While working from home, you face many challenges and hurdles. The biggest is keeping a professional outlook. The second challenge is doing the work at the same standard as in the physical office.
Businesses run from home often suffer because they can’t arrange a professional virtual environment. It is expensive to get all the physical office facilities individually at home. It can affect your performance and productivity. But, you can use the virtual office service to overcome these challenges.
A virtual office is an online, subscription-based service that gives your business a professional look and feels it lacks. It creates a perfect and ideal virtual workspace environment where you and your team members can work safely.
The features virtual office offers cut down your overhead and enhance your productivity. But, if you find that is not the case, then you need to re-evaluate your workspace to find where you are lagging. If you are still confused, please read through. This post will tell you how you can improve the performance of your virtual office.
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Features of a virtual office
Before we move further, let us first look at some of the features you will get when using the virtual office service:
- A virtual office gives you a business address of a legit physical location. The address is registered and can be used as your legal business address. You can use it for your marketing and business correspondence.
- You get office facilities like call handling. All your business calls are answered and filtered by professional receptionists. Your messages are noted down and forwarded to you along with calls.
- Another feature you get as a part of the front desk service is mail forwarding. You can receive your mail and packages at the physical address of the virtual office. The front desk staff will receive and sort out your mail for you. Urgent mail is scanned and emailed to you. These two front desk services take a lot of burden off of you. Now you don’t have to ask friends and family to wait for your packages and mail when you are traveling. You don’t miss out on anything even while moving around.
- Virtual office service also understands your need for physical interaction with your employees and clients. It provides meeting and conference rooms. These rooms have all the needed equipment to host meetings, conferences, seminars, etc. you can also hold group conference calls for clients who are abroad.
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- The word ‘virtual’ is synonymous with technology. To run an online workspace you need technology that secures your data and communication. You also need a flawless, cloud-based business management system. Luckily there are many software and apps available that help you monitor and manage your business online. Virtual office service includes this software as a part of their service. They give supportive technology providing a secure and safe virtual environment for data storage and sharing.
- A very important factor that leaves a strong impression on your clients and employees is the environment and ambiance of your office. A virtual office is known for trendy workspace interiors. The interior design and furnishing of the virtual office are stylish and as per the trends of the industry. Any visitor that interacts with you on the physical premises will have a good and professional impression of your business.
- Every office space is incomplete without office facilities like computers, Wifi, scanners, printers, fax machines, landline phones, etc. A virtual office provides all these facilities on the office premises.
- A good workspace is managed and run by admin staff. The virtual office service is responsible for hiring, paying, and managing the admin staff.
- A virtual office also includes amenities for the entertainment of the employees. These include swimming pools, cafeterias, coffee shops, restaurants, gaming rooms, pool tables, gyms, etc.
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Ways to improve performance in virtual office
Productivity and performance can be a problem in a virtual office if things are not done right. Many factors can affect your team’s performance while working virtually. But, there are a few things you can do to enhance your performance and make it better than the physical office.
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Invest in the right collaboration tools
Communication and collaboration between your team members and you are the keys to getting better results. It can remove lapses in your work and keeps your employees engaged and connected with their work.
There are many good and popular tools for easy communication and data sharing. You can stay on top of the whole process as the team leader through management apps.
Tools like Slack, Trello, Zoom, Microsoft office 365, etc. are tools that connect your whole team to organize and share data about projects.
As a team leader, you can assign different projects to different teams, and keep an eye on their performance through collaborative software.
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Before choosing a tool for your business, learn about the features it offers. See if they match your requirements. Only then will you be able to make the right choice.
There are many free and paid tools available in the market, don’t get attracted to the free ones that don’t cater to your needs. Nor get impressed by excessive features and pay for them even when you don’t need them.
When you use the right collaborative tool, you can enhance your performance tenfold. Not just that, it helps you save time and channels all your effort in the right direction.
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Impose attendance and time management policies
Whoever said ‘time is money, was a genius.
Time is the biggest investment you and your employees put into your business. When you don’t use time aptly, you lose productivity and your performance nosedives. This is also the biggest challenge remote workers face.
How to ensure the attendance of your employees and how to make sure they don’t waste time? That is the biggest issue you will face managing a remote team.
There are tools to manage the attendance of your team members.
You can also derive a policy for the amount of time you want your team members or employees to be present and how much time they can overwork on a project after working hours.
Some tools use timers to monitor how much time each person spends online working on the project.
When you are contacting your employees through phone or email, set a certain response schedule and timeframe. Also, tell them to inform you in advance in case of an emergency or any other appointment.
A good and trusting relationship with your staff can improve their level of commitment to the work. If your work allows flexibility, then you can set up a relaxed reporting schedule.
But be prepared to deal with slackers, after all, they are part of every team even in a physical office environment.
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Encourage personal connections and focus on the outcome
Understanding your team members can be very helpful in enhancing their performance.
You can know their personalities, weaknesses, and strengths. This can help assign projects to them. This will also teach you how to motivate them and what to expect of them.
To build this connection, you can arrange non-work-related team events. You can also add personal and financial incentives to promote motivation in your team.
You can also encourage healthy competition among the members. Assign small incentives for day-to-day tasks for the winning member of these competitions to further motivate them.
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Set goals for your team on a daily or weekly basis. Be straightforward with your team members about their tasks and your expectations from them. Offer guidance openly and arrange regular meetings so you can help them out.
