Working time

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.
• Knowledge Management - With the number of layoffs we've had during this recession, a lot of businesses are starting to really appreciate the impact of lost knowledge after the staff walks out the door. You may be missing documents they created during their work, lost forever in their email inboxes or private folders/computers, or actual procedures and instructions that could have easily been captured in a wiki. Businesses will increasingly appreciate the value of the information and knowledge their staff have and look for tools and procedures to ensure they manage and retain this knowledge in the organisation.
• Doing more with less - Some companies have been hit hard by redundancies, and the remaining staff have found they have more work on their plate, which will only grow again as the economy recovers. Companies have needed to drive through productivity tools to enable a smaller workforce to do more. As the workload increases again, companies will look first to productivity improvements before hiring a large workforce again.
• Cutting back operating costs - One of the biggest winners during the recession was cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with cloud computing, essentially the software vendor provides the software over the internet for a monthly subscription. No more upfront capital costs to buy licenses and servers to run it, no need to hire specialist IT guys to keep the system running and backed up. The huge cost savings this allows have allowed some businesses to cut down their IT costs dramatically over the past year, and this is one of those trends where once you start, you don't go back! Expect more and more businesses to take advantage of cloud computing from now on.

We're entering a brave new world. Businesses will tread carefully towards recovery, but with a new appreciation of some of the trends that have appeared this decade. They will increasingly start to see how these trends can really help them save operating costs and help their workforce become more flexible and agile to respond to future opportunities and threats. Expect to see cloud computing vendors like SambaStream become more pervasive in the enterprise and enterprise collaboration tools like SambaJAM become a standard way of working and helping businesses manage their core asset - knowledge. We feel very confident as we enter the new economy, I hope you do too!

If you'd like to learn more about how SambaJAM can address the trends discussed in this blog for your business, please contact us here.

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days
• Delayed payments - If your customers are also suffering from snow days, you could find payments from customers disrupted, and the interruption in your cash flow hitting your business
• Missed deadlines and targets - If your business is working to tight deadlines and targets, you could find snow days have a dramatic impact on your staff's productivity, meaning you have to adjust your original deadlines and targets further in the future. If you have service level agreements with customers, you could also find yourself hit with penalties if there is a significant slip in deadlines and targets.
• Increase in work backlog - With people ramping up to full speed after the Christmas holidays, we noticed that "business as usual" didn't start properly until this week of the (18th January onwards), a full 2 weeks after the new year! This was mainly due to the disruption of snow and now means staff and businesses find themselves with a much bigger backlog of work to catch-up after the Christmas holidays.

Unfortunately businesses can't control the weather, but what they can control is ensuring their staff has access to the information and tools they need to get on with their work regardless of where they're located.

With collaboration software like SambaJAM, staff can stay connected virtually over the web, without any loss of access to the key information and tools they use everyday in the office. For example:

• If you currently keep all your documents on your office desktops or shared network drives, most likely your staff will lose access to those outside the office. With web based collaboration software, not only can you ensure your staff still have access to the documents, you can also ensure they can search and edit documents easily. All they need is a web browser, and with online editing tools like Zoho, they don’t even need expensive Microsoft Office installed on their home PC or laptop to continue working.
• By using task management, you can still action and assign tasks to your team, even if you’re all sitting in different locations. This helps you keep things on track during the disruption.
• If you have all your information inside the collaboration platform, you can still search for the information and documents you need to complete your work without any disruption
• If you need your colleagues contact details, the profile pages can act as a replacement for your internal corporate directory, so staff can still get in touch with everyone from home
• You can use the social networking tools to keep your team connected and talking even if they’re sitting miles apart. They can post questions, ideas, issues as though its business as usual. Like a virtual office conversation on the web.

For your staff, the great thing about collaboration tools like SambaJAM, is if they use them day to day in the office, moving to another location will be seamless. All their information, documents and tools will still be there in the same place they left them, and as long as they have a browser to access them, you can ensure they don’t let the backlog of work after Christmas build up on snow days, making for a more relaxed return to work for both them and you.

If your business suffered as a result of the recent weather and you’d like to see how collaboration tools like SambaJAM can support remote working, please contact us here.