Why a virtual office? It saves you money!

Are you a manager or owner of a company? Do you feel you need your employees present so you can keep an eye on them? Well, hopefully the answer is no. But if the answer is yes, I have something interesting bits of information you may find useful...and they may save you lots of money.

In most business situations, an employee is only needed in the office for very important things; for example your IT tech person or the receptionist. One of the constants in business is that employees are the biggest expense to a company. Not only do you pay for their training, salary or wages, and benefits, but there are a ton of other costs as well.

Let's start with the cost of space for a cube, office furniture, printing supplies, printer maintenance, liability insurance if someone gets injured at work, and the list goes on. With technology today, more companies are finding they don't even need employees in the office for meetings anymore. Virtual meetings save time and money. With document collaboration tools, especially free ones such as OfficeLive and Google Docs, employees don't even have the need to store important files on their main computer. And if you give your employees a certain budget for supplies at home, you eliminate excess at the office, as well as reducing the need for various insurances and office space.

You can even go a step farther and have a mainly virtual company and office. This is a rather lengthy topic, but here is the short of it. First, the only people that ever need to be in the office are employees that will need to interact with incoming customers and any personnel needed to keep daily operations running, such as servers and the tech environment. Second, have a bunch of "Hotel" cubes or areas in which an employee can come in with a laptop, plug in and do their work if they are needed in the office. Most meetings and sales calls can be held virtually. Third, use a document management system that you can manage and track everything. A good example is SharePoint. Fourth, give laptops to your employees and give them the ability to VPN into work. For security and liability reasons, you can lock down a laptop much better than someone's personal home computer. Lastly, go green. Give your employees a low supply budget. Why? Because why on earth would they possibly need to print anything out when everything can be collaborated online.

I will be doing a series of blog posts on various software that is extremely helpful in achieving the virtual company. I will also be going into some more details on how it saves companies lots of money. Enjoy!