Are you managing your business from home? And, are you juggling to manage it well?
In the era of digitization, small business groups or online business owners have well utilized the technology by setting up virtual offices at any location in the world. The outcome of such a unique concept has surprised as well as benefited owners as well as employees. In comparison to rented office spaces, virtual offices have given more flexibility in operations and have been cost effective. The question that arises in our minds is “How such virtual offices are managed?”

Here are a few tips that may help you manage it like a cakewalk. However, it completely depends upon the kind of service you are offering.

1. Choose the apt virtual office space service – The first and foremost requirement for a virtual office is its professional business address, so that the selected virtual office space service can forward the mails/letters received at this address to you. These services offer other facilities like reception services, meeting rooms etc. to their clients.

2. Make complete use of technology – In a virtual working environment, resources and the management meet very rarely. The team works in coordination sitting at different locations. Make optimum use of technology. You can stay connected through Whatsapp groups, Facebook messenger, Google chats and conference calls. Communication is the heart of virtual office system. In order to monitor effective receipt of information at all the remote locations adopt the most effective communication system.

3. Keep it flexible – Since you get the advantage to work from anywhere in the world, ensure that your work timings are flexible too. While the employees save time by not traveling to physical office, let your employees choose flexible hours of working. This way, you can proffer your service 24 hours keeping a resource available for every odd hour too.

4. Hire experienced people for your virtual environment – In order to manage virtual office, one needs a team of motivated people who have an experience of remote working. Also, constantly appreciate their collaborative efforts through rewards, bonus etc.

5. Provide training on Virtual office working – Virtual office system is quite new and involves novel operations. Training on virtual communication system, coordination, project management is essential for better management.

6. Energize your team and build their trust – Integrate a team and build their commitment by recognizing, appreciating and rewarding their endeavors. Celebrating their success at fixed interval can deepen their trust and improve efficiency.

7. Support the team contribution – Introduce dynamic ways to integrate your team by frequent communication, discussing problems through video conferencing, introducing incentive and sharing mechanism etc.

8. Analyzing serious teams disputes early and act fairly – Managing virtual team is not a simple task. It sometimes involves conflicts which are to be fairly resolved in time in order to maintain trust.

9. Circumvent any attribution errors – Attribution or acknowledgement errors are quite common in virtual office and it is important to manage these errors through designing articulate team protocols and norms. These norms are supposed to be strictly adhered by employees or team members.

10. Design operational & remuneration procedures for the team – The most effective way to manage a virtual office is to develop the working procedures beforehand i.e. team based reward schemes or individual bonus, team development procedures, team charters etc.

11. Continuous monitoring of collaborative culture, HR management etc. – Last but not the least, you must ensure smooth working at remote places and better coordination through adequate communicative methods. Also, it is better to make related HR policies and forms available on intranet for the team members located at remote places to access.

Above few guidelines can give you a glimpse to master this unique art of managing the virtual office.