The VoIP and Telecommuting Connection
November 2, 2009
This article appeared on MSNBC.com and was really informative regarding telecommuting and the possibilities of using ones own VoIP network:
“Victor Cousins has a pretty good gig working for the human resources department at Sun Microsystems, but he doesn’t have an office, just a locker.
Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s not one of those types who measure his career success by the size of his office. In fact, he’s proud to be office-less, and he’s the quintessential telecommuter. He works anywhere he wants – his home in Oakland, the local coffee shop, and at any Sun location throughout the country. When his mother had knee surgery in May he was able to spend time with her, working out of a Sun office in St. Louis.
Welcome to the workplace of the future. Cousins is an example of the mobile worker that will become much more pervasive in the next 10 years.
Finally, telecommuting will become a mainstay in Corporate America but that doesn’t mean everyone will be working at home all the time, a prediction made by many workforce observers just a decade ago. The U.S. worker will be a mélange of office inhabitant and work-anywhere warrior.
Take Cousins. Even though he doesn’t have an office, he reserves office space at Sun’s San Francisco location when he needs to be in house and interact with coworkers and managers. Right now, he splits his time 50-50 between home and in the office, but envisions spending more time away from the mother ship in the months ahead.
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“I like having the balance,” he says about the flexibility and freedom to work from anywhere. He has a desktop computer; a laptop and a high speed Internet VoIP connection at his home. Sun paid more than $3,000 toward the equipment he needed to go mobile.
Today, upwards of 12 million employees telework more than 8 hours per week, up from about 6 million in 2000, according to Gartner Dataquest. The number will hit nearly 14 million by 2009. Caroline Jones, an analyst for Gartner who expects the number to continue to grow, says the rate of increase has been steady for a number of years even though telecommuting hasn’t been getting a lot of publicity in recent years.”
With the growth in VoIP networks and reliability the potential for telecommuting has become more practical and accessible than ever.
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