Forget preconceptions of triple copy service tickets and greasy parts rolling around the back of disorganized vans, the Madison, Ohio-based appliance repair company is setting an example in a relatively old-fashioned industry, modeling how more sectors than you might imagine can take advantage of fast connections, cloud computing and a little ingenuity to streamline their businesses.

Talent

Back in 2008, Fred’s Appliance was in trouble. “By January of 2009, we experienced our first layoffs ever,” Adam Butcher, the owner of Fred’s explained in an interview. “The first quarter of that year, we really got ourselves in gear to get paperless.”

The company made some big changes. Rather than have technicians report into the office once a day to pick up their assignments, Fred’s instituted a totally virtual system that has techs skipping the office and heading straight out to customers. “It saves a ton of time, offers better customer service and, of course, it’s a huge cost savings to the company not having the technicians report to a base location each day,” says Butcher, who also notes that the switch saves in fuel costs and wear and tear on vehicles.

Not only did the technicians work more efficiently but so did the small remaining back office staff. “I don’t necessarily want to promote technology to axe jobs, but it kind of worked that way for us. We’re running just about the same amount of service calls that we were prior to 2008 and we have about three less office people,” says Butcher. “We have ten technicians and not including me there are three office people. You’ll find across our industry, it’s usually about a one-to-two ratio. I think we could add two more techs without adding more office staff.”

Tools 

So how does Butcher’s team pull this off? A handful of tech tools are key. “We use Google Apps for email, chat and calendar. We also use Vocalocity, which is our phone system. It’s cloud-hosted, which allows us to take our handsets anywhere. OfficeDrop was one of our last legs in becoming truly paperless. Anybody that we’re doing business with, we’re paperless with them if possible, but not all companies are at that level yet, so they are mailing us items that are important. Instead of sticking them in a file cabinet, we scan them and upload them right to OfficeDrop’s cloud,” Butcher says.

Techs in the field all carry stripped down netbooks with touch screen capabilities. Industry specific proprietary software sends their assignments straight to these laptops. “It’s a little piece of software. It’s got a custom drawn map and a job roster list, and we literally drag and drop the service calls. Once the day of the route comes, the technician turns on his laptop and he’s running a little utility that automatically pulls those service calls right in,” Butcher explains. “Through that utility they can capture all the information they need – what they did, model, serial number and they also can bring up a ticket image on the screen. The customer can sign right on the screen. It’s very nifty.”

Dropbox is the final piece of the puzzle. “The technician in the field can document certain things using pictures — a portrait of the unit to show its condition and maybe any pre-existing damage in the house. It also helps with field support. Say you have a newer guy out on the road and he’s looking at a unit he’s not familiar with. He’s able to snap a picture of that and then any supervisor can look at that picture and assist him,” Butcher says.

Tips

The tech know-how needed to patch this system of tools together isn’t vast, but it’s more than many family-owned service companies have on hand, according to Butcher, who is passionate about getting more firms in his industry to work virtually. “When it comes to the technology, for the actual employees themselves, it’s really not that difficult,” Butcher says. “But when it comes to getting a business to this level, you need to have one person that’s tech savvy enough to get the company moving in that direction.”

“I attend a trade show called United Servicers Association each year and put on a class. I push servicers all across the country to get themselves geared up to work in this fashion. There’s a lot of mom and pop. It’s passed down from grandpa and they’re stuck in a lot of the old ways, but they’re realizing that they need to go this direction,” Butcher says, adding, “it’s been a gradual process, but I’d say over the past two to three years, it’s really starting to gain momentum.”

So what tips does Butcher have for small businesses in more traditional industries who are looking to go paperless and virtual like Fred’s? In short, minimize hardware. “Initially we made a very large investment in server space. We actually purchased a rack and servers – very costly. Now we lease cloud space, so we work 100 percent off the cloud-based server and that is one of the best moves that we have ever made,” Butcher says. “Granted the drawback is if you’re having internet interruptions then you’re going to be down, but I feel we have less exposure because all we have to do is drive home and we can work from home.”

