 Welcome to Telecommuting Toolkit, Tactics Tips and Tools for Working and Managing Remotely. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm a Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for going on 7 years. Prior to that, I spent almost a decade in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California where I worked with a series of small nonprofits as the accidental techie. I'm glad to be your host for today's event. You'll also see in the background Ali Bestikian who is an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup. She will be on hand to help you with any tech issues and answer your questions, and she'll be capturing them for Q&A with our presenters for later. So feel free to reach out to her if you'd like as well. Now on to the presenters for today's event. We are joined by a panel of three experts who work and live and breathe telework. So they're going to be sharing their expertise and experience. The first is Jim Lynch who has had a long career here at TechSoup and he's been involved in creating all of TechSoup's environmental programs. He's the father of many of them. So we're proud to have him join us. He also writes several pieces about different aspects of telework, how it's revolutionized the workplace, and its decreasing operating costs for nonprofits. He has been interviewed extensively over the years on computer recycling, telework, and related green topics by outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, PC World Magazine, and many others. We're glad to have him join. Also we'll be joined by Jane Craven. She's an internationally recognized trainer, researcher, and consultant. She's a pioneer regarding the research and practice of virtual volunteering. And she's a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. And she's also a past forums and community manager here at TechSoup. So she's one that we consider part of our own family. And she runs Coyote Communications where she frequently has reports and articles on how she works around the world with virtual volunteering, and a whole host of other topics in the social good sector. Our final presenter today will be Elijah Van Der Giesen or Eli as we lovingly call him here. Eli thrives to be a connector and he really is. He holds that community together with NetSquared which is a global community and project of TechSoup Global. He's been a volunteer manager, an event organizer, and a digital campaigner who also is working remotely for TechSoup in Vancouver. And he is NetSquared's community manager supporting a global volunteer network of 50 monthly meetups with more than 450 events per year in cities around the world. So we are glad to have all of them joining us today. I mentioned where Eli is up in Vancouver and Jane is out of nearby Portland. And Jim and I and Ali actually are all in the San Francisco area. Feel free to chat into us to let us know where you're joining from today so we can get an idea of where you, our audience is at. We have about 105 people in the room with us right now and we want to hear from you. So while you do that, I'll go ahead and take us through the agenda quickly. We will do a quick introduction to TechSoup and who we are if you're not familiar. We will then ask you to help answer some questions about how you work remotely or if you have staff that do. We'll talk about what telework is, why it's growing, cover some of the benefits, strategies, and policies of telework. We'll talk about what successful virtual work and how to support volunteers, how that happens successfully. And then we'll share some tools and tips for working and managing remotely. And we'll also highlight a few tools that are in TechSoup's catalog of donation programs. We'll have time for Q&A at the end, but feel free to ask those questions at any time during the webinar. So jumping into TechSoup, we are a global network of 63 partner organizations providing technology resources to more than a half million organizations in 121 countries around the world. We are proud to be doing that. Like I mentioned, in 121 countries served with 63 global partners in all of those countries. We have so far helped bring almost $5 billion worth of technology products and grants to NGOs, libraries, and foundations around the world. And you can find out more about our specific product donation program if you are based here in the US by visiting techsoup.org. Now onto these quick questions. Do you work remotely one day or more per week? This is you, participant, person on the other end of this call, Veronica, Gretchen, Gina, Jeff. Go ahead and answer us. Let us know. Do you work from home sometimes? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you're considering it. Maybe you have some other answer you'd like to chat into us. So go ahead and let us know. We'll give just a moment for everybody to participate in this by clicking one of those radio buttons. And then we'll show the results. You should be seeing them once you've clicked your own answer in. While people are doing that, we've got people joining from all over the country. New Jersey, Minnesota, Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington D.C., Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, everywhere. So glad to have you with us. I'm going to go ahead and show the results. We have some people saying that they work from the office but connect to various remote sites. We have some people who say they work from home and the office. And some people who work 100% from home. Glad to have you participating in the poll. So it looks like more than half of you are working remotely one day or more per week. And 18% do not. And 19% are considering it. So that's nearly the other half that are not. So that's helpful. And for those of you who are working from home some, you can feel free to chat into us while we're sharing our own tips on things that you find helpful and useful strategies and tips for your work from home that we can share back out with other participants. Last question for you, do you manage staff, volunteers, or board members, or projects from a distance? And so this could be your remote and you manage those things while you're not at the office or you could be in the office and have staff that are out in the world, field staff, or other countries, or board members, volunteers. So go ahead and take a second to answer that one. And then we'll be diving right into the content at hand with our first presenter, Mr. Jim Lynch. I'm going to give just another