Really bad weather can have your business spinning its wheels. But not if you have a remote working model.
One of our remote live receptionists, Candace, shared this photo of her snowy front yard in Medford, Oregon.
The snow didn’t keep Candace from doing her job. In fact, she never had to set foot in it, because she works from home, giving one of our big clients excellent customer service as part of a distributed, dedicated team.
“I was very happy that I didn’t have to drive to work,” Candace says. “I love the snow but I hate driving in it!”
Don’t Let Snow Shut You Down
In years past, before we implemented our current remote working model in 2007, a major snowstorm could really bury us. When all our live receptionists worked in a single call center building, bad roads could mean no one was able to get to work. One year, we literally had an employee driving around all day and all night in a 4×4 truck, picking up members of our team and ferrying them to the office.
No more.
These days, we’re ready for bad weather. All our live receptionists work from their home offices. And not just in one city—we’re working on our sixth state, with teams spread out all across the U.S., in all four of the country’s main time zones. Remote working in bad weather is just like remote working in good weather. And that’s the point!
Distributed Teams for Resilience
A distributed business model means our employees never have to risk driving in hazardous conditions. And spreading our teams out means no one storm can knock us out of commission. We always have people online and ready to take care of our customers.
This remote working setup—we like to call it Anywhere Works—has helped AnswerConnect survive many episodes of extreme weather without service interruptions.
Allowing people to work where they are, and understanding that work is what they do, not where they do it, has been a great benefit to our company. Empowering people to work at home is part of being ready for winter storms and extreme cold.
Has remote working helped your company weather the storms of winter? Let us know in the comments.
