IT can offer a flexible solution to working moms via remote working from home

Do you have working moms (or dads) at your office? How often do they run into the predicament of juggling the needs of family and work?

I am a working mom, functioning as a Debtors Controller in the finance department for Space Age with challenging and deadline orientated tasks. And as such I often run into the issue of what to do when my kids suddenly get ill or any other typical family problems. Any working parent – and employer of a working parent – will know this dilemma too well.

Fortunately, gone are the days of worrying about that, because in today’s times, technology offers a workable solution for kids to be looked after by their moms and work still getting done – thanks to remote working.

”I wish I could work from home today”

How often have you heard that saying when an emergency arises? Exactly! Here’s how we at Space Age handle this challenge.

Just a short while ago I once again found myself needing to stay at home with my sick child. But as Murphy has it, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Month end was looming, clients wanted statements, invoices needed to be sent out, monies recovered and like in any department, the finance department can’t afford to have tasks waiting to be done.

At Space Age we have implemented a remote working policy and infrastructure that allowed me the flexibility to do both things at the same time, tend to my child and keep the boss happy.

Previously in such a predicament I would be scrambling around trying to find ways to get things done, in between making doctors appointments and spending time driving between office and home and never really having the peace of mind that all my deadlines are met and at the same time, that my child is taken care of. And taking a day’s leave on month end is certainly going to put strain and pressure on the whole department.

Nowadays I can make use of our remote working facilities.

How do remote working facilities work?

In order for me to continue a normal business day, I need to have access to all the programs and software I use in the office. These days more and more are SaaS solutions sitting fully in the cloud but many of our systems aren’t yet and need to be accessed remotely via a secure server connection.

Our team has set all our daily IT needs up in such a way that as long as we have at least 3G access to the internet we can have access to our network and servers from anywhere. Having Lync installed I can easily and quickly communicate with my colleagues via IM chat or phone chat. Making sure that data can’t be compromised and is secure, is of course of paramount importance and we have a strict policy in place on how this is to be set up.

It also helps to know a thing or two about keeping personal information secure, as my colleague Grant outlined in his post.

From a business standpoint it makes a lot of sense to enable your employees to work anywhere at any time, it’s part and parcel of a holistic Business & IT alignment strategy.

Here are some quick pros and cons, I am sure you can think of many more please list them in the comments for discussion.

Advantages of remote working for employees

• Accessibility to all the programs you would use while in office
• Secure access to all live data at your finger tips
• Flexibility in terms of physical presence

Disadvantages of remote working for employees

• 3G can be inconsistent at times, therefore slower connection speeds unless you make use of an ADSL Line which is considerably more stable (but this would limit you to home use only)
• Documentation (hard copies) are in the office
• Proper IT setup and IT security policies are required

All our managed services clients have access to our specialists to help them set up a secure remote working facility for their employees and our team leads will be happy to assist in setting up some fair use policies around the issue of remote working.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs FreeDigitalPhotos.net