moment for everyone to respond. And just know that when you chat into us, we can see your chat comments, but you are all not able to read one another. Unfortunately, it's a limitation of our tool today. So if there's something that you think is useful and that we see and think our audience would benefit from knowing, we'll go ahead and put that back out in the chat window for you. So looking at the results, 75% of you manage staff, volunteers, board members, or projects from a distance. So that is really great to know. And this is what's becoming of the world, isn't it Jim? We're so glad to have you join the program today. I'll let you take it away. Thanks so much. Alright, thanks Becky. You might come in and okay? Alright. Terrific. So Telework. Telework has many names, and so many of you do Telework anyway. In fact, I'm speaking to more experts than we usually do on these things. But it is essentially when someone is working outside the office, either at home or when traveling. So I'm moving on to the next slide. People are calling it all kinds of different things. We actually tried to invent a name here at TechSoup some years ago. I did, which failed flat. I won't even give you the name because it's too embarrassing. But Mobile Work, E-Work, Virtual Volunteering, all kinds of names under this. So the trend since 2005 has been a rapid increase in this type of work, and that's mainly due to the fact of the information economy that we're working in more and more. A number of types of people can't Telework still. Certainly a around half, we think, of the US population is working directly with the public in some manner. So that might be people working in libraries, working directly with the public and so on. But many of us can, at least part of the time. So the interesting thing to me is that this is not just an advanced economy thing. Lots and lots of people are doing Telework in the rest of the world and even in developing countries now. So I mentioned that there's been about 80% growth, or maybe I didn't, but that's been what it has been in the entire US economy. And the nonprofit sector is mirroring that very closely. So we're no different. And by the way, the nonprofit sector includes mostly small shops, small offices, under 10 people working in them. So there are lots of benefits from Telework that you probably already know. Most employees really love to be able to work at home at least part of the time or be able to work wherever they are. So if they're traveling, they like to be able to check in. It has created flex time. It's created a thing where people aren't necessarily working a straight eight hours straight through or whatever number of hours straight through. People take breaks. People do different things. They make appointments and go to them. And they can work throughout the day on their own schedule. And this has a huge impact on how to manage teleworkers as well, which I'll get into a little later. A big deal about Telework has been the reduction in the need for office space. And one example that we have right here at TechSoup is that we have a London office that a year ago was quite populated with our staff members there. And now hardly anybody goes in there to our London office and more wondering whether we even need an office there anymore because everybody has basically stopped using it. So we're seeing that more and more throughout the world. By the way, offices and structures in the United States account for a little over half of our carbon footprint. So if your organization is particularly interested in environment and things like that, reducing in office spaces, reducing your office space is probably the biggest thing you can do to decrease your greenhouse gas footprint, your carbon footprint. So this is something that I might invite folks to comment on a little more. This is a controversial thing that Becky and I have had some debating about. The reduction in IT costs are significant at this point. I'm not sure that's entirely fair because what's happening out there in the world is that it's plugging into the Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD movement in IT. That means everybody is basically using their own devices. They're using their tablets, and they're using their own phones, and they're using their own laptops. And that's a trend for people to do inside their own offices, but especially a huge trend in teleworking. And so the thing we're talking about, which I would love to know is whether you are getting reimbursed. So many of you are doing telework already. I'd love to know if you're being reimbursed on IT expenses. Is your organization paying for your minutes on your phone? Or are they paying a portion of your Internet costs? Are they paying, giving you some money toward the purchase of your devices? So I'd love to know what's going on there. TechSoup, we do subsidized mobile phone minutes for some people, but strangely enough lots of people don't apply for it, and lots of people don't even know that that is a policy at TechSoup, and don't even ask. So that's what our experience has been. The thing that is amazing about telework to me, and one of the most extraordinary things about it, is that no matter where someone exists or lives, or spends their time, you can actually hire them, or have them as a volunteer. And that's just astonishing to me that you can have the most talented people in the world, and it really doesn't matter where they are. They don't have to be in your city. So that's an incredible benefit I think from telework. So looking at the slide, just the strictly environmental aspects of telework are that it's reducing greenhouse gas emissions by an extraordinary degree. We think the stats on this are a little bit soft for the United States. The travel expenses of an individual worker are reduced somewhere between $5,000 per year and $10,000 per year. And I think you guys probably know this already because you're already experiencing those costs, and they include things like don't have to pay for parking, don't have to pay for the train, don't have to pay for gas, gasoline if you're driving in, and so on and so forth. Insurance, all of that goes into these commuting costs, all of that's saved by teleworkers. So what do you need to telework? Probably the main thing is a laptop. That's most of what we use at TechSoup, and in my experience that's most of what everybody uses as their main piece of equipment for teleworking. Most places still are probably email heavy as far