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Posts Tagged ‘Employees’

Making Your Case for Virtual Work

August 31st, 2010

Maria Helm

With mobile technology and online tools becoming available to anyone inexpensively or sometimes even free, more and more workers are thinking of cutting out commute time and work from home. The challenge is how does one make a case for virtual work? First, ask yourself whether the nature of your job does not require you to be present in the office. In other words, if you can start and finish your job or project without eyeball-to-eyeball contact with co-workers or customers, then you are a candidate for virtual work.

Second, are you sure you’re cut out for virtual work? Are you convinced that you have the self-discipline to work from home under minimal supervision? And perhaps more importantly, does your boss perceive you as the kind of self-starter who can perform independently? Are you a proven performer? Well organized? A good time manager? If you can effectively communicate your value to your employer, you’ll be better able to sell your boss on the idea of letting you do virtual work.

Once you are comfortable that virtual work or telecommuting is right for you, and you are fully informed, use the following guidelines and strategies to craft an effective proposal:

* Ask not what telecommuting can do for you; explain what telecommuting can do for your employer. Never frame your proposal in terms of how telecommuting will meet your needs. Don’t mention your need for better work-life balance, more time to spend with your kids, or any other personal need. State only that telecommuting will make you more productive and efficient, be a better use of the time you previously spent on the road, make your boss’s life easier — whatever benefits you come up with that focus on the employer’s needs — not yours.

Posted in Virtual Office

Tags: Credibility, Employees, Telecommuting, Virtual Work

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Get Your Employees Motivated and Productive

August 12th, 2010

Maria Helm

Who doesn’t want employees that are more productive in the workplace? Yet personal issues, illness and family obligations often prevent employees from coming in. That’s why so many employers are now enabling remote access to their network.

Whether you call it “working from home,” “virtual office,” or “telecommuting,” the idea is the same; your network is configured to give you and your staff the ability to work from some location other than the office.

While telecommuting will not work in every situation, there is no doubt that technology has made working from home extremely practical whether a few times a month or every week. As a matter of fact, offering work-from-home options can give you a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining the best employees. Here are some additional benefits to allowing your people remote access:

Employees who are sick can continue to work without infecting the office or losing an entire day of work
Employees forced to stay home to take care of sick family members can continue to work instead of taking off long periods.
Inclement weather or heavily congested traffic won’t shut down your office.
Key managers with a heavy workload will actually be more productive if given the ability to work from home on evening and weekends.
Allowing employees flexibility during peak workloads (e.g., your accounting staff during tax season or periodic reporting dates) makes employees happier to put in the extra hours from a home office.
Employees with temporary or permanent disabilities can continue to be fully functional in a home environment.

How to Get Started With a Telecommuting Program

First, make sure you have a telecommuting policy. Second, make sure that systems are in place to adequately support telecommuting. There are several options for remotely accessing your network, however, there are two primary ways used by most. They are:

Posted in Motivation

Tags: Employees, Going virtual, Productive, Small Business, Telecommuting, VPN, Work from home

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How to Lead for Exceptional Customer Service

August 20th, 2009

Maria Helm

Ever stop to really ponder about what business you’re in? Ask around, and you’ll probably hear things like: retail, food service, manufacturing, etc. If those are the kind of answers you or your employees would give, then you’d be only half right!

One question for you: If all your customers went away for good, would you still have a business? Would your employees still have jobs? Nope, of course not! The more important half of what you and your employees do is CUSTOMER SERVICE.

Everyone in your organization needs to know excellent Customer Service, more importantly need to practice it. And the leadership you provide plays a huge role in making that happen.

Here are some Customer Service Leadership tips:

Start with hiring the right people. Your selection process must be a part of your overall customer service strategy. During interviews, probe the candidate’s passion for providing superior service. Pose hypothetical situations and ask the candidate to describe how s/he would handle them.

State it in Job Descriptions. Make “Customer Service” a part of all job descriptions, no matter the level of function. Make sure that that each employee understands how he or she directly or indirectly “touches” the customer.

Expect it and Inspect it. Clarify your expectations and communicate them to everyone. Have follow-up meetings to make sure that they are clear on what is expected of them. Include “customer service” feedback in all performance evaluations.

Make your Employees Customer Service Experts. Help your employees become experts on the products and services you offer. Provide them with product manuals, sales tools, and appropriate training. The more they know, the better their service will be.

Celebrate Successes. Recognize employees who provide exceptional customer services. Share their stories internally and with your customers.

By applying these ideas and by focusing on the people who focus on the customers, you can help ensure that you don’t end up as one of the losers. You owe it to your customers, you owe it to your organization and you owe it to yourself.

“Motivate them, train them, care about them, and make winners out of them . . . we know that if we treat our employees correctly, they’ll treat the customers right. And if customers are treated right, they’ll come back.” – J. Marriott, Jr.

Posted in Customer Service

Tags: Business, Customer Service, Employees, Hiring, Leadership, Tips

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