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Telecommuting in Silicon Valley

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Telecommuting in Silicon Valley

CalTrain Telecommute in Silicon ValleyFor millions of people, commuting to and from work represents both the means to achieving their professional goals and the pure bane of their existence. It is estimated that Americans spent a whopping 42 hours a year of their lives in traffic heading to and from work. After that settles in and you’ve stopped plotting ways to get out of the office ahead of the crowds, let me offer some observations I’ve had in my daily grind.

To be clear, before I continue, you might get the wrong impression but let me assure you- neither I nor any member of the VirtualPBX community is opposed to team sports. Quite the contrary, in fact. That being said, for anyone who lives and commutes in a major sports market via public transportation has probably encountered some of the same problems me and my fellow CalTrain commuters experience during baseball season. Yes, even in an even year, the San Francisco Giants home schedule is a royal pain when it comes to getting home from work. To get an idea of the challenges that Bay Area denizens experience when there is a home game in the evening allow me to offer the following analogy.

Vanpool Meets Van Wilder

The CalTrain is effectively a big carpool for people trekking up and down the peninsula to their various schools and offices each day. Like any such community, there is a familiarity and solidarity that comes from sharing this experience; we all ride or walk to the stations when it’s raining, we all are delayed the same amount of time for mechanical troubles, and so on. The group also shares a love-hate relationship with the Giants’ home schedule because it means that our otherwise peaceful mini-van is injected with about 1,500 rowdy, seat-occupying, noise-making sports fans. Oh, did I mention that drinking alcohol is permitted on the train? Because it is, and it’s also a big part of what makes the quadrupling of train’s regular population so challenging. Anyway, as you can imagine, these nights can motivate people to try and avoid the crowds as best as they can.

Tools For Telecommuting

However, for those who are fortunate enough to have an employer who has embraced a work from home policy, there is hope! For anyone who needs to change their schedule to be at home, due to a baseball game or a newborn or anything between, having an array of hosted communication tools for distance working is irreplaceably helpful.

  • A VoIP Softphone will allow employees to appear to be at their desk whether they are taking an earlier train home or simply working from a home office. This is good for not only receiving calls away from work, but for placing them virtually from an employee’s office number, too.
  • For me personally, Follow Me Calling is incredibly useful because I don’t ever have to know in advance where I will be to accept a call, the incoming call finds me by following a series of numbers I decide for it to try.
  • Finally, for folks who need to stay flexible in their hours, they need to have the same flexibility over what devices they can use, too. Dash from VirtualPBX has one of the most comprehensive device compatibility platforms ever seen, so you can be sure to be able to use whatever hardware you want to get the job done.

While commuting will never likely be totally free of hassles, I suspect nobody really expects that to be an option. Using these helpful telecommuting tools from VirtualPBX is a surefire way to eliminate many of the objections an employer may have to adopting a work-from-home policy, however. And seeing as how it has been proven time and again that remote workforces are more productive and profitable than their in-office compatriots, hopefully you’ll have everything you need to, ahem, pitch, your boss the idea of how to avoid the baseball crowds moving forward.

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