Navigating Success: A Comprehensive Guide to Virtual Office Management

| Visitor Management | Workplace Strategy

The future never quite looks like you expect it to. While films like "Ready Player One" have primed us to expect a workplace of the future based on all-encompassing virtual reality, the pandemic ushered in a more mundane version of remote work built on cloud-based software, videoconferencing, and home offices.

The virtual office is here, and it’s surprisingly familiar. Ready to dive into the future of work and remote office management? This primer will explore the benefits of a virtual office and how you can institute one in your company.

Understanding the Virtual Office

What is a virtual office? It's an office that has fully transitioned to a constellation of remote workers who meet and coordinate their activities online. A true virtual office completely does away with a physical work location, though it usually maintains a mailing address for business purposes (often provided by a virtual office post-forwarding service).

A virtual office has some major advantages (like doing away with rent) and some less obvious downsides (like paying for a large number of software services). This guide will cover both sides of the coin.

It’s important to check the assumptions behind a virtual office. Ensure that they hold true for your company:

Your business does not depend on foot traffic or in-person customer interactions at your place of business. Grocery stores, hair salons, and the like are not suited to remote work.
Your business can be done over the internet. Manufacturers, home builders, and infrastructure companies are not suited for the virtual office.
Your workforce is tech-savvy and can operate the variety of software required for a virtual office, including project management software, cloud storage, video conferencing, and more.
Your company culture can be maintained online through disciplined communication, goal setting, and highly motivated employees.
Your management can adapt to remote workers and is not based on micromanagement or a high-oversight model.

If your company can clear these hurdles, you may be well suited to a virtual office.

Virtual Office, Real Advantages

Going virtual has some significant advantages:

Save on Real Estate

Office rent is often one of the larger expenses a company bears. The ability to do away with this cost is one of the principal attractions of a virtual office. Keep in mind, though, that a virtual office is not pure savings: your software services costs are going to rise once you’ve assembled all the tools required for remote work.

Pull From a Larger Talent Pool

For many years, companies have had to fish in the local pond for suitable employees. A virtual office opens up the horizons — it’s now possible to assemble your workforce across different states or even countries. Now, you can not only hire the best person in your area for the job, but the best person, period. Note that as your workers grow more dispersed, timezone management becomes an issue, so be careful to ensure that whoever you hire has overlap with your working hours.

Increase Production Transparency

A culture of remote work is a stress test for your communication protocols and project management processes. One of the paradoxical benefits of a virtual office is that you’re forced to become better as a company at communicating work status, delegating tasks, and moving projects along your pipeline.

If you’re doing virtual office management right, your management team will feel like they have a better handle on what work is being done than ever before. A virtual office lives and dies by the efficacy of its distributed project management, so take great care when training your employees on your project management software.

Improve Management Culture

When your workers are operating from their own homes, it becomes impractical to peer over their shoulders all the time. Management may have had micromanagerial tendencies before; a remote office will root them out. In a virtual office, you must rely on clear communication and intrinsic employee motivation. This is a net gain — your employees will perform better and be happier.

Increase Employee Wellness

The main attractions of a virtual office for employees are the prospects of better work/life balance and scheduling flexibility. And not just that — remote employees get to skip the commute, set their own dress code, and have lunch at home.

The benefits for workers are many. As a virtual company, don't be shy about touting the benefits of your system. Remote employment offers make you more competitive for the best workers than companies that maintain in-person offices.

Tips for Mastering Virtual Office Management

When transitioning to a virtual office, it helps to have a plan of attack. Start by analyzing how work is currently done at your company:

What’s the lifecycle of your most important projects?
Who is involved?
What are the major steps?
How is the work delivered?

Then, build a strategy to move that work online. Expect bumps along the way — when it comes to your virtual office system, no one gets everything right the first time.

A critical element of success in virtual office management is assembling the right mix of tools to support the work. The number-one thing to get right is your project management system — this is the tool your company will live in. Popular options are Basecamp, monday.com, and Asana.

Next, figure out text communication. Many companies these days choose to maintain a chat system like Slack or Discord. Be prepared to augment text with video through a conferencing tool like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet.

SwipedOn offers virtual office management software that makes it easy to keep track of your employees' schedules and locations. Not every virtual office will be 100% remote; you may have some physical assets that you need to manage. In that case, consider using a virtual office management system that can cover a mix of virtual and physical assets.

Hopefully, this overview has given you food for thought when planning your strategy for a virtual workplace. There's no time like the present to put your plan in motion — the office of the future is here!