As a digital business, we’ve had the luxury of having an office in Port Perry and the ability to work from home or anywhere Internet access is available. But, in order to do that, we've had to put processes and systems in place to support that work option.
Infrastructure
- VOIP (Voice Over IP) Phones: We moved from land-lines to VOIP (Internet-based) phones for our business. As long as we have that phone and an Internet connection, people can call us. We've been at home and out of the country and the system is seamless.
- Email: We made the decision a number of years ago to move our email service to a Canadian platform. It's given us an added degree of comfort knowing that critical piece of our operations is handled close to home.
- Hosting: Along with repatriating our email service, we moved our hosting to all Canadian servers. Our WordPress hosting infrastructure resides in Canada and is managed in Canada by a remote team.
- Slack: Slack has become our communication platform for projects in the works. It makes it easy to bring in external resources such as graphic designers and developers to project conversations when needed.
- Nextcloud: Like so many businesses, we have a lot of files. Nextcloud is where we store them in a secure environment. We're able to access those files when we need them, sync them to our desktop and then save them in the cloud for the long term. Sync.com is another great option to consider for this kind of service.
- Daylite: We've used this software for close to 10 years. It acts as the hub for all of our client projects and on-going client care. As a cloud-based service, we're able to access this info from home or at the office.
Processes
Software doesn't solve all problems. We still have regular Monday morning team meetings via phone (yes, telephones are still a great communication tool). If we need more than telephone we use FaceTime, Zoom, or Join.me so we can screen share. Not only do those meetings keep all of us in the loop, they are an effective way to keep everyone connected. We can also record those meetings if necessary.
The solutions we put in place were created to solve problems we faced at various times. Many created opportunities and further advantages we hadn’t seen at the time of implementation. The problems made us more resilient as a company.