as doing most of their work and checking in and communicating with fellow employees and anyone else outside of your organization. Smartphones are an increasingly used element in telework. That's so that you can take a call from anywhere of course, and of course smartphones have been described as the God device. They do everything, maybe not as conveniently as a laptop or a tablet or anything else, but they pretty much do anything. You can use your email, you can text, you can use Skype, you can do almost anything on a smartphone that you can do on anything else. And so you could actually live with just a smartphone, and I've seen people do that. Tablets are interesting. They were all the rage about a year and a half ago. It's sort of leveling off now where people are using them or buying them less. However, they are quite useful because it's very easy to slip them in your carrying case and take off with them and use them in a coffee shop or when traveling. They are a really terrific tool for traveling. And of course, good keyboards are terrific. There's lots of good keyboards now that are available for iPads and for the Surface Tablet which is the Microsoft device that's actually turning tablets into a much more useful device especially for working. Broadband Internet of course is a given. It can be mobile Internet or it can be Wi-Fi. But one of the things I write about a lot is that public Wi-Fi is very risky and that I'm always hoping people use it with caution and very sparingly because actually people can actually use software tools to watch you carefully and see everything you're doing and do things like put keystroke counters to find out what your passwords are and things like that. So public Wi-Fi is something that I would caution to use very sparingly. VPN is something that we use a lot here at TechSoup. It's called Virtual Private Networking. That's something that you do. You basically go into your network. You can set it up with Cisco devices that are something we have as a donation here at TechSoup. You can use VPN to get into your network just like as if you were there. And of course, communication tools, we use quite a bit at TechSoup and everybody else does too. ReadyTalk, the thing we're using right now is very useful for doing conference calls, go to Meeting Link which is going to change its name to Skype for Business in the coming year. WebEx and Skype itself is a pretty useful thing that we use and I think other folks use. And then Cloud Storage so that you can have common sets of documents are terrific for telework. So the world is just getting better and better. And so I don't think I have a whole lot of time left to talk about telework strategy and policies but this is probably one of the more interesting and useful things. Just to let you know in our resources slide, I've just done a fresh article on that whole thing which talks about the fact that instead of judging people on how much time they're sitting at their desk, actually telework requires that managers evaluate employees by their productivity and based on very clear, clearly defined deliverables that employees know and their managers know. So that seems to be the key for this new world and it's a very different world in terms of management. So Becky, back to you. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate it. I am going to go ahead and take us into introducing our next speaker, Jane Cravens, who will talk to us a bit about the strategies that have worked for her both in working remotely and also in managing teams and in particular virtual volunteers. And I picked this image in particular because virtual volunteering is something that Jane is a huge expert on. Virtual volunteers is a term she doesn't like very much. So I'd love for you to start us off by explaining if you're working with volunteers how not to insult them by calling them a virtual volunteer, right? Because they are real and they are there and they are doing work for you no matter where they are and they need some love too. So Jane, talk to us a little bit about the strategies for helping support them. Sure. Well, interesting to note that when I started the virtual volunteering project back at the University of Texas in the 1990s, we used guidelines that were based on telework manuals. Telecommuting and telework started, it really started to flourish in the 90s. And all I did in some of those early guidelines was just take these wonderful telework manuals, take the word employee out, put in the word volunteer. And it still worked. All the recommendations worked. The reason I'm not crazy about the word virtual volunteer is because people will say and have said to me, oh, does that mean the volunteers aren't real? Or they'll say, well, I don't want to work with virtual volunteers. I'm going to work with real volunteers. And that always really bothers me because volunteers are real. Your remote staff are real. All of these people are real. So a lot of time it's about thinking about all of these people as it's not just an email address. It's a real person. So that's my big saying. I'll be following up on the slide that Jim didn't get to do. A lot of things he was about to bring up, I'll be bringing up. So it segues quite nicely. One of the things he had on that slide was that it's not for everybody. Telework isn't for everybody. And I really second that. You cannot work remotely effectively if you are also looking after children at the same time, just as you can't have your children inside your office and be doing meetings. If you can, good for you. But it's really impossible. Your children need your focus. Another person in your office that you have a meeting with needs your focus. I think multitasking is a lie. You have to focus on the job and get it done. You can't telecommute if you aren't available to colleagues for spontaneous meetings. And this can be a challenge for a lot of people because they want a day's notice for a meeting or whatnot when they telecommute. Well, a lot of workplaces, they just can't have that just as they want you on site to be able to walk into somebody's office and say, hey, you got a second? They want you to be able to do that when you telecommute. Now that doesn't mean if you are working with people remotely and they are in Australia that they should be able to contact you at 3 a.m. But it does mean that you need to think about times of the day when you will be on instant messaging, on Skype, whatever, and somebody can just see you and say, hey, I need