The Virtual Office is Real
Have you ever heard about the plumber and his pipes or the mechanic and his car? That’s right — someone with a great skill who never seems to use it to look after their own stuff. Well at Greensense we are not like that — we are good at helping companies adapt to climate change and we are good at doing it in our own business. Ultimately we believe the environmental impacts that we are causing should compel us to action. Our actions match our words.
Now there are lots of initiatives we could talk about — and likely future blog posts — but for today it is our virtual office. We often get asked whether we have offices and how we operate, so here is an insight into part of the working life at Greensense.
Firstly we don’t have our own facilities — part of trying to minimise our environmental impact and save emissions. We meet as a team once a week in a hired room in the city close to public transport. As such we really need to rely on a robust, virtual office to allow us to operate during the course of the week. If you are interested in some of the energy and emission savings that are being forecasted from operating this way you can read more about it here.
We have made significant investment in finding the best Software As A Service (SaaS) solution for our business (which you may have also heard referred to as cloud computing or the virtual office). All our technology is run this way and yes — it really works — saving energy, saving emissions, building flexible work patterns and improving efficiencies. Our solutions are listed below so you can take a look. The caveat here is that we are not endorsing any of these solutions — they are suitable for us but you need to look at your own requirements before working out whether they are suitable for you.
Financials — for employee tracking, invoicing, accounts payable, order book tracking etc we use Saasu.
Knowledge Sharing — we have an internal blog site for knowledge sharing and use the same technology for our external website — WordPress.
Document Management — for file sharing, back up, versioning, synchronising etc we use Dropbox
CRM — for managing our sales and customer details we use PipelineDeals
Mail, Messaging and Calendars all comes from Google
and finally our timesheeting and resource allocation comes from ClickTime.
We all have the ability to change to make a difference. If you would like any help on practical things you can do within your organisation to minimise environmental impact then let us know.