Remote Office Experts

Back in February of 2009, I posted a blog entry (The Remote Office – Eating Our Own Dog Food) about our business moving from a centralized office to everyone working from home. There were three primary reasons for this decision:

• Why incur the  cost associated with maintaining an office that, generally, no clients ever saw?
• Why make our guys come into an office, if we can make it work otherwise?
• We wanted to ‘eat our own dog food’. We sell this remote stuff, why not use it ourselves?

We have survived a few months working remotely. This article is about our communication improvements as a result of the transition.

Real-time Communication is Key with any Remote Office

One of the biggest things, that we knew we had to overcome before moving out of our office, was finding how to replace the the different types of in-person communication that we had throughout the day.

• Eye contact – You could look at someone and tell whether he was on the phone and, generally, how much longer he thought he would be.
• The drop by – With all of our desks within walking distance, it was no big deal to walk over and interrupt someone’s day if he didn’t look busy.
• Gathering around a monitor – Often, the guys would find a new utility, a funny video or they needed help with something they were troubleshooting. Having everyone near each other made this easy.
• Whiteboard/notes – If someone was on the phone, it was typical to write a quick note and hold it up and get a nod for either yes or no.
• “Love taps” – We had these little yellow foam golf balls and other projectiles in our office. It was standard operating procedure to send one over to an unsuspecting co-worker just for fun.

While seemingly very small, eye contact and “love taps” enabled us to be a quick-moving team that really understood and cared about each other.

How would we replace these? Or should we, in some cases?

Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS)

We determined that a chat system would be the most likely candidate for replacing these types of communication. We investigated a few different chat systems and determined that we wanted something that was internally hosted and had enterprise features.

Microsoft Office Communications server fit the bill for us.

• Person-to-person and group-based instant messaging
• Complete integration with Outlook
• Presence – Available, Away, Do Not Disturb, Offline and Out of Office
• Desktop sharing with individuals and groups
• Video streaming for face-to-face communications

[It also doesn't hurt that we are a Microsoft partner and get the majority of the licenses for free.]

Microsoft OCS Makes us Better

New whiz-bang technology is great and all, but unless it makes a business better, it’s just an expensive toy. Microsoft Office Communications Server makes our business better. The biggest change I noticed is the way our team responds to company-wide issues for our clients.

Pre-Collaboration Wide-Spread Event:

Previously, all of our help desk phones would begin ringing, and we all would have our heads down focused on that one person on the phone. The higher-level engineers would realize that it could be a wide-spread problem, but they couldn’t get in touch with the other people on the desk, because they were focused on their own call. An email would be sent, but if just one person doesn’t reply-all, the communication forks and some staff members end up losing critical information.

Post Collaboration Wide-Spread Event:

When a wide-spread issue is taking place, that same lead engineer now starts up a group chat with all technicians [three clicks]. This way all communication is done in real-time and captured in a single place. If for some reason, one technician feels that seeing his/her screen would help, a single click publishes that person’s desktop to all of the people in the group chat. Amazing!

Microsoft Outlook Integration and OCS

Another feature, that I really love, is the integration between Outlook and Microsoft OCS. The two biggies are:

Out of Office status with message

I leave the “office” pretty regularily to meet with prospects and clients (want a meeting? – contact me), and I always want my team to know where I am. When I update my out of office message, it will automatically set my status to ‘Out of Office’ (displayed with a red dot) and put my out of office message next to my name. Immediately, my team can see that I’m out – because of the red dot – and where  am just by hovering the mouse over my name.

Ability to reply to an email with an instant message

If you receive an email from anyone in your organization, there is a little dot next to the sender’s name with his current status. This not only allows you to see whether they are available for chat, out of the office, or away just briefly, but also allows you to respond to the email with a chat instead of a standard reply. [shown in the image above]

This is a huge time saver. How many times have you had one of your email threads accumulate 15 replies and take 30 minutes to complete? Instant messaging, directly from email, quickly put an end to that.

Did we Replace all of the Communication Methods, above?

• Eye contact – Mostly replaced by the status indicators. Next step: integrating our phones into it so we can see whether you are on the phone or not.
• The drop by – Gone and hopefully never replaced. What a time waster!
• Gathering around a monitor – Replaced by desktop sharing. Faster, and allows remote people to participate even if they are at client sites.
• Whiteboard/notes – Replaced by instant messages. And, groups of people can be involved, now.
• “Love taps” – This one is hard to replace, although I’ve started to see a trend of sending YouTube videos to each other unannounced and without saying what’s in them (for instance: Video1 or Video2 – both clean) or some clever banter in a group chat window for no reason.

No, we haven’t, replaced all the communication methods, but we’re getting closer. And, I think we have improved, as a service organization, because of the communication methods we have implemented.

Although, I really do miss launching little yellow foam golf balls around the office.