to talk to you right now. So that's super important. And live meetings regularly are absolutely essential. You can't do this communication entirely via email and instant messaging if you are teleworking, if you are a paid employee. It's just impossible. Now I've worked with online volunteers where I didn't have to have live meetings with them and I actually maybe never even heard their voice. But when you have somebody that has a regular role, a daily role, a weekly role, you really need to have live meetings sometimes by phone, by Skype, by WebEx, something so that you can interact in real time. So equipment expectations to work with people that are going to be teleworkers is that the remote staff have to be tech savvy enough not to overburden your IT support back at the office. You've got to be pretty independent. It doesn't mean you can't seek help, but it means that if somebody throws a new software at you, you can figure it out relatively quickly, a new conferencing tool, what not. You know how to do some basic troubleshooting. You also have to decide whose computer will be used. As Jim said, some people use their own device and they like using their own device. Some organizations really hate that. They really don't want you to use your own device. They want you to use the official company device. So you need to work that out. And if you are permitted to use a work computer or equipment, tablet, whatever outside of work hours for personal reasons, that has to be decided up front. You have to look at how data is going to be backed up. You have to look at the expectations that the company has regarding you keeping confidentiality and privacy on home devices. Remember the biggest theft of data and identity theft is by people in the same office or in the same household. It's actually not strangers. So it's something that a lot of companies are asking, how are you going to keep this device secure? What's going to happen if the equipment is stolen, lost, or damaged? Are you responsible? Are they responsible? Etc. What are the virus protections going to be like if you need to protect data? As Jim said, TechSoup does reimburse for some costs. Are you going to do that? It's one of the things I recommend if you are going to work with online volunteers in particular. Say up front, are you going to reimburse costs or no? And insurance coverage, not only for purchased equipment, but for people working remotely, is that something that you need to have for paid staff? The way a lot of people get around it is everybody is a contractor, everybody is an employee. But it's something to look into and a Google search will help you very much in finding out what you need. The keys to telework success are to set goals for yourself if you are a teleworker as an individual contributor or as a part of a team every month. One of the things Jim said was talking about managing by goals, not by time spent. And that's hugely important. So you need to talk with your team members or your supervisor, and you need to agree in writing how often you are going to report in, what reaching the goals is going to look like, what the goals are. And if people aren't reporting improperly, you need to be ready to have a live meeting to discuss why and how to improve. That bullet point is really huge. You have to be ready to troubleshoot when someone goes silent or they are not delivering. It's a key issue. That said, most teleworkers are rather fantastic at delivering. I haven't had as much of a problem, for instance with online volunteers people are shocked that not that many drop out. But I have to say, I'm pretty tough in screening. So I reject more people that apply than I accept. But the results are people don't disappear on the assignment. Measure progress towards set goals. Again, as Jim said, measure towards accomplishments not so much hours spent, have the goals been met, if not why not. Showing goal progress, it can be as simple as a Google spreadsheet. It can be as that simple. It doesn't have to be some expensive software, although it can be that, a Gantt chart or whatever. And really don't rely on email as your only way of communicating. I just think a collaborative space is absolutely essential. I've got a list of possible tools at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, which is there. My fav is MiniGroup. I think it's a nice, cheap, stable platform. I so miss Yahoo Groups the way it used to be. It was my favorite online collaborative tool. If you have ones you like, please feel free to post in our chat room about online collaborative tools you like. But it's a great way for everybody to share documents that they're working on so that it's available for everybody to look at, anytime they want to look at it. They don't have to email you and say, I really need that document. It's there for people to look at. And it's very important to set boundaries. If you answer email at 3 a.m. from your team, people are going to expect that. So I actually don't. I actually often will not answer emails on weekends just to make it clear. I don't do that. You need to initiate communication. Don't wait for a manager to contact you. Don't wait for team members to contact you. You get out there and let them know you have a question. Let them know what's going on. And really dedicate 100% of your attention to work during work hours. Working from a coffee shop may not be okay with your supervisor. Again, as Jim said, a lot of those public networks are really wonky in terms of security. I like if I'm teleworking with a new client, I do it all from home at first and then gradually might do it from somewhere else just to see if they're comfortable. I have a ton of advice on this. It's a subject near and dear to my heart on my own website. The link is there. And again, the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, we're sharing tech tools that people like. And if you share some here that I think look good, I will most definitely put those up. So I think I made my time and I get to hand it over to Eli. Great. Thank you for that, Jane. I'm going to jump in here really quickly before we move forward with that. And just jump in with one question that one of the users asked, Angela asked to backtrack a little bit on the security aspect of technology and teleworking. You mentioned that public Wi-Fi, maybe not such a great thing to use. Jim also mentioned that. So I wanted to mention that we'll include in the follow-up email some examples of policies and a guide of what