And Butcher’s aversion to investing in expensive hardware extends to appliance parts as well. “We have what you could basically call a virtual warehouse. We used to have a ton of parts and it was overtaking our building. That’s another thing we got rid of. We do not have any inventory at our base location at all. The technicians have a small inventory on their trucks for fast-moving parts and then as technicians need parts, they place a parts request with us through the software. We key the order and we ship it directly to the customer’s home.” Usually the part arrives the following day and the repair is completed in two days. The system is quick and also saves in floor space, costly inventory and time spent organizing stock.

“We’re not experts at inventory. We’re experts at service, so why not outsource that expertise to a parts distributor? That’s what they sleep and breathe,” concludes Butcher.

Do you think virtual work is ready to conquer more mom and pop businesses in traditional sectors? 

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One of the most compelling and frequently cited explanations is that middle managers just aren’t that into the idea, distrusting their employees to keep working without supervisors watching them like hawks. You’d hope that over time managers would get over this fear, but a new survey out of Canada suggests that trust issues persist. Microsoft Canada’s recently released Flexible Working report surveyed 1,249 employees and 642 bosses and  found that while 55 percent of employees feel they’re more productive working from home, only a quarter of bosses agreed.  Why were Canadian managers less than crazy about remote work? They gave Microsoft a numbers of reasons:

• Just shy of half (49 percent) said the inability to talk face-to-face
• The same percentage complained about lack of focus
• 26 percent disliked the  lack of accountability
• 22 percent opined that that employees do less work

Still, despite the skepticism of bosses, almost half of them (42 percent) support remote working arrangements for their employees. That stat just reinforces the inevitability of remote work, according to Carolyn Buccongello, vice president of human resources at Microsoft Canada. “Boundaries between work and life are blurring. You may dismiss this as a Generation-C issue but this speaks broadly to all generations. There are pros and cons to this new way of work, but it is not going away and technology can become the key to resetting those boundaries,” she says.

She also called for bosses to rethink their distrust and focus on employees’ results, not face time. “A flexible workforce begins with leadership teams building a culture of trust and a vision that focuses on individual results rather than how much time they spend at their desk,” she says.

What, if anything, will finally convince middle management to embrace virtual work?

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All of which, you could say, is yet another firm kick landed on an already very dead horse, but the other survey findings were more surprising. While telecommuting is often presented as a good idea whose time has not yet come due to entrenched institutional skepticism, Wrike’s findings suggest we may soon be turning a corner on a future where remote work is far less fringe, even for those in the least hip organizations.

Already, 83 percent of respondents reported spending at least a few hours each week working outside the office. This probably amounts to a bit of checking work email and the like out of hours, but many were extremely hopeful about the expansion of virtual work at their companies. When asked if their offices might go fully virtual in the future, 65 percent of respondents said yes, though they differed on exactly how long the shift would take:

• 25 percent expected their office to go fully virtual within a year or two (or their office was already virtual)
• About another quarter (24 percent) expected the shift to take three to five years
• While 16 percent thought it would take five years or more

Despite this disagreement about the exact time frame, the over-arching message of the survey seems clear. Workers are expecting a virtual workplace, and expecting it soon. Management will have to take heed, won’t it?

How long do you think before your organization goes fully virtual?

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But like the dinosaurs, which scientists tell us live on as chickens, the office building of the past is unlikely to become completely extinct, but rather to evolve to meet the demands of new kinds of workers, driven by technological advances and a desire for a lighter, cheaper real estate footprint. So what will this new paradigm look like? To find out, we spoke with Bob Gaudreau, Executive VP of Regus and Philip Ross, CEO of Unwired, about the changing meaning of the office in a wired world.

Jessica Stillman: One of the models for the future you explore in the report is the idea that employees will be allowed to buy their own office space. Can you explain how you envision that working?

Philp Ross: One of the core corporate drivers in the move to agility is a reduction in the cost of real estate. It’s a move from providing a container for work that tends not to be used towards a future where it’s on-demand — that work places are aligned with how people actually want to work.

