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For office workers the most important reason for travelling to a central place of work is to interact easily with work colleagues. There is of course the traditional ‘presentation culture’ which requires you to show your boss that you’re hard at work so he can admire your commitment and keep an eye on the slackers. But in a challenging economic climate are these really compelling reasons for maintaining large office blocks, providing company cars and paying city centre salary scale weighting?

Comms technology can improve working patterns to cut costs

For further information call Spitfire on 020 7501 3000 or visit www.spitfire.co.uk

Successful businesses always examine working practices critically to see if there is a better way of doing things that reduces the cost base. Modern voice and data communications technology now provides the means for breaking down traditional working patters to produce a better work-life balance and reduce overheads.

So what are the new technologies that will allow employees to change their working patterns?Well, one answer is hosted telephony. Spitfire now offers a hosted telephony service with phone system functionality provided remotely by Spitfire. Called SIP Communicator™, it only requires SIP compatible handsets, making the service an extremely cost-effective solution for business start-ups and small businesses that are growing and anticipate moving premises or are spread over multiple sites. Crucially in this difficult time for business credit, it requires no upfront capital expenditure and as a service provision, it is a completely tax deductible cost. SIP Communicator™ has been designed as an end-to-end service and is ideal for small start-up SMEs and multisite operations such as retail branch networks or small businesses employing home workers.Where a business has home workers or workers in many different locations, then SIP Communicator™ provides real business and economic benefits because staff can call each other free of charge and incoming calls can be routed to any location.

SIP Communicator™ offers all the usual phone system features of holding and transferring calls, but has a number of additional benefits. The system can be configured via the Internet, allowing change of feature set-ups as and when required, without incurring any engineering charges. Multiple hunt groups can be set up for incoming calls to ring telephones simultaneously or sequentially. SIP Communicator also provides voice mail, auto-attendant and conference call functionality. Users can be located anywhere and provided with phone numbers for

any location, so an employee based in Glasgow can have a London phone number and vice versa. (Spitfire can provide geographic numbers for any area in the UK, as well as non-geographic numbers such as 0800 and 0845 if required).

SIP Communicator™ requires no capital outlay or in-house technical expertise and the service is very flexible - an important consideration for start-up and expanding companies that anticipate frequent moves in premises during the early growth years. For organisations with a staff working partly or entirely from home a hosted telephony service is ideal, because it allows users to communicate easily with each other free of charge, while also providing a professional response to outside callers. This new technology means that we are already starting to see the growth of ‘virtual businesses’ that operate without a central premises with staff working from home. Developments such as hosted telephony are starting to break down the working patterns of the last century. Gradually going to the office will become meaningless, because the office will be where you happen to be. Workers will visit a central location for large conferences and meetings, but very few people will keep a permanent desk in an office building. There are powerful economic benefits for these changes. If businesses benefit from reduced overheads, workers will also benefit from more flexible working patterns that harmonise the competing demands of business and domestic life. No commuting means more productivity and time for childcare and the gym. The wasteful use of energy for business travelling, with its cost to the environment and the quality of life in our cities and towns will also be reduced – a networked world means everybody wins!

For office workers the most importan reason for travelling t a central place of work is to interact easily with work

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One of the positive effects of the current recession is the way it has forced companies to examine their working practices for more efficient, cost effective methods of doing business. Many current working practices are accepted uncritically because that’s the way it’s always been done.We accept round-trip commuter journeys of 100 miles or more as normal, but until the mid-twentieth century spending several hours a day travelling to and from work would have been unthinkable.