types of security tools you might want to have. No matter if you're working at home or in an office, just so that you keep yourself and your equipment safe, especially if you are bringing your own equipment, you want to make sure that you're not giving away the farm by using Starbucks, Wi-Fi, or McDonald's, or the local coffee shop down the street. And with that I'd like to go ahead and introduce our next presenter and have Eli tell us a little bit about the work that he's doing. And he's going to particularly share his methodology, his day-to-day favorite tools that he uses as recommendations for where you might want to start if you're looking for tools and tips on teleworking for yourself. So welcome to the program Eli. Hi there. Thank you so much. I'm going to follow up the two really smart people with my more practical focus on some of the tools I use to operate day-to-day working within the parameters of course of what Jane and Jim were just walking you through. So hi there. My name is Eli. I live in Vancouver, Canada. And I am the Community Manager for TechSoup's NetSquared project. You're saying what the heck is NetSquared? Reasonable question. So we are a global network of volunteers who hold nonprofit technology events. You should probably go to one of our events. We're in 50 cities in 20 countries, which means I spend all of my day managing different time zone issues, just trying to schedule calls with people, sending emails, getting on chat, basically trying to knit together these different groups. NetSquared is really actually all about face-to-face interaction. So the core experience is actually not virtual and distributed, but very much about people in their own communities holding face-to-face events. So often our events are discussions and lectures where people come together to talk about a technology issue of interest in nonprofits, or sometimes we're going to go and get really hands-on. So I put up a picture here of a recent social media surgery where I got together experts from the community, dressed them up like surgeons and scrubs and had them talk to local nonprofits for half-hour periods where they got to walk each other through their challenges and try and come up with solutions. So it's super fun. The events are free. You'd be a fool to not go. So as a teleworker, I've got three problems. Well, actually four problems because I work from my kitchen two feet away from my fridge. So that's a whole other kind of issue. But the three problems that we're going to talk about today are basically scheduling, communicating, and keeping visible. That thing Jane really talked about which is initiating the calls and making sure that your work is visible because it's easy as a remote worker to become invisible. So let's talk a little bit about scheduling coordination. I'll walk you through two tools that I use all the time. So tool number one is doodle.com. It is a free miracle. And anyone who has ever sent six or seven or ten emails back and forth trying to schedule a meeting with three or four or five or ten people and finding a time that works for everyone knows that that is the worst thing in the world. And so doodle is a solution to that problem where you get to go and say like these are some times that I'm available and then you send out the link to everyone else and they say like these are some times that it worked for me. And then you get to find a time that hopefully works for everyone and then you schedule your call or your meeting or your hangout or whatever. Doodle's basic version is free. It's like an ad in the side that you can ignore. But I happily pay them $40 a year because then it actually syncs up with your Outlook calendar or your Google calendar. So it's even easier to schedule possible times that aren't going to conflict with your other appointments. Another tool that I love, love, love for scheduling is something called Calendly or calend.ly because the cool kids on the Internet like ridiculous URLs. And Calendly is a bit of a miracle when it comes for doing one-on-one meetings, but not so much for doing group meetings. So in Calendly you just basically go in and define some different kinds of meetings that you want to make yourself available for, be those quick 15-minute chats or big one-hour meetings. And then you even get to say, but actually I only want to accept like three meetings a day that are one hour. So you can actually really set all kinds of parameters and make sure meetings aren't back-to-back, so you have a breathing room. But basically you have to find out when you are available. And then you send a link to someone you want to have a meeting with. And they get to go through and find like a time that works for you. So they are like, I know I'm also available Thursday in the afternoon. So they click in to the Thursday afternoon button and then it takes them in to select the final time. And you can define a form field to say like put your Skype ID here to make sure you've got everything set up. And if you're a consultant you can even actually have people, hey, if you can put a credit card form here and say, you know, someone wants half an hour of my time, it's going to cost you $50. And you can even set all that up in the Calendly. Again, like all these fancy online tools, the first basic version is free to anyone to use. But if you wanted to find out multiple types of collect money, again they'll have you to take a little bit of money from you every day just to make it happen. But most people don't need to do that. Another problem I have of course is just how do I actually communicate with people. And I am no magical exception. I spend all of every day in email just like you do. But as a remote worker who doesn't get to walk and talk and see my colleagues all the time, I want to get into video chat as much as possible because it's not perfect but it's way better than just being an ephemeral voice out there in the world. The more they can see your face the more you are real. And being real is exactly what you want to get. So I have subscribed to the Skype All You Can Eat Dial Out package. So I spend every moment I'm not in email on Skype either during Skype to Skype calls or doing like the Skype to phone dialogue because of course I'm calling people in 20 countries and it's one way to keep my long distance bill under control. You can also of course as a nonprofit apply through TechSoup to get super affordable like $1 gets you $20 credit vouchers available to nonprofits through TechSoup or