Telemarketing Software Featured Article

There’s a lot of talk these days about the value of collaboration.

• Apple (News - Alert) recently opened its new donut-shaped headquarters, which was designed to enable people to “bump into” one another. (And that may be working. But Apple employees are also bumping into the glass walls).

• Architects like Jeanne Gang are designing commercial and residential buildings to encourage human interaction.

• And many businesses are using open floor plans and carving out space for huddle rooms. These small gathering spots are meant to encourage team collaboration.

Team collaboration is important. But, the availability of affordable conferencing and other communications solutions means workers can do that from just about anywhere.

And providing workers with flexibility and uninterrupted personal work time is also extremely important to employee engagement, productivity, and results.

Enabling employees such as sales development reps to work remotely can help on all of these fronts.

Working at home frees employees from office noise and distractions. That’s why employees tend to perform better when working from home, says Darryl Praill, sales development rep at VanillaSoft.

Telecommuting also adds up for businesses. It tends to result in lower absenteeism and higher productivity, he says. And Praill refers to a study in which 77 percent of remote workers said they’re more productive while working offsite and less likely to take time off.

Businesses that are interested is reaping these benefits should consider the following remote work best practices, says Praill.

That includes creating a work from home policy, so remote workers know what is expected of them. Companies should also hand-select the workers who seem best suited for remote work.

Out of sight, out of mind can easily come into play with remote workers. So Praill reminds organizations to remember to onboard new and continue to train existing remote employees. A learning management system can help with that, he notes.

And, he adds that it’s important to give remote workers the tools they need to succeed and to keep them in the loop. A sales engagement platform that does automated lead routing, scripting, and sales cadence management is helpful on the first front. Making team collaboration, videoconferencing, and other communications tools available to these workers is also key, he says.