The use of web and advanced phone services have already transformed the way businesses are done in the country and now it is time for companies to increasingly use the Internet as a virtual office, improving their productivity at all levels.
“With a virtual office, first of all, you’ll be able to get rid of the high cost of your rental space and use your home as your office,” said Muhammad Fazlur Rahman, a former Secretary of the government.
He says, “Many senior executives of multinational companies nowadays do not attend their offices in person. They do their jobs sitting at home when many others spend too much of time in traffic, driving to and from office everyday.”
With fuel prices on the rise, a virtual office can help a company save a lot of money it spends every month on transportation of its staff. “Besides,” according to experts, “the virtual office will allow its staff to avoid the everyday traffic jam on the city streets. Those who are tired of spending hours together in traffic jam everyday would like to join such offices.”
Describing the further benefits of virtual office, Barrister Ahsan Habib said: “You've found, for example, an expert you want to hire for your office, but he lives in the UK and you’re in Dhaka. With a virtual office, you can make such a remote player part of your team. Internet can make it easier. You need his service, not his physical presence.”
Barrister Habib, who lives in the UK and had been in Dhaka recently, said: “A newspaper reporter was my neighbor in East London. I never saw him going to office. One day I asked him, how come a journalist never visits his office! Then he said, ‘we don’t need to go to office as we work online. My boss assigns through online and I file my stories the same way, that’s it.”
“Working at home is gradually becoming a normal phenomenon, especially in the United States and Europe. This new trend has been coined ‘telework’, or working at a place away from one’s traditional workplace, but maintaining constant contact with it through the use of modern information, hi-tech and telecommunication gadgets,” writes a writer in a Russian journal.
He says the number of ‘teleworkers’ is growing at about 20-30 percent globally every year. For instance, he says, the number of ‘teleworkers’ in Finland is about one-third of the number of the nation’s able-bodied, employable population.
In 2007, the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers wrote a letter to their government to reward “home workers” with an anti-traffic jam bonus. The organization actually wanted “home workers” to be compensated for the costs of home-working such as light, energy and the cost of setting up an office in their homes. This, the Confederation says, will reduce traffic congestion and promote economic growth.
Telework in Bangladesh can bring about a big change. The companies here, especially those with limited financial resources to foot the ever-increasing office rents in major cities, can ask their expert employees, whose physical presence does not matter, to work from home.
The virtual office system has already arrived in Bangladesh in one way or the other. There are many small businesspeople in the country carrying out their business through online. Take the example of SM Farhad Ullah, a supplier of garment accessories in the port city of Chittagong.
Farhad Ullah does his business with the help of his assistants without having any office. “This is my startup venture… I’ve got a fax machine, one laptop and a number of telephones at my home. I’m doing fine. Technology has made things easier. We need to take advantage of that,” he said
For an effective virtual office, according to experts, one only needs to provide genuine professionals reliable infrastructure, an effective network access, a professional phone system, technical support and a well-thought out action plan.
When there are benefits of virtual office, there are drawbacks as well. “With the popularization of virtual office, many unskilled and semiskilled people may lose their jobs. Besides, the ‘teleworkers’ or ‘home workers’ may feel bored working at home all day long. And most importantly, lack of face to face communication may result in misunderstandings and confusion with the management,” said Barrister Habib.
“Anyway”, he said, “the benefits of virtual office are much more than its drawbacks and we need to popularize it as it’ll help manage time and space very effectively.”
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