Skype. So a killer deal you should totally, totally, totally get it because it's the world's best thing. And of course I'm also in hangouts all the time too for people who are in the Google ecosystem. So as a remote worker I don't have a place to find out what's going on in unofficial ways. I don't have access to a water cooler. So I'm desperately trying to create a virtual water cooler. A place where I can get the informal gossip that's coming out of an organization because that's where all the real planning happens. It's like when you ran into someone accidentally in the hallway and found out about the cool new project that you could be part of. And so for me some of those fake virtual water coolers are any one of the online chat tools. I've thrown up a couple icons here but of course there's a million other tool solutions. Use whatever is going to get the best chance of actually being adopted by the people you work with. So in TechSoup we're heavy users of Yammer which again is part of the Office 365 package available to nonprofits. I've also got groups on Slack. I've got people on Skype Chat. I've used Chatter in the past if you're a Salesforce shop. I use Facebook groups. Each one of the communities I work with has a different chat place to be but it's so important to have a place where you can have quick interactions with people because mailing lists are amazing but many people are very reluctant to use them for the small quick interactions. The me too is the have you ever thought about because sometimes email feels like you need to have a big well thought out idea. It's like publishing a book or a blog post as opposed to sending out a quick tweet in the world. So this is basically your equivalent of Twitter or Facebook where you can gossip and chat with your colleagues. So this is really the Yammer group that TechSoup uses and I really encourage you to get in on these things because this is where you're going to find out what your boss thinks is important and who the new hires are and also the hot gossip. So really I strongly encourage you to look into some kind of chat solution because it's the informal discussions that are so important. And this is where I'm going to turn it over to Becky to tell you a little bit more about this next little poll. Becky- Yeah, so we wanted to get an idea of if you're currently teleworking and maybe you're using a group chat solution now, what is it that you're using mostly? And if it's not one of these, we're limited to 10 options. So if it's something else go ahead and chat into us and we'll compile those and send them back out to you. So these are some of the ones that Eli's been covering. We know there are other ones like Uvoo and Jing and all kinds of other products out there. And we want to know what you're using so we can let everybody else know. So go ahead and click on these on your screen. We'll give everybody a moment just to respond. And it looks like so far the overwhelming majority are not using any of these. And that's okay, but these are great tools to look at even if you're not using Skype for credits. I use Skype every day just for the free instant messaging. And I think the most useful feature that I use with it is updating my mood to tell people if I'm in the office or if I'm working at home and my cell phone number to reach me if I'm working at home. I also use the Do Not Disturb when I'm running webinars. And I set my, I'm available, I'm in meetings, I'm not available. Great little features in a lot of these tools that can help you stay abreast of what your team is doing and keep each other in the loop without actually having to email all the time to say, hey, I'm working at home today. It's really nice to just update it and people can see, oh, she's working at home on February 4th or February 6th. So while everybody is responding, I'm going to go ahead and open up the results. It looks like the biggest group of users is Google Plus, and the second is Skype. But most of you are not using any of these tools. And so these are some great options. And we've had other people chat in. Some people use GroupMe. Somebody mentioned it's like WhatsApp for Facebook or Facebook Messenger. Somebody mentioned they use online forums, and they have a private forum, so that would be something more like your own intranet, which we also use here at TechSoup. And that's more file sharing for us than it is communications. We also have somebody saying they use Skype, but the video is slow and jerky and so they don't like looking at themselves. Usually it's your internet connection or more than it is the camera or Skype. But anyway, this is really helpful for us. And if you are using tools and want to chat those into us, we'll be sure to mention those in the follow-up email. So that I'd like to hand it back over to Eli to wrap up his section and then we'll get to your questions. Sure thing. Thank you, Becky. So all I can really say about these chat things is as a remote worker, I strongly encourage you to overshare, which is you may feel that you're being obnoxious, but you're not wandering those hallways every day. So you need to make yourself visible by getting on top of whatever the group chat solution is by sending the all staff emails, by sending updates however you can, send smoke signals, but definitely overshare, otherwise you'll turn invisible. Which really brings me to the last piece, which is as a remote worker, you do have the danger of being invisible. And realistically, if you're not visible, you're also the first person who is going to be cut if there's ever any rounds of layoffs or project priorities change. Just because if they don't know what you're doing, why would they keep you around? So it's important as remote workers to make sure that everyone knows exactly what you're up to. And so to that point, just as Jane said, you want to have regular direct meetings with your boss, but don't just have one relationship within the organization. Make sure you cultivate many allies and advocates for your work within the organization. So work those relationships. You are your number one marketer. And then the last thing I have found that works really well for me is as a person who basically works alone, I need to take care of my own agenda. So because I'm on a headset all day, I can be the person who takes notes at every meeting, and then you distribute the minutes. And being the person who distributes the minutes from a meeting means you control what actually happened in that meeting. And