Thursday Bram is a full-time writer who covers freelancing and small business topics. You can find more about Thursday at her personal website, www.ThursdayBram.com.
When you work online, it’s easy to feel relaxed about legal issues, but there are many laws that can potentially impact you. Benjamin Wright is an attorney specializing in the issues surrounding working online. He points to six questions that web-based workers must keep in mind: Read more »
Sometimes there are situations that call for building your own tools. The trick is figuring out which situations actually call for constructing a custom tool; guessing wrong could wind up costing both time and money for your organization as a whole. Read more »
Every IT department will joke about the support they have to provide to the rest of the organization: “Is it plugged in?” Every organization of a certain size has to provide internal support, but it’s a tough prospect in even the most tech-savvy of companies. Read more »
Coworking is a relatively new, and to many people unknown, phenomenon. Angel Kwiatkowski and Beth Buczynski have written an ebook, Coworking: How Freelancers Escape the Coffee Shop Office, that offers people interested in coworking the information necessary to find a good location and use it effectively. Read more »
Sharing institutional knowledge can be a huge pitfall for many organizations. If you need to make sure that different people in your organization have access to the knowledge that keep your organization rolling along, arranging for some sort of sharing mechanism can be difficult. Read more »
Support’s a crucial function, whether you’re supporting customers who buy from your company or you need to provide internal support within your organization. TeamSupport is a web app that aims to improve internal and external support processes by serving as a centralized help desk. Read more »
Cloud document storage app OfficeDrop has become known for bringing filing into the modern era, helping users to get away from those pesky manila folders. The company is hoping to make traditional scanning software equally outdated with an upgraded version of its scanning app ScanDrop. Read more »
With more and more organizations relying on team members who don’t come into the office, companies will see a greater number of support requests from telecommuters. One such request is for a stipend to subsidize the cost of using a coworking space. Read more »
Managing human resources can be very labor intensive. For example, when you post a job listing online, you’re practically begging to wind up with a large stack of files to wade through. TribeHR attempts to automate and streamline as many human resources tasks as it can. Read more »
In the course of writing about different tools, I often make a point of asking about them on various social networking sites. The responses I get sometimes include comments about how much much users absolutely loathe particular tools that they have to work with. Read more »
When we discuss telecommuting dilemmas for businesses, we often jump to talking about management issues. But many other parts of an organization can also have concerns about telecommuting; one of them is the human resources department. Here are four issues that your HR department may face. Read more »
As with most collaboration apps, Central Desktop is general-purpose tool, trying to pack in all the features that every organization needs. But what if it could be focused on a specific industry? SocialBridge is, essentially, Central Desktop built only for use by creative agencies. Read more »
The growing lifestyle business movement presents a staff retention issue for businesses. However, by taking some of the elements that make lifestyle businesses so attractive, such as freedom and flexibility, and offering them to their employees, employers can mitigate that risk. Read more »
Coworking spaces — shared office-like workspaces that offer desks, Internet access and social interaction — are popping up all over the world and are proving to be a popular choice with freelancers. But businesses working with distributed teams should consider the benefits of coworking spaces, too. Read more »
Working with freelancers has become a necessity for many businesses. But bringing someone into your team who doesn’t have a good idea of how your organization operates can present difficulties. You can make things easier by asking the right questions before you start your working relationship: Read more »
To help counter the disconnection faced by telecommuters, Anybots offers a physical avatar, which displays a video at about eye-level as well as can be driven around a facility. All a remote team member needs to use the robotic avatar is a web browser. Read more »
It seems like, at the very least, your bookkeeper needs to come in on a regular basis to take care of paperwork. However, with some planning and the use of the right tools, bookkeeping is a task that can be done remotely. Read more »
Working with virtual staff members can take some getting used to. Just like other management skills, it takes practice; working with virtual staff is not a skill you pick up overnight. But there are some steps you can take to make the process a little easier: Read more »
Glass, an app that allows users to share notes about any website, has announced it’s now out of private beta. Since I wrote about initial launch of the tool, there has been a major redesign, and the invite wall has been dropped. Read more »
