This morning saw another couple of inches of snow dumped on us here in North Hampshire and an accident shut the main route into Reading.
According to The Times the cost to the economy in lost productivity is set to reach £2bn.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Simple low cost technology and modern working practices make it easy for employees of professional service companies to work from anywhere.
Here’s how we beat the snow and kept working as normal last week:
- Staff get laptops, not desktop PCs as standard enabling them to work from home, client site… anywhere
- Email accounts are accessible via browser, Blackberry, iPhone and of course Outlook from your laptop
- Project documents are stored centrally in SharePoint and accessible anywhere you have an Internet connection
- IM worked as a replacement for those ad-hoc office conversations: “Hey, can you remember where the expenses form is…?”
- Meetings became web conferences complete with video and document sharing
It used to be that only the biggest FTSE-100 companies could afford this type of technology, but Cloud Computing now means that the cost has fallen drastically and it is now no longer about how big you are, but how agile you are.
Maybe the weather is a blessing and maybe, just maybe, things could be about to change…
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