Phones - Most of you have 3 phone numbers; a company extension, a direct desk phone number, and a cell number. You have to track text and voicemails on all of them and have no access to some of them from home. We use Grasshopper.com to assign one number to each employee and the phone calls and texts are contained in one app on their personal cell phone or web browser on the computer and all voicemails get text transcription and are emailed to your inbox. You can control you Phone call schedule to keep you sane in the mornings / evenings / weekends or screen your calls before picking them up. We can transfer calls between employees and forward an important voicemail to your co-worker.
Shared File System - You’ll notice that I didn’t say file server or VPN for access to files. These solutions depend on a reliable internet connection between home and the office for each open and save operation. Any abnormality in the connection really adds fragility to productivity and more importantly add frustration. A solution needs to use the local SSD / Hard Drive of the computer for performance and up-time and use the internet for sync. Dropbox and other similar clouds is fine. We use a peer-2-peer solution called Resilio Sync.
Conference Calls - You need a conference call system that doesn’t need you to install software, has traditional phone call-in support, easy screen sharing, and allows for both scheduled meetings and quick meetings instant. We use Join.me and its cousin GoToMeeting since it has many of these features. Its so easy that in the middle of a phone call, I’ll pause to send link for the other person to see my screen.
Text Chat - This is almost more important than a conference call system. We have a group chat in Google Hangouts to coordinate on submittals and issues and have individual chats when sharing progress updates and instructions. I might recommend Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Hardware and Software Licenses - We chose a hardware combination that is easy and inexpensive to replicate so that we can provide each employee an identical workplace computing setup even at home. We also switched from desktops to laptops since the cost of just one AutoCAD license alone more than pays for a laptop and the risk of damage or theft of that laptop. However, you can’t just use any hardware and expect it to run AutoCAD, be inexpensive, support 4k, and not have some headaches. Even a pencil lead breaks and a pen runs out of ink. Same is true with technology. I love talking about equipment and hardware. Give me a call.
Task Management - Your team needs to keep track of who’s holding the ball and who needs to catch it next. In the office, you had team meetings, stand-up meetings, stopped by someone’s desk, left a note, etc. and the project manager kept a passive eye on progress by hearing people talk about the project, answered questions, and saw physical activity. Don’t discount this. Its important and it needs to be replicated it in the cloud. I even programmed my own version of this in 2009 for my old company. My absolute favorite system is Asana.com, its free up to 15 people. Maybe you start the roll-out with your PM’s and figure out your best practices and customs before a larger roll out.
Tracking Work Hours - You still need to track people’s hours. Since we don’t track time per project, we find emailing timesheets to the HR email account works just fine. Your existing system is likely local networked based and probably need specific tracking needs. I don’t have a suggestion for this.
Tracking Project Hours - Call me if you still thing you should be tracking hours per project. I have a way better solution for this.
Password Sharing - Your company has a bunch of websites that have different employees that need to share the login credentials. LastPass that is cross-platform and lets us sync password, encrypt them per user, share passwords with a limited group of employees, and never reuse a password.
PDF Markup - No one has a good printer at home and its just infeasible to replicate. Also your 5-year-old is really terrible at AutoCAD redlines. You need to get your relines to the right person and that person no longer works next to you. The solution also needs to be so friction free that its better than paper. We use a graphic artist screen tablets attached to our computer so that our PDF markup software directly opens and saves from the shared file system. This means we can cut and paste from another screen and application and also view it on our 43” 4K screen at full size and high resolution. No transferring sketches from an iPad and the graphic tablet only responds to a pen, there is no touch. Its as if were real paper. Without these tools, its no wonder paper still hangs around most offices. That’s been huge change at our office.
Email & Calendars - Most companies have already moved to the cloud for these items choosing either Office 365 or Google G-Suite so I will skip going into much detail. However, you still have an email server in the office, cloud services are only $5 per person per month, billed monthly. And no need to pay for Outlook, its all in your web browser.
Computer Support - Your IT staff needs a way to diagnose computer issues and help your people reduce down time. You need some sort of remote support software. Most times screen sharing is good enough for this, but a remote desktop solution can save tons of time. We use Chrome Remote Desktop for this, it has a bunch of other features, and its free.
Zapier.com - Lets you automate workflows between your mix of cloud solutions. Saves a bunch of time.
HR and Accounting - Put your bookkeeping in the cloud and automate your payroll. We use Xero and Gusto for this. Its amazing.
Virtual Presence - This is the most recent solution we have implemented. People like people, we like to interact, tell jokes, etc. and we form bonds with our co-workers. An office provides a low friction atmosphere for these team building interactions. We needed something more than a video call. We use tandem.chat to provide a continuous video feed of employees who want to hang around the virtual “water cooler” where you can see each other as you work, see if someone is on the phone, see if someone is back from lunch, see if someone looks deep in thought, and un-mute when you want to tell a joke or ask a simple design question. We found tandem.chat a few weeks ago and its pretty cool.
