Note: this was posted late because even though I knew what I wanted to write, it took a long time actually to sit down and WRITE it. Then it was difficult for me to come up with a long post about this subject without sounding like I was making fun of those companies and Atlanta in general. I figured the news media did enough of that already. So, here is a “blip” on the radar about the subject.
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The end of January and the beginning of February were unusual for the residents and companies in and near Atlanta, GA. Snow is something that Georgia has always had trouble with.
Large companies found their workers late or even not able to report to work as the weather hit them earlier this year. Then there were the numerous reports of people stranded for hours trying to get home. Everyone was let out at the same time.
An efficient “bad weather” plan calls for staggered release of employees and appropriate response from those few who must continue to work through the storm. Atlanta, generally speaking, failed the staggered release portion of the previous sentence.
Our office in Columbus, GA let out as the sleet began falling. We have 90% laptop users, so we advised them that they should take their laptops home in case they could not make it into work. When we closed the next day due to weather, work didn’t have to stop, projects didn’t have to be held up, The following day, we headed to work and resumed our usual day. Only a few workers who live out of town were still unable to come in to work (physically). Those few workers were “logged in” remotely doing their work from home.
Other than switching to laptops, part of our bad weather/short term disaster plan is Office 365. It allows texting/video conferencing like Skype, document sharing, remote calendar, remote email, all while out of the office or at the office. We traded off fast internal email for slightly slower external mail and internal SharePoint for external SharePoint.
We pay per month, and as our staff size fluctuates, so does our monthly bill.
But, if the weather doesn’t play nice or the area near our office suffers some hazardous leak of some kind… we aren’t dead in the water, and neither should you be.
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