How Virtual Receptionists Can Benefit Virtual Offices

This guest post was submitted to The Anywhere Office by Kevin Gillam of Ruby Receptionists

Whether you wear all the hats in your virtual office or you have staff working from remote locations,there’s often one thing missing – a receptionist. A phone answering service for your virtual office is a simple solution that can provide you with the same invaluable benefits enjoyed by businesses withon-site receptionists.

From forwarding calls to your business number to making calls on your behalf, a virtual receptionist service is the glue that helps hold your operations together, no matter where you or your employees are. Just like on-site receptionists, virtual receptionists provide a variety of services, including: Phone answering with a custom greeting and letting you know who’s on the line before transferring, just like a receptionist in a physical office. Taking messages by hand or forwarding calls to voicemail – both of which can be emailed to you. Connecting calls to any phone number of your choice. Making phone calls on your behalf. Relaying messages and information to callers.

The big companies all have someone to answer the phone on behalf of the head honchos and other employees. There is no reason you can’t have someone providing you with the same professional first impression just because you have a virtual office. When you have an attentive virtual receptionist handling your calls, you provide your callers with a top-notch experience.

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5 Tips for Virtual Collaboration – Forbes

In this excellent Forbes article powerhouse body language expert and leadership communication coach Carol Kinsey Goman shares some expert advice about virtual collaboration.

Virtual collaboration holds amazing promise. When successful, it enables talented peers to work together regardless of location and organizations to mine the collective wisdom of a widely dispersed employee population. In order to tap into this potential, enterprises are increasingly using geographically distributed teams as a key part of their business strategy.

But virtual collaboration comes with its own unique challenges — especially for leaders whose previous experience has been mainly with collocated teams. Various studies have shown that it is more difficult to get virtual teams to bond, harder for informal leaders to emerge, tougher to create genuine dialogue, and easier for misunderstandings to escalate.

As an Institute for Management Studies faculty member, I present a seminar on “The Power of Collaborative Leadership.” From that program, here are five tips for virtual collaboration:

5 Tips for Virtual Collaboration – Forbes.

7 Tools for Virtual Team Collaboration

In this informative article technology expert Midori Connolly shares her top picks for tools to improve virtual team productivity. Connolly specializes in providing end-to-end hybrid meeting design, strategic planning, and technological execution. Here she shares some key collaboration and scheduling tools useful for working with distributed teams.

Digital Dish: 7 Tools for Virtual Team Collaboration

What Makes a Great Remote Team?

Wayne Turmell breaks down one of the key ideas in Darlene Derosa’s Book ‘Virtual Team Success’ in this article from Management Issues.

In her very good book, “Virtual Team Success”, Darleen Derosa has a lot to say, but one of the most helpful is her “5 Differentiators for Top Virtual Teams”. It’s based on lots of research but has the added value of being true on a gut level as well.

Here are the five ways great remote teams are probably operating at a higher level than yours and mine:

5 Tips for Motivating Virtual Teams

This article gives some real world advice specifically about how to motivate employees and recognize accomplishments in virtual teams

“As more companies expand globally, telecommuting is becoming a common work arrangement for many employees,” said Dr. Paul Eccher, author and co-founder of The Vaya Group. “However, just because these workers are out of sight does not mean they should be kept out of the loop. Leaders must learn how to effectively manage virtual teams in order to improve the bottom line and sustain talent over time.”

“Through our research and work within Fortune 500 companies, we’ve discovered that only 21 percent of leaders excel at motivating their teams,” Eccher’s partner Dave Ross said, “With these simple tips, leaders can build camaraderie, create a more positive work environment and encourage stronger business performance, regardless of distance.”

The Vaya Group recommends the following tips for motivating virtual teams:

Virtual Team Building: 5 Tips for Motivating Virtual Teams – pymnts.com.

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