Can your business run with no one in the office?

On days where inclement weather prevents members of the team from getting to the office, it’s easy to lose a day or two of productivity. But planning ahead, and leveraging available technology, can help limit lost time. In fact, the Roundpeg marketing crew has gotten so good at getting work done from different locations, we hardly skip a beat.  The ice storms a few weeks ago really tested our skill.

Here are a few tips to help:

  • Send yourself key information: whether it’s passwords, contact lists, or graphics, that way you can get work done at home. If we know we might not be able to make it in the office, we email ourselves documents, put large pictures in dropbox, and take home our password database. Lorraine even makes a carbon copy of our server on portable hard drive, so she has all of our project work (past and present) at her fingertips.
  • Use web based email on and contact management tools.   With gmail and other web mail tools, your contact list and email history follows you wherever you go.  At Roundpeg, we rely on our AddressTwo data base. In addition to contact information, we can track contact history.  That way, if Lorraine and I are both working on a call list, no one gets called twice, and no one gets left out.
  • If you work in a collaborative environment, you don’t need to be in the same room: Skype and GoToMeeting are just two ways people leverage technology to get work done from wherever they are.
  • Stay in contact: Our team schedules 2 or 3 brief 10 minute calls throughout the day to catch up and make sure we’re all on the same page.
  • Have back-up work: Even if I forget something I wanted to work on at the office or lose power, I still plan tasks I can accomplish (like, say, writing blog posts)

These tips should help you remain productive, no matter where you decide to work from. What other “remote working” tips do you have?