CISCO

CHAPTER 6 Teleworking - is working away from the traditional workplace, such as working from a home office. - is a broad term referring to conducting work by connecting to a workplace from a remote location, with th ...

CHAPTER 6 Teleworking - is working away from the traditional workplace, such as working from a home office. - is a broad term referring to conducting work by connecting to a workplace from a remote location, with the assistance of telecommunications. - Improved employee productivity - Reduced costs and expenses - Easier recruitment and retention - Reduced absenteeism - Improved morale - Improved corporate citizenship - Improved customer service - benefits of offering a teleworking environment: Improved employee productivity - In general, teleworking allows employees to do more and maintain better quality work, than those workers confined exclusively to an office space. Reduced costs and expenses - A major expense in many organizations is the cost of real estate. Teleworking means reduced requirements for office space. Easier recruitment and retention - Being able to offer flexibility can reduce staff turnover by up to 20 percent. Reduced absenteeism - Telework can reduce absenteeism by as much as 80 percent. Improved morale - Improvements that offer the option of telework are often seen as family-friendly employers. Improved corporate citizenship - Allowing employees to work from home, and reducing the commuting emissions of a company's employees can be an important part of an organization’s plan to become carbon neutral and environmentally responsible. Improved customer service - With staff able to start their working day without first commuting to the office, clients and customers will experience improved contact and response times leading to large improvements in client retention and value. Helps reduce traffic and infrastructure requirements - Telework eliminates many contemporary problems at the source. Helps reduce urban drift - Urban drift refers to the movement of individuals from rural locations to city centers and towns in search of better conditions and employment opportunities. Improved rural and suburban amenities - More people working in rural or suburban region could mean better mass transit services and changes to local retail facilities. Productivity - Over 70 percent of teleworkers claim they are significantly more productive, which means they do more in less time; thus, saving time or earning more in the same time. Flexibility - Teleworkers can better manage when and where work is performed. Cost savings - Employees that must commute to an office spend a significant amount of money adding up vehicle fuel and maintenance, lunches, work clothes, eating out, and all the other costs of traditional work that one can reduce by teleworking. Home and family - For many people, spending more time with the family or caring for dependent relatives is a major reason for teleworking. Tracking of employee progress - It may be difficult for some managers to track the work accomplishments of employees that telework. Necessary to implement a new management style - Managers that oversee employees within an office have the capability to maintain in-person contact with all employees. Feeling of isolation - For many people, working on their own becomes lonely. Slower connections - Residential and rural areas do not generally get the kind of technology support and services that inner city offices can receive, and they can be expensive. Distractions - Whether it is a neighbor, a spouse, a child, lawn mowing, the laundry, the TV or the refrigerator, there are distractions in the home office. - Broadband connections - IPsec VPNs - Traditional private WAN Layer 2 technologies - There are three primary remote connection technologies available to organizations supporting teleworker services: Broadband connections - The broadband term refers to advanced communications systems capable of providing high-speed transmission of services, such as data, voice, and video, over the Internet and other networks. IPsec VPNs - This is the most common option for teleworkers, combined with remote access over broadband, to establish a secure VPN over the public Internet. Traditional private WAN Layer 2 technologies - These types of connections provide many remote connection solutions and include technologies, such as Frame Relay, ATM, and leased lines. Home office components - The required home office components are a laptop or desktop computer, broadband access (cable, DSL, or wireless), and a VPN router or VPN client software installed on the computer. Corporate components - Corporate components are VPN-capable routers, VPN concentrators, multifunction security appliances, authentication, and central management devices for resilient aggregation and termination of the VPN connections. Quality of service (QoS) - supported VoIP and videoconferencing components is becoming an integral component of the teleworkers toolkit. - refers to the capability of a network to provide better service to selected network traffic, as required by voice and video applications. Providing support for VoIP