Many people in Somerset live in remote locations and for some the journey to work is a long one. This coupled with an ever busier life means that many people struggle to balance their work and home lives.

On top of that businesses now have new flexible working regulations to abide by, they continue to strive to keep staff happy and are always looking for a reduction in costs and to increase productivity. And flexible working is the answer.

Flexible working means thinking anew about the way you and your staff work, making the most of advances in IT, broadband and websites to help you achieve both business and personal objectives.

At a very simple level, examples could include:

making more use of teleconferencing rather than spending time and money travelling to meetings

enabling your staff to carry out some of their work from home rather than travel into the office every day

adopting a more flexible approach to when work is done. Perhaps it would suit some of your staff and the business if some of the work were carried out in the early morning, in the evening or at weekends?



Some businesses will want to invest in technology to realise even greater benefits from flexible working. Examples include:

installing a Virtual Private Network so that your staff can all work from home just as efficiently as they could in the office

supplying staff with wireless enabled laptops so they can use broadband hotspots as they travel around and so minimise downtime

having staff working from a number of different locations around the UK - or even around the globe - connected together by broadband

using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony (phone calls through your broadband connection) to save on the costs of calls between employees working remotely and the office

Some businesses even decide that they no longer need a permanent office at all - with dramatic cost savings!