Sharing code can be one of the toughest parts of managing a big project: a lot of collaboration tools have a way to share written content and images but they don’t handle code particularly well. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Read more »
Training timelines seem to grow by leaps and bounds whenever there’s a little distance between the trainer and the trainees. When you’re working with a virtual team you can’t let the fact that you don’t see every member of your team in person slow you down. Read more »
Working with virtual staff based in other countries has been growing in popularity recently, driven in part by the lower costs. But there are some concerns — legalities, data security and the language barrier — to take into account before you enlist the help of workers from overseas. Read more »
The typical virtual assistant has clients that they truly enjoy working with, along with a few they’ll never work with again. You want to be in that first category, especially if you want to build a lasting relationship with a professional who can help your business. Read more »
Many workers these days only look for telecommuting positions, and those who’ve worked on a virtual basis before often have very specific ideas about what they want to see in an employer. Knowing what those expectations are and how to manage them can be useful. Read more »
ProjectTurf has an impressive list of features. This web-based collaboration tools has pretty much every feature that I can think of when it comes to running a project. You’ll find all the standard project management functionality in this tool, plus some fancier bells-and-whistles. Read more »
There are times when you don’t need a complex collaboration tool. Sometimes, you just need to be able to chat with people about a given topic. Convore can fill that need. It allows you to join existing public topics, as well as establish private rooms. Read more »
There are plenty of customer relationship management tools out there, but most come with very significant price tags. Discourse is a web app that works with your LinkedIn account, offering an easy to use deal and project management tool at an easy to bear price. Read more »
There is a way to get a an easy to use collaboration platform in place quickly using simple blogging tools. The approach outlined here lets you get to work with your team, without waiting on corporate IT to set up something on the internal network. Read more »
You might think that contractors will take on any jobs they can land, but there are certain qualities that freelancers look for in their clients. If you can’t offer up these qualities, you may not be able to hire the best freelancers for your projects. Read more »
If it hasn’t already happened, it’s coming: one of your employees is going to ask you if they can telecommute. The possibility of employees working remotely is something that is better to think about before the question comes up, rather than scrambling in the moment. Read more »
When you’re working with a distributed workforce, it can be tough to manage institutional knowledge, whether that’s dealing with details like why you use a specific process or how to handle a specific client, or the bigger questions like how to make parts for specialized machinery. Read more »
The right collaborative writing tool can make document creation easier, but there are certain characteristics that make a world of difference in a collaborative writing environment — especially if you’re working in a larger organization. Here’s a list of the features that you should be looking for. Read more »
The ability to write clearly is becoming more and more important, especially in organizations that work primarily online. Whether you’re using an IM client, a project management app or email, clear writing will speed up the process and minimize problems. Read more »
When you work with a virtual team, good Internet access is crucial. One person with a spotty connection can slow down the whole group. This issue is becoming a growing concern as companies hire employees around the world; Internet access isn’t consistent in every country. Read more »
When you’ve got team members all over the world, you have to have the right tools to keep them all up to speed. Inventure Management works with Brazilian and American employees and found itself in need of a collaboration tool that could cross international barriers easily Read more »
When you add a new tool to the set you expect your team to work with every day, it takes more than just a little bit of training to get the ball rolling. You have to sit down and talk about the tool. Read more »
There have been a number of recent productivity apps to help individuals track where their time goes. TimeDoctor offers to do the same thing for companies, including those with remote teams, by tracking the time that remote employees spend on different tasks. Read more »
You can see it coming: a time when you’re going to have to change the collaboration tools your team uses for something bigger and more robust. When can you minimize the time you spend transitioning, so your team gets the most work done during the process? Read more »
When your team starts working virtually, people of different generations are going to adjust to the situation better, and perhaps faster, than others. Here are some technology and management considerations to take into account when planning a multi-generational virtual team. Read more »
While it would be wrong to suggest that there are fashions in collaboration tools — you don’t have to have the latest tool to walk down the runway — there are certainly trends that are going to impact the tools we use in the coming year. Read more »
