Does virtual working work?
July 26th, 2008 | by Adam LuckingWorking together well as business, virtually, is a challenge and it is no different for us at Choregus. Some people will say that it is critical to success that business owners work in the same location.
However the Choregus team managed to do this rather well over the years. We worked from different areas of the UK and it sometimes caused a few problems, but they were in no way “deal breakers”.
So if you are a new business, here are the advantages of working virtually.
Cheap – As there is no physical office space to pay for or no commute to the office, there are are no major costs involved.
Productivity – Working from home is all well and good, as long as you can ignore distractions such as TV. As you are more comfortable in your own home you become happier and as a result productivity rises considerably. At Choregus we found that in the early days, working apart meant we all focused hard on what we were good at rather than worrying about irrelevant issues.
Communication – With all the usual communication tools at our disposal, like Skype, MSN Messenger, email and our own online whiteboard we could still effectively communicate with each other. Working virtually doesn’t mean you lose all communication.
Does it work?
As you can see Choregus worked extremely well in the early days, however as the business grows it can become difficult to work in a virtual environment, especially with more than 4 or 5 people. The key to success is ensuring that people are kept in the loop about everything. This could be communicating daily using MSN, email and even holding meetings using Skype and virtual whiteboards.
So do you have any experience of working in a virtual environment? How do you compare it to a physical office? What problems did you encounter, if any? It would be good to gain an insight into your experiences.
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One Response to “Does virtual working work?”
By J.A. Watson on Jul 26, 2008 | Reply
If you are considering running a business, you need to take into account three critical factors about Skype:
- Service outages, anywhere from local to worldwide, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
- Presence reporting extremely erratic. There is nothing more frustrating than needing to talk to someone, knowing they are online, and Skype refuses to connect because it claims they are not online. It happens all the time.
- Customer Support / Technical Support. NONE. Do you really want to make your business depending on something for which you have nowhere to turn when something doesn’t work?
There are alternatives to Skype which don’t suffer from these problems, such as ooVoo, SightSpeed and Gizmo5.