We found that only 45 percent of desks in offices are used at any one point in time today. So what we’re doing is aligning the idea of “buy/bring-your-own,” which is beginning to get traction in the IT world, with the idea of just provisioning work, so that companies give their employers a stipend, a budget, and the budget is for all aspects of the provisioning of work to suit them and the way they work.

Bob Gandreau: We’re seeing it happen already. Companies like Yell in the UK had 20 properties that were sitting vacant 70 percent of the time. So what they did is they gave everyone a membership to be able to use any of the Regus locations, and these people can go into the location where they want, when they want and work how they want. It’s not totally the worker buying his own, but it is companies giving them a sum of money and allowing the worker to pick the right work setting depending on what the worker needs. What that means for Yell is they’re saving, I think, £1.5 million or 40 percent of all their property costs by working in a much more agile way.

Jessica: If you go super lean and cut back severely on space at traditional offices, how do you plan usage so if everyone wants to use the space, they can?

Ross: It’s a very important point. We identified only 12.3 percent of people want to work from home, but you can also see in the research that people want a very short commute. So I think what we’re identifying really is that people want to work locally. We’re seeing this kind of new hybrid model where there’s a bit of working from home, a bit of working from the corporate office, but also this move towards third space — new spaces that are in the community — and that’s a very exciting trend.

In terms of load-balancing the corporate building, we’ve seen it done around the world. We profiled companies like Macquarie Bank in Sydney who built a kind of on-demand, real-time building. Companies are looking at this to provide places to work, not desks or cubes, so that there is always somewhere to work and also reallocating space based on the work that people actually do, which is moving more and more towards collaborative work, not just working solo in a cube. Again, we found that not only are 55 percent of the cubes empty at any one point in time, people report they can’t get meeting rooms. So I think what we’re seeing is a wholesale reallocation of space in the corporate center, and that also looks like a 20-25 percent of reduction of space at the same time.

Gandreau: In the old days you might see 10 percent of the space as meeting room, lounge and collaboration, now it’s 20-30 percent of the space, because it becomes a destination for people to come together and do that kind of work, which is where the good ideas come from.

Jessica: So-called “third space” seems to play a big role in the future you’re imagining, but are they up to the task today? Are there enough quality spaces available, and if not, do you predict a big boom in the industry?

Ross: There is a mixed range out there – there are some very good ones and some very mediocre ones that don’t quite meet the needs of the corporates. You can see them meeting the needs of the freelancers, the contingent workers, who go in with their Macbook Airs and have a coffee and they’re online, but they don’t meet the confidentiality needs and other services needs that they will have to respond to if Fortune companies adopt third space. I see them becoming, perhaps, more like an airport lounge with tiers of membership where platinum cardholders can get advanced services with teleconferencing, privacy and other facilities. I think it’s got some way to go from the kind of café society to a much more sophisticated offering of the future.

But if we see a huge change, a sea change, in the way that big corporates are working — if they do reduce their property footprint by 30 or 25 percent — we’ll see tens of thousands of new workers looking for someplace to work, especially in their communities, but no that hasn’t yet been provided for.

Gandreau: I see it happening before our eyes when you go out in the community. I was just back at my alma mater in Boston and I went to the library. In the old days, you couldn’t talk in the library, right? Now there are white boards and students collaborating, so I see more and more third spaces appearing in the places you’d least think they’d appear. Another place I’ve seen them, and Regus has looked at locating, is shopping malls. People are actually meeting in shopping malls. They’re naturally occurring in the places where large groups come together – sort of like the piazza in the old days. If you were in an Italian village people would go to the piazza and it was a beehive of activity. Third spaces are the piazzas of the modern century.

Jessica: Your report very much focuses on the cost savings of agile working and shies away from more holistic arguments, including commonly sited things like quality of life and environmental benefits. Why did you make that choice?

Ross: Over the years a lot of chat has been around about touchy-feely, nice-to-have issues around this, but corporates want to see the bottom line. They want to understand the impact on their business — how they can reduce costs, how they can improve efficiency. They are hard-nosed. We’re coming out of a climate of recession. Money is king. Doing more with less is top of the agenda.

