Driving Business Growth: New Telecom Options Are Fueling Remote Work Forces
by Ed Mass

Note: An adaptation of this article was published in St. Louis CEO magazine in November 2007.

Here are some of the hottest developments in telecommunications:
More workplaces consider themselves virtual workplaces
Number of virtual workers is rising
Number of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) minutes of usage is increasing
Sales of IP/SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephony systems are rising
More carriers are offering SIP services

More employees, including peers and lines of management, become one-person “offices.” Instead of just sending and receiving e-mail, workers make and receive phone calls while being remotely connected to the office phone system. These “offices” can even be traveling from one hotel to another.
Distributing The Work Force
With worsening traffic situations in many cities, setting up remote workers may be the better alternative than having all employees come to the corporate office. With VOIP systems, no one knows where the employee is located at the time of the call.
Therefore, the centralized headquarters office and its branch office network become a wider, geographically disbursed distribution of “offices” of varying sizes. And there is no longer a restriction to finding employees only where an official company location exists. Companies obtain the most talented and skilled workers for their needs from any area of the country or the world.
To the, almost counter-intuitive, surprise of many corporate executives, companies are finding enhanced productivity from remote workers. At the same time they’re realizing cost savings from reduced physical facilities expenses.
Distributed Workforce, Geographic Representation
One company I’ve worked for has 130 office workers. However, in whose office do they work? Twenty of them work out of their home as representatives of the company in other countries. About 15 are fully home-based workers in other parts of the U.S. away from headquarters. About 30 are part time, home-based workers who spend anywhere from one to four days in the office and the other days at home. Those that spend more time in the office may have their own desks while those that spend more time at home share a desk when they come into the office.
In addition, this company also has fluctuating work force needs on a project basis. They have a base of about 150 contract workers they can call upon when needed. All they need to do is set them up as remote workers, train them using teleconferences and webinars, and these workers are ready to act as company employees.
All home based workers use either a soft phone or the same physical phone as used in the office to connect remotely to the office phone system.
Redundancy, Disaster Recovery
One concern of creating such a distributed workforce is the redundancy and disaster recovery strategies that must be implemented to maintain uptime. Redundancy applies to having multiple physical equipment with automatic failover should the primary equipment fail. Disaster recovery applies to having redundancy located at one or more locations other than the primary location.
It seems electrical power outages, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are increasing. Disaster recovery considerations are just as real for midsize companies as they are for large corporations.
Fortunately, the new IP Telephony technologies offer solutions to both strategies at greatly reduced costs compared to previous telecommunications equipment and service offerings. Where it used to cost 60% to 80% of the original equipment cost to obtain redundancy and disaster recovery, it now may be as little as 10% - 20% of the original equipment cost.
In like fashion, the cost is also greatly reduced for the telecommunications services from carriers to enable connecting multiple locations for automatic failover for disaster recovery. Again, it’s affordable for even mid-size companies compared to the costs of just a few years ago.
The enabling technologies that allow such dramatic cost reductions are IP Telephony and SIP. SIP is a standard for carrying voice traffic both internally through an IP Phone system and through “SIP trunks” from carriers. It allows interoperating between equipment providers and carriers as well as between equipment from different manufacturers.
SIP trunks also allow greater simultaneous call capacity compared to equivalent facilities using the older technologies. Therefore, costs are further reduced with increasing capacity.
Technology Advances
There are technical details that must be properly implemented to get good voice quality. However, when this is accomplished, the quality of the call is the same as any other call. The person on the other end of the phone call can’t tell where the “office” worker is physically located. Calls can be easily and seamlessly passed between the headquarters, branch offices, and home based “offices.”
The redundancy and disaster recovery systems automatically take over upon failure of the main equipment components or services at primary locations.
This entire scenario that once was cost effective and affordable only to large corporations now is easily and cost effectively accomplished by mid-size companies.
Companies Of All Sizes Are Deriving Tremendous Productivity And Cost Benefits From Using Remote Workers.
Copyright 2007 Mass Strategic Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.