How to beat congestion and the taxman - ‘Teleworking’ Fact or Fiction!

Hi, welcome to my next instalment of Moore’s Law.  I want to raise the topic of Teleworking, does it work?  Does anyone use it?  Why bother, I have a mobile phone after all?

Until recently due to an unforeseen skiing accident during our annual pilgrimage to the ski slopes of Europe, I had to join the ever growing band of teleworkers during my convalescence - nursing my bust shoulder back to health.

The first and most obvious difference was the fact that I was online at 8:00am, relaxed and ready to go, due to not having to negotiate the morning traffic and stress that goes with attempting to navigate around the city to arrive at the office in a timely manner.  Great more toast!

The other big advantage was that due to the lack of distraction my concentration levels were so much better and as such I found that my level of production was so much higher.  The biggest down side was from other members of staff, who still have a perception that working from home is an analogy for skiving. I actually found it rather the opposite; in fact my biggest annoyance was when my wife returned home before 5:30pm and distracted me from my tasks due to wanting the same desk space for her own work.  ‘I thought we should consider more desk space or setting up another office in the house, possibly the shed, probably cheaper just organising my diary so at that time of the day I am back in the office’.  However the statistics show that teleworking or home working is in fact, as a rule, much more productive than attending a central office.

So what is involved in delivering the ‘Teleworker’?  In our case this is quite simply delivering a VoIP end on the VPN tunnel for voice as well as a PC to access the enterprise.  This can be a softphone on a PC or an actual physical device, most of us actually use the physical device so that we can hot desk and have access to all the features at the touch of a button.  ‘Without waiting on the laptop booting up’ this includes mobile handoff as discussed in my previous blog, once again reducing call costs for the mobile user and also allowing others to see your activity with presence, so for those Doubting Thomas’s within the office if they wish to monitor my remote activity they can, if they don’t have anything else to do, so they can save staring out of the windows until the afternoon.  The teleworker does not have to be located in the home, it could be a remote office or shed, technically any location with access to the internet will set up its own VPN tunnel with QOS back to the voice server, this increases quality, reliability and security of the voice application especially where there are speed challenges with the local DSL service.

There are a lot more companies now beginning to see the light of teleworking, dispelling the doubts of staff productivity and are developing staff working models to include the teleworker.  We ourselves have benefited from this new working model and currently have retained two members of staff who relocated to Turkey and India, and are still actively fully employed to continue their working role with Commsworld as if they were based in our central office in Edinburgh. This saved Commsworld a lot of time and energy to replace these key members of staff.

So finally ‘if your ears aren’t already bleeding’ how does this beat the taxman?  Well apart from the wasted fuel during your delayed commute to the office ‘burning cash directly into the chancellor’s pocket’ the taxmen are devising a scheme to tax PSTN lines for businesses.  The teleworker can now use a VoIP connection delivered over Broadband or DSL, home workers in the past would normally have fitted a PSTN line or lines into the house or their remote location which possibly will be taxable in the future, these PSTN lines can now be removed and the residential line with DSL can suffice for both connections or multiple VoIP connections to the office as well as its residential uses.   Bit of a result on the finances there, hopefully the chancellor doesn’t read this blog and come up with another money making tax scheme or I have just enlightened them to this small loop hole in their scheme therefore ‘mums’ the word.