so…. you’re working remotely … now what?
We’ve all seen these articles before ….. The perils, pitfalls, pros and cons of working from home or working from the office. The temptations cited by some commentators, such as sleeping in or slacking off in front of the TV, I would say are not <ahem> location-oriented problems. Rather those are personnel-oriented problems. 
In all seriousness, the important discussion is on the unique tools required to ensure maximum productivity and optimum customer service whether from the office, home, or otherwise remote from your constituencies. Consistent with the subject of this weblog, persistent group chat (PGC) is a powerful adhesive for remote and far flung teams. PGC enables members to communicate as a team would – in a forum. Vanilla IM (such as consumer apps for the unwashed masses) only lets you do 1:1’s or trivially small groups. Imagine the power of having your entire department, plus internal customers, in 4 cities across 3 time zones all online. Collaborating. With, oh yeah, a free transcript of the session captured automatically and with zero effort (where your EIM/chat client supports logging).
I’ve seen this take a major leap of faith for some people. And it can take adjustment – taking what was previously verbal and tacit and taking the small extra effort to type it up. But group chat is a huge productivity multiplier, and worth the shift.
Cheers,
Eric
Hi Eric,
I’ve been working from home for FaceTime Communications for over 8 years and I remember thinking that PGC was a very interesting IM-like feature when I first saw it several years ago. As a remote worker, I’ve been a big fan and heavy user of the multi-party-chat feature available with most of the public IM clients which is similar to PGC but is lacking some key functionality. I rely on this type of technology on a daily basis for the usual obvious reasons. If we were to implement PGC I would definitely use it as the archiving and persistent, topic-based rooms (as opposed to adhoc rooms) are two huge advantages that PGC has over IM multi-party chat.
Kind regards.