the next steps, because you document it out, you have more power than you would imagine as the person who takes the notes. And similarly, I want to show my boss that I'm really busy and active and on it. And so I have a document that we use every month. In our case it's a Google Doc. And I just send my boss the link to that document right before every meeting. And in the week between our meetings, I'm always building out the list of the next agenda items that we can talk about and running inventory of the major tasks I'm working on. Again, because I want to show that I'm busy. And two, when people know that you are already occupied, they're not going to come to you with other work. They're not going to throw more on your plate because they can see that your plate is full. That's all I got for you except for to say, I love, love, love working remotely. It is the world's best thing for me, and I thought I was going to hate it. But it also turned me into a much more entrepreneurial person because now I have to really control my work and how I messaged it across the organization. That is terrific, Gila. And I will say personally, we love, love, love having you work with us. So I'm really glad you're able to join today. And Jane took us through some of the overarching things to think about. If you're managing people remotely, Eli took us through some of the tools and tips on if you're working remotely, if you're that person doing the work from a distance. And Jim gave us sort of that overarching, here's why it's important, and here's some things, maybe bigger policies to think about as an organization that why this might benefit you, or why you might want to move more toward this. And I'm going to wrap us up with a look at a few more tools that these are available through the TechSoup donation program. And we have a whole section of telecommuting tools that includes online collaboration tools, remote access tools, web and audio conferencing products, so everything from your file sharing to your go-to webinar, go-to training, go-to my PC, remote access stuff, to more traditional online collaboration fun tools like Huddle and Skype. So you can find these in our catalog, and we'll include links to those in the follow-up email. And you can see that section here at TechSoup.org, and it's just called telecommuting. And you'll see there's a drop-down on the screen where you can select whether you want to look at collaboration tools, remote access, or web and audio conferencing. We also will point you in that follow-up email to a whole bunch of additional resources including a workplace savings calculator that can show you how much you'll save by not commuting every day for your organization or for you as an individual. We'll look at more stats, and then lots of resources on how to telework, how we do it, how cell phones and tablets enable it, actual policies. So for those of you, somebody asked in the chat if there's policy language you could include in a new hire document so that people who work remotely know upfront what the expectations are around privacy and security and maintaining their equipment, things like that. Some examples of how we telework here at TechSoup, and tools that we use, telecommuting articles. We have a whole section of those and collaboration and online conferencing tools. So I'm going to go ahead and open us up to questions. We have quite a lot of them. So this one is for Jim. Jill asks, also by having a bring-your-own-device mindset, which many of you in the chat express that you do bring your own devices and you don't necessarily get reimbursed. Doesn't that shut the door for some people who may not have the money to provide their own device to bring to work? How do you reconcile that if you don't have your own device but you want that job and you're remote? Is there a way to have that conversation with a company? What would you recommend, Jim? Oh my. Well, first of all, I'd get in the door and get the job. That's sort of the way I would think of it. And at TechSoup we've been advocates for refurbished equipment quite a bit. So we have actually something called the RCI program that provides refurbished laptops that are vetted and have fail rates that are better than new Dell computers and things like that. But there are lots and lots of refurbished equipment. You can probably get a refurbished laptop for under $100 that would work. And one big expense actually is high-speed broadband. And you can actually do with $20 very cheap. The cheapest kind of broadband that's available in your area except if you're working in a rural area that becomes an issue and I have no answer for that. On mobile phones or mobile devices, lots and lots now are available as refurbished ones. There are lots of under $100 tablets now available. And actually there are under $50 smart phones that are available by the prepaid carriers. Most of them in example is one called Cricket. So there's lots of ways to do this if you have just any resource. So you might have to borrow some money to get a rig like that. But it doesn't take much. Laptop and cell phone probably do it. This is Jane. Go ahead. No, I just want to say a lot of these jobs are contract jobs and they expect you to bid. I put in the bid if I'm going to need an upgrade. I consider that. I did that two years ago to get the Mac I'm using now. It came along and I was like, there's no way I can do that unless my hardware is severely upgraded. So I just built it into my proposal and they went for it. And it's mine now. That's great advice. And I would second that, that any job if you're worth having and they want you, you can always try and negotiate to ensure that you've got the equipment you need to do it well. And if you've got the talent to do it, a lot of organizations will try and help. If not provide it, they'll help meet you halfway. We have a question from Duane that's around tax implications. And so I chatted out a bunch of stuff around if you are bringing your own devices and not getting reimbursed, you can often deduct a percentage of that equipment and or home office space and or part of your utilities and mortgage if you have a dedicated home office. In your taxes, it's usually when you, what's the word I'm looking for? When you do your deductions manually, it's not, I can't itemize. Thank you. That's the word I'm looking for. When you itemize your deductions. So Duane, if you have staff that are looking for deductions, they would need to talk to their tax professionals. I'm not