Technology trends, the drivers from cloud to devices to connectivity, are enabling us to look at agility from a very different perspective, and in the report we’ve identified this idea of the agility dividend — how we can measure and monetize this, because I think what we found is companies are saying, we want to look at this but how do we present this to the board? The dividend looks at three key areas: reducing costs of real estate, a happiness dividend in work-life balance and improving the working lives of people, and the productivity dividend, making us more effective. If you sit back and look at this picture, it’s a no-brainer: there are lots of other spin-offs from environmental benefits through to the quality of life. We have to monetize it. We need a figure to produce a compelling business case to the CFO and the COO.

Gandreau: Our challenge has been for years to put a number to it. Once you can put a number to it, it becomes a really compelling argument. Once you have the bottom line, the flexibility you get by working in a more agile way just becomes the gravy. But it all starts with the numbers.

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Here are some questions you should consider before jumping out of your cubicle and into a remote work situation.

1. When it comes to being flexible, I’m…
• a. Much more comfortable with structure.
• b. Incredibly adaptable.
2. When I’m given an assignment, I…
• a. Tend to procrastinate but work really well under pressure.
• b. Am very good at prioritizing so I’m never working down to the wire.
3. Often the best part of work is…
• a. Interacting with my colleagues.
• b. The sense of accomplishment I feel when I get things done.
4. My favorite type of work involves…
• a. Gathering in a room with my co-workers and carrying out face-to-face brainstorming sessions.
• b. Taking disparate pieces of information and assets and piecing them together to make a logical whole.
5. I get frustrated when…
• a. I can’t get hold of someone to get answers when I need information to complete a project.
• b. I’m forced to be in one place for too long.
6. I thrive when…
• a. I have a set schedule that I can rely on.
• b. My work is varied and dynamic.
7. My ideal work environment is…
• a. A traditional workspace with a desk, filing cabinets, and all the equipment I need at my fingertips.
• b. Mobile, portable and lightweight.
8. I find email to be…
• a. A necessary evil, but I’m dismayed that it is replacing in-person or phone conversations.
• b. Essential, but I’m also open to exploring other ways of communicating online.
9. My love of technology is…
• a. Average. I see how it can be helpful, but I have my favorite tools and am cautious about upgrading.
• b. Avid. I am always interested in trying out a better tech tool and can pick up new software pretty quickly.
10. I’m most comfortable in an organization that is…
• a. Clearly structured. I need to know who I report to and what my assignment is at all times to remain focused and productive.
• b. Dynamic. I can adapt to a more structured organization but am also at home in a more loosely structured one.
11. If I were to work from home, I’d…
• a. Be easily distracted.
• b. Carve out a suitable workspace, or find a better location outside of my home.
12. The alternative workspace options in my community are…
• a. Few to nil. And I couldn’t really be productive working out of my local coffee shop.
• b. Varied, including some coworking spaces.

How do you think you fared? If you chose mostly “b” as your answers, you probably have the right temperament to transition to remote work. If you answered mostly “a,” you may be better off sticking to a more structured, traditional work environment to be successful in your job.

Not everyone is cut out to work remotely. If you’re not sure that remote work is for you, you could give it a try for discrete projects and see how comfortable you are with being apart from your team and working on your own over time. In an ever-changing work landscape, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone may be the best thing you ever do for your career.

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Here’s a breakdown of some things you should consider before taking a leap into the cloud and trying to bring your team along with you.

1. Portability

How portable is your business? If you’re dealing in intellectual property creation or knowledge work — anything that can be produced and delivered electronically via computers, the Internet and phone — then you’re probably in good shape for moving your company into the cloud. Andy mentioned public relations and marketing as good candidates for virtual companies: the virtual agency model. Any content creation shop with creative teams — ad agencies, news agencies, copywriters, bloggers, podcasters, editors, online producers — can work remotely.

