Own business vs. effective remote work time management

Working remotely requires thoughtful organization to ensure efficiency and adequate control over task completion. In this article, we discuss how to optimize your remote work time, organize your workstation, and how to use virtual office support to help you manage your business.

Why is it important for your business to optimize remote working hours?

There are few industries where work can be done entirely remotely. These are those fields where the entire product can be transmitted over the Internet in the form of a digital file. Editorial offices, IT companies, consulting firms, insurance companies or banks come to mind. But in each of these cases it will be very difficult to switch to working remotely completely. In each case, there will be a need for meetings, brainstorming, consultations. But this can be handled on teams.

You need to organize remote work in such a way, set rules so that the final product does not suffer as a result. It may be necessary to develop rules and regulations for remote work, so that everyone knows how to navigate this and when to work remotely and when to work in the office. The decision to adopt as a long-term model hybrid work has become very popular after the pandemic.

Organizing remote work step by step

Preparation for the implementation of remote work requires the development of conditions for its implementation. It may be necessary to establish a schedule, so that not everyone is working at the same time under the company. Well, and the basic issue for the introduction of remote work is a good boss. That is, one who is able to evaluate the work of employees on the basis of results and not just working time.

Weak bosses and thus poor employer discernment in assessing crew performance was one of the reasons why state-owned companies allowed remote work to a much lesser extent than private ones during the lockdown. But of course, in private companies, off-site work also sometimes involves branding it if management doesn't know what the crew is doing.

Working remotely - a daily plan for more effective organization

When working outside the office, tools are needed to regulate the remote work of the team. A work plan for remote workers can be useful here. Regulations for providing remote work may be necessary.

Often employees have tasks in their job description that can be done remotely and those that are better done on-site. In such cases, it is all too easy to use remote work for the former tasks.

The fact of how remote work goes is largely due to the quality of the team and their motivation to work. Remote workers are difficult to keep track of, even for a well-informed boss. Effective remote work requires something else. You may be a task-based system, maybe different kinds of rewards....

Equipping the workplace, or organizing the remote workspace

The position of work performed remotely depends mostly on the employee's premises. Nevertheless, the employer should also ensure that remote work is performed in accordance with safety rules. This is because it should be remembered that, according to the regulations, remote work does not exempt the employer from responsibility for the employee. So, occupational safety and hygienic work rules apply at all times. When organizing remote work, the employer is obliged to collect a statement from the employee that he has sufficient working conditions.

Communication with customers during designated hours

For many companies, contact with customers is fundamental. When work is done in the traditional way there is no problem with this. Everyone is on site. If the company decides to organize hybrid work or exclusively work remotely then the problem of communication with customers arises.

One solution worth considering is to adopt the model used by many offices. Such an organization of working hours, in which specific times are designated for contact with customers. The rules of work organization in this case assume that certain people will be available at certain times either on the phone or physically at work.

This organization of working time will look different in each company, because each company has its own specific needs.

Electronic signature to save time

Working time is a value in itself. Every employer is obliged to comply with a certain amount of employees' working time. A waste of time at work is a waste of money.

In the age of the Internet and various tools that we had to learn during the pandemic, it is not a problem to arrange all the details remotely. However, until recently, when it came to signing a contract, it was necessary to meet in person and sign the documents.

This is where electronic signatures bow. Qualified electronic signature has become very widespread in recent years. It allows you to sign documents remotely without cumbersome and time-consuming commutes. It is worth equipping employees with such a tool.

How does a virtual office help organize remote work?

By setting up a company in a virtual office, we can work anywhere. We can say that we are de-localized. The office will pick up correspondence, scan it and make it available on the platform, send the originals to the specified address. The boss can work in the Bialowieza Forest. The team's remote work stations can be in Zakopane, the Mazurian Mountains, or anywhere else.

Providing yourself with working conditions, organization of the workstation can be left to the team. The boss is left with the need to provide the remote worker with work tools, establish work rules and control the work. The rules of organization can be arbitrary and the establishment of task-based working hours will cause the crew to take care of productivity itself.

For good measure, quite a few companies, having sent employees home because of the pandemic, are already using a similar work system.

Building customer trust with a prestigious address

Virtual offices are usually located in city centers. When a company is registered in such a place, the KRS or CEIDG shows just such an address and not from the outskirts of the city. Seeing that a company is registered in a prestigious place we reflexively give it more trust.

Elimination of traffic distractions

A virtual office not only provides efficient and professional handling of incoming correspondence. It can also provide peace of mind at work. A problem in many companies is non-essential business phones.

The solution to this problem can be a dedicated phone line answered by a virtual office employee. If he or she is well and thoroughly instructed what type of calls to divert to whom and which ones not to connect at all, the productivity of employees can increase. Nothing unnecessary will distract them.

Secure storage of vital correspondence

The virtual office provides a professional service. There, nothing is allowed to get lost. On the other hand, when the whole team is working remotely, keeping the paperwork in order may not be easy, if not impossible. Especially with such a distributed structure as outlined above.

Correspondence security, protection of employee data are areas that are better entrusted to professionals.

Additional services to support the implementation of remote working

The use of remote work is very tempting for many companies. It promotes flexible work organization, it is easy to change the place of work in such a case. Most employees also praise remote work.

When a company decides to work remotely completely, it is important to delegate the maximum amount of non-core responsibilities.

The first thing that comes to mind here is bookkeeping. Accounting records are essential for a company, because tax offices are unlikely to recognize translations like I forgot, lost, misplaced. Data protection is also not insignificant in the choice of outsourcing. The same applies to HR, or the handling of employee affairs. Very often companies offer accounting and HR in a package. When organizing a job, it's worth asking a virtual office about such services, as this may be the "second leg" of its business. Aaa... and also sending correspondence is also done by virtual offices.

Technical and IT support are other services that can and should be outsourced.

And once we have these conditions for safe remote work it remains to focus on the essence of our own work.