Love Snow Days, Hate Snow Days?

Whether you love them or hate them, snow days do happen.  As a business owner you face lost productivity, rescheduling and a general interruption in day to day operations.  But you also care for the safety of your employees, yourself and your families. 
As an employee you miss appointments, meetings, and due dates on tasks due to circumstances beyond your control, making for a hectic rest-of-week.  You also have time to spread work and leisure throughout your day and accomplish specific tasks or objectives you may have had for that day that you’d prefer not to miss out on.
An easy to implement way to balance the needs of an employer to minimize losses, maximize employee safety, and proactively enable employees is setting up a remote access solution at your home and office. 
Remote access solutions allow you to access your computer(s) from any other computer in the world that has an internet connection as if you were sitting right in front of it (you can even send a fax from the office if you have the right type of printer!).
There are a number of solutions available that break down into these broad categories:
i)                    Web based portal – LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, etc
ii)                   Enterprise level – VPN/Server connectivity and Remote Desktop Connections (RDP)
iii)                 VNC based – opensource VPN-like service
Most small businesses, homes and home offices can suffice with free or low-cost web-based remote access applications.  Be careful though, some free services don’t allow copy/paste between local/remote computers or allow you to print to your local printer.
Generally, enterprise and RDP based solutions are only needed in environments that have a server and domain based environment.  In all cases routers settings must be modified to implement these types of solutions. 
If you think that remote access might be a solution to the consequences of “snow days”, as an employer or employee, give me a call at 902-980-0989 or email ben.wiper@nerdsonsite.com and I would be happy to provide a free no obligation quote to deliver a solution tailor-made for your specific needs.
Solutions start as low as $89.00+tax if you have me set it up remotely for you, $119.00+tax for on-site service.  Compare that to what one day of lost wages costs and multiply by the number of snow days on average per year.  I’m sure you’ll find the return on investment to be very high.
 Finally, here are a few links to studies on the increased productivity and retention rate achieved by executive an effective telecommuting environment:
http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/remoteworklifestyle/Remote_Work_Lifestyle_Productivity.htm
http://www.bnet.com/blog/teamwork/ha-i-knew-it-remote-working-boosts-productivity/1101
6-Part Video Webinar about Remote Access Solutions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnuU0P93zl4