I’m Ben Rife, President, CEO, and Founder of Bullfrog, The Next Generation Business Phone System. I’m working from my deck today and I came across an article that highlights a business trend that I wanted to share with you.
Aetna, the Health Insurance giant, announced that they are hiring more than 400+ remote workers, employees that work from home. 43% of their current workforce are remote. Their largest competitor United Health Group just made a similar hiring move in May when they hired more than 300+ remote workers.
What we’re seeing is a trend in business, with the notable exception of Yahoo, most businesses are leveraging a remote or mobile workforce. Business is no longer done from your desk or even your office. Now, it’s done from the road, in your car, from an airport, hotel, coffee shop, couch, or as in my case, my deck.
In order for your workforce to be successful working from home, they need to have the right technology. Here are 3 tools as an example:
1. Email
While email used to be located on a server in your office, today most businesses use a hosted email service provided by Microsoft or Google, which they can access on their smart phone, mobile device, tablet, PC, or Mac.
2. CRM
With respect to my own sales team, many of which work from home, we rely heavily on our customer relationship management tool, or contact database of prospects and customers. We use SalesForce.com, which is a hosted application, meaning the servers hosting our software database resides in the cloud, off our premises.
3. Phone
It’s mandatory that your remote workers be able to reliably communicate with vendors, prospects, customers, and co-workers. Having an on-premise PBX phone system at your office is no longer an option. Employees need to communicate the way your vendors, prospects, and customers do by leveraging Instant Messaging, Presence, Audio and Video Conferencing, Desktop and File Sharing. Being remote means that your employees need to be more connected than ever before.
In conclusion, remote workers can provide a business with a much greater pool of candidates to recruit and hire from, as well as providing a greater skill set, and a lower total operating expense. However, it’s important to get the technology right.
For more information on how Bullfrog 4 Business can help your business communicate with your remote workforce, or for a FREE trial of our software, go to http://bullfrog.net.
