/Virtual conference rooms/ Remote desktop sharing – All the organizations have used this at one time or other. Like Skype, this online product is used mainly for video conferencing, but it can go beyond that. It also allows individuals to share access to their computers. This can be particularly helpful for training on software programs that you require your virtual workforce to use.
But when the organization want to do more than just communicate with their teams, then they use the collaborative tools BizMerlin. It is not just for communication but also for collaboration.
BizMerlin is a great productivity tool for the virtual workforce. Task lists and deadlines can be posted for individuals or for groups. Tasks can be created project wise and hence resource (manpower and other) allocation can also be tracked project wise. Real time reports can be run to see the spillover and deficit.
Documents and files can be uploaded and shared. Messages can be posted regarding projects. Instant chat/messaging facilitate real-time discussions. It even includes a time tracking feature so that your virtual workforce can punch-in their hours for the tasks that they have been working on. Tasks can be flagged and the flow of information can be tracked. Team leads, project managers receive real-time status reports of the tasks that the team members have been working on. Hence, everyone is on the same platform and that too – real-time!
But the best part is that a single log in gives you the access to all the information that a progressive employee in a progressive organization needs – be it their appraisals, assets, expenses, projects, tasks, calendars or holidays.