2. Process

Just asking yourself the simple questions: “If we didn’t go into an office together, could we still get work done?” and “If so, how?” These will lead you down the path of thinking about how to configure, or reconfigure, your business. You need to deeply analyze the way you currently get things done and document it. Illustrate your work process using a mind-mapping or flowchart tool. Break down how your projects are handled from start to finish. When does your team meeting face-to-face? Envision how that would look as a videoconference instead. What are the steps you might be eliminating by going virtual? Don’t just stop at mapping out your process and translating that to a virtual workflow. Add dollar amounts to your current process versus a virtual process. You should begin to see why virtual work makes good financial sense.

3. Personality

Even if you’re in an industry with proven virtual models, this doesn’t mean that your company that has been entrenched in “the office” can eschew physical location and hit the cloud running. As you probably know from managing people: people hate change. Even if change is for the best, the very act of changing can paralyze some. You may have to make some hard decisions about how to handle resistance against the change to virtual work. Start with open communications, present the concept of going virtual to your team, and suss out the champions of this model. Chances are, you’ve been approached in the past by someone or several team members who’ve asked about telecommuting, even part-time. For the nay-sayers, find ways to offer support every step of the way as they transition from being in the office to working from home.

You may want to bring in consultants to assess your team and offer individual consulting on setting up their virtual workspaces. Set up training sessions for workers and their managers to make sure everyone is up to speed, not just on the technology changes but the culture changes as well. If not everyone is thrilled with your intention to go virtual, don’t be shocked. Be prepared.

4. Infrastructure

In my post What Does It Take To Run a Virtual Team (Redux), I listed the needs of a virtual team, namely:

• Communications amongst your team members and externally;
• Management of projects, team members, deadlines, and document;
• Archiving of files, knowledge and communications content;
• Interaction between team members including integration, collaboration and socializing.

There is no “one size fits all” technology solution for every company that goes virtual, although there are many enterprise solutions available from Microsoft to Cisco to a never-ending procession of innovative startups looking to solve the problems of virtual work. If you pick a fully-integrated enterprise system, keep in mind it may be more expensive and less flexible than newer, more innovative solutions. The rub of going with smaller startups for your virtual infrastructure needs is that you may have to cobble together several tools, so while they might be highly affordable, you’ll be looking at issues such as cross compatibility and integration.

5. Accountability

A common question managers ask when confronted with the prospect of managing a virtual worker is “how am I going to make sure they get their work done?” A manager who is constantly looking over a worker’s shoulder to make sure they are working is going to have to go through a fundamental shift in how to manage — and how not to manage — to be able to handle managing a virtual team. Managing virtual workers isn’t about watching them like a hawk and micromanaging their every move. Instead, the infrastructure you put into place should have built-in checks and balances to watch productivity and on-time delivery.

Make sure your processes and expectations are not only clear but also communicated clearly to team members. Not everyone will thrive in a virtual work environment, but the issue may be less an inability to get work done and more to do with a feeling of isolation or being disconnected from the team. Be ready to address any issue that crops up as you move toward virtual work and have a plan for addressing issues including missed deadlines, lack of participation, failure to properly document or archive, and forgetting to log time, if that is a requirement.

6. Commitment

You need to decide how committed you are to going virtual and how flexible you’ll be with team members who resist. Can you afford to move in phases, first deploying the team members who are ready, willing and able to take to the cloud, while leaving the others in the office? In order to get the real benefits of going virtual, you should at least consider downsizing the physical work space and look for suitable alternatives that offer real cost savings.

As more and more of your workers opt to go virtual, pretty soon those who are resisting may give in or give up. There is no way to please everyone, but having an understanding that you may have some very unhappy team members from the moment you say “virtual” should help to guide you in your approach. Consider consulting your lawyer to make sure any drastic changes you make in your workplace don’t infringe on workers’ rights.

By thinking through your process carefully and thoughtfully in advance and spending time considering and reviewing the technology you’ll use to build cohesion amongst your dispersed team members, you can certainly construct the ideal virtual workspace. Bringing everyone to the cloud without encountering some digging in of heels is the best scenario, but as a leader and manager, be prepared for the worst.

What do you think about bringing your own company into the cloud?

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