an accountant. I just know from personal experience I work at home here at TechSoup a couple of days a week and I'm able to deduct my portion of my home office, a portion of that in my taxes each year. So definitely give them the advice to talk to their tax professional or to look at TurboTax or the online programs because they all have sections in there about itemizing deductions for home office expenses. And they can get a portion of their internet, their electric bill if they are doing it from their home covered which it does help at the end of the day. We also have a question here from Carla asking, how can you tell if you are on a public wireless connection, how can you tell if somebody is on your computer? Is there a way to know? How to stay safe? I know you shared out that hotspot security app, but is there a way to know if there is somebody using your machine? This is Jim. I don't know of a way where you can actually watch the watcher. I've seen articles on PC World on exactly what a screen looks like with the proper software of what they can see. They can see pretty much everything. And you can't tell. You can't actually, as far as I know, maybe somebody is more of a computer geek than me. However, as far as I know, just assume that if you are in a Starbucks or if you are in a free Wi-Fi zone that it's very possible for someone to set up and watch everything you are doing. So that's what I do. I basically assume that I don't do anything that somebody isn't watching unless I'm using this hotspot security software that I mentioned on the chat. Great. So good best practice to have something like that installed upfront. And maybe if you have the option of not working from a public space to do your online banking and other more sensitive projects, maybe you do them not on a public Wi-Fi. So here's a question that I think Eli and Jane, I think either of you might want to take a stab at. Tenna comments that I feel really stuck at times because I'm working with staff in remote areas in Africa with no Wi-Fi. And I imagine they may have some limited connectivity. What are the best tools? Are there some recommendations for tools that maybe have online things that they do when they do have connectivity but allow people to work productively offline and just upload in batches or something like that? Do you have any recommendations? And that's for either of you to take a stab at. Yeah, I'm old school. I tend to work offline and then upload things later. That's because I've been online since the 90s and that's the way we used to do it. And so with most of the people I've worked with remotely, that's also how they do it. They prepare the document offline, they edit it, they gather the data offline, they edit the video offline, and then they upload it to a shared space when they have an Internet connection and then I deal with it. So that's how I tend to do it with whatever Dropbox, again Yahoo groups, mini groups, good old fashioned email, whatever they have to just in that hour or 30 minutes that they're going to have an Internet connection, that's how they share their work with me. What I ask for usually is I need it by such and such date. So I'm going to look for it Monday at 9 a.m. my time. So be sure to get it in by then. That's how I do it. Eli, I'll turn it over to you. I know. I wish I had some magical solution to solve those problems. Rather as someone who supports groups across large parts of Africa at this point, it's been a real mind stretch to actually have to have my assumptions around connectivity and relial power challenge. So it is, I think, as you say, Jane, like going back to doing things in batches, like downloading your email, or applying to your email, then getting on to it is kind of the right solution. The other thing I've often been looking for is things that are low bandwidth solutions. So something like a Google Hangout is going to crunch through Internet way too fast. It requires too much from most people's connections. So I've often tried to have when I got a video chat to also open up a text chat that goes alongside it. So at least those who can't necessarily dial in still have a way to participate in at least part of the conversation. And the last thing I'd point you to because it's super sexy is something called the brick, which is a ruggedized Internet Wi-Fi device and actually battery as well, which is built specifically for people who develop world-its-brck.com. I'll drop that into the chat. That might be something worth checking out, but honestly, there is no easy, great solution. I'm sure that's the case, Eli. With that, we're going to have to go ahead and wrap it up. I know we didn't get to every question, but we hopefully gave you some good food for thought today on how you can increase the telework productivity in your organization. We invite you to join us for upcoming webinars. Next week we'll be talking about why Internet freedom matters for nonprofits and libraries, and what you can do to help preserve it. Then we'll be talking about inclusive information access with using assistive technology in libraries. We'll also have some conversations about tech donations for faith-based organizations or churches on the 19th. And then we'll have a series of two webinars. One is QuickBooks for New Nonprofit Users, and the following one is QuickBooks for Existing Nonprofit Users. We hope you'll join us for these and more. You can also look at our webinar archives, not only for upcoming events and archives, but also for those NetSquared Meetups that Eli mentioned. So we hope you'll join us for some of those. You can connect with us on TechSoup Global, TechSoup.org, or Facebook, or our Twitter. I'd like to thank all of our presenters today for taking the time to share their expertise. And thank you to our participants for really engaging us in chat and with questions and sharing your own advice. Lastly, I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk, for providing the use of their ReadyTalk 500 platform for us to present these webinars to you. It is also available on our website at TechSoup.org slash ReadyTalk. When you leave this webinar, go ahead and take a moment to fill out the post-event survey so we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you all so much. And for those of you who are wondering, these are the credits for our images used throughout today's webinar in case you're interested in finding more images you can use on your end. Thanks so much everyone, and have a great day. Bye-bye.