As a general rule, one of the largest expenditures that a typical company makes is in the hiring and paying of personnel. While technology
and infrastructure costs might also be enormous, generally speaking it is paying employees a salary that takes up the largest chunk of resources of a typical company operating in the world today.
While you should try and avoid mass lay-offs unless there are no other options left to pursue, there are ways that you can save a little bit of money here and there by trimming the hedges a little bit. One strategy that you can employee is to rotate employee shifts, taking a handful of employees and letting them off work one or two hours early on Friday. If you rotate this throughout the different people that are working, you can save a few hours of salary once a week and the rotation should ensure that people do not lose so much of their work that it makes it difficult for them to continue working for you at the current rate of work and pay that you give them.
Strategies like this often have the added effect of increasing employee morale, something that directly contributes to higher productivity. This in turn can allow you to add a permanent rotated employee shift situation into your business until the economy turns around. While it will not save nearly as much money as mass lay-offs, it will keep morale high and might just save enough in conjunction with other cost saving measures that your company can get through the current hard times.
While convincing the boss might be something that is difficult to do, an arguably harder proposition might be convincing yourself. It is quite possible that you are a fan of Bloggy Biz and have been reading the last month’s worth of posts with an amused expression on your face because you do not seriously believe that telecommuting could ever be helpful in your situation.
Well, if this sounds like you, then you need to convince yourself that telecommuting is worthwhile. The best way to do this is to consider the alternatives. Driving to work is what created the financial mess in the first place, since your car is running on gasoline. Buying a scooter or a new car would be extremely expensive and even if you can afford it, the increased mileage would only put you back in this situation within a year or two. Carpooling can be difficult at times, for reasons that have already been covered before.
That only leaves you with two options. These two options are mass transit and telecommuting. Mass transit is a great idea, but most people in the world do not live in areas where mass transit even exists, let alone is good enough to get you where you need to go. And even those that do will acknowledge that mass transit does have days of too many people and too many delays. If you take a terrible mass transit system to work for a week, I’d be willing to bet that telecommuting will start to become a lot more attractive quickly.
Telecommuting has already been defined as being the best solution to the current energy crisis and hopefully the numerous posts on this topic on Bloggy Biz have shown you exactly why this is so. However, there are many people that are not particularly interested in telecommuting at the current moment in time and unfortunately a large number of those people are people that others call their boss. You need to convince your boss that telecommuting is worthwhile.
The only way to do this is to find out exactly why your boss has qualms with telecommuting and then set out to find solutions to those problems that are acceptable to your boss. If your boss is worried about not being able to come out and tell you something to your face, then mention online teleconferencing technology and also mention that you will get a dedicated phone line for use with the business. If they are worried about productivity, then explain and even show them where you will work at home to prove that productivity will not be a problem.
The wholesale switch to a telecommuting based economy is not going to be an easy one, but convincing the boss should be easy enough if you are serious about getting things done.
There are many ideas that people have for telecommuting, but here is a very simple system that can be used immediately for people that work in customer service, technical support, order taking or a similar type of job where the majority of work is done on the phone and at a computer terminal.
The first part of the system involves all of the representatives logging into an online database system when their shift starts. It is worthwhile to note that most of the businesses that hire these types of workers already have such a system currently where the workers can request time off, book additional work and do other housekeeping tasks. It would be a simple matter to expand this system to include everything else.
Once everyone has logged in, they can then sync up their dedicated work phone line with the database and this in turn will put them into a queue of available agents for the calls that then come in. Each call that comes in is then delegated to the next available agent in a way similar to how in-office systems already work. The technology already exists to bring those systems online and if this was done for every office that has these types of workers, that amount of fuel consumption within the country would drop by a very dramatic amount.
For people that are interested in telecommuting as a way of solving their gas price problems, there is one thing that is going to be required of you immediately. That thing is the installation of a dedicated phone line. While the internet has created many methods of communication far superior in nature to the conventional landline, it is also important to realize that the business world does not move quickly and for that reason conventional phone conversations are still the way most things are done in industry.
Therefore, the dedicated phone line is something that you need to have installed right away, sometimes even at the expense of the company. This phone line is one that you will only use for work purposes and because of that it will be one that is always free when you are not using it for some part of your work. Most bosses are reluctant to allow telecommuting because they feel it will detract from the actual work being done and a dedicated landline will go a long way towards convincing them otherwise.
Installation of a dedicated landline is just one of many telecommuting trips that can serve to make your at home work experience just as authentic and productive as the one you had when you commuted to work in the conventional manner.
