Singing to the Choir

Straight to the Source ::

A winning balance of in-house, outsourced and services-based resources

Telecommuting Case Study: Chorus Does It Right

Posted by Ann All on July 31, 2008 at 3:06 pm

I am a big fan of case studies. Even the most overtly promotional ones generally offer enough valuable tips on how companies handle real-life business situations to make them worthwhile.

I recently found an especially well-done case study in CIO.com on how one company, New Jersey software provider Chorus, shuttered two offices and sent all 35 of its employees and full-time consultants to work at home, a move the CEO says should save Chorus $400,000 a year.

This article caught my eye, as I've written several recent posts on telecommuting myself, and IT Business Edge recently published several interesting interviews on the topic.

My only (minor) criticism is that it's a long piece. But CIO.com deals with that by dividing it into three logical installments, each packed with plenty of real-world advice from Chorus executives.

The first piece focuses on technology challenges and how Chorus dealt with them. There were a few early glitches with the company's VoIP system, including how to set it up so that employees in Texas and New Jersey could call each other using four-digit access codes, but IT staffers were able to solve them fairly easily. The coolest tip: Chorus established a dedicated extension for each of four"hunt" groups so employees can quickly and easily reach other employees from different business areas.

The second article focuses on creating policies for the newly virtual company. Some highlights: All employees must have a dedicated area at home specifically devoted to work activities. Chorus provides all needed gear, up to and including items such as paper shredders. All employees are required to use instant messaging. The article also relates how Chorus provides effective remote tech support.

The final installment discusses how Chorus dealt with the transition to a virtual environment. Key takeaways: Chorus issues a daily compilation of all of the projects, both internal and external, that different teams are working on. Some teams conduct daily meetings, by phone or WebEx. Managers communicate regularly with team members and discuss some non-business topics to maintain camaraderie.

Everyone Works at Home at Chorus, Part One

– Meridith Levinson, CIO

July 15, 2008
Rick Boyd used to spend $500 a month on gas and tolls commuting 48 miles a day between his home in Westchester County, N.Y., and his office in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. Now Boyd doesn't commute any more because his company, Chorus, which provides clinical, practice management and financial software for health care providers, has gone virtual.

Chorus closed its Hasbrouck Heights headquarters in early June and its other office, in Stafford, Texas (outside of Houston), in early July. Now all of the company's 35 employees and full-time consultants work at home, and for the most part, they love it.
Chorus CIO Rick Boyd
Chorus CIO Rick Boyd says existing technology made it easy for his company to go virtual.

Boyd, who is Chorus's CIO, says the company decided to close its offices to save money and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting and because it had the necessary technology to support such a move. President and CEO A.J. Schreiber says Chorus can continue to serve customers while simultaneously saving $400,000 a year simply by closing its 15,000 square feet of office space. Sure, breaking leases and telecom contracts is costing the company money, but the long-term savings far outweigh those short-term costs, says Schreiber. "We wouldn't have done this if it would have had a negative impact on our ability to serve customers," he adds.
Chorus CEO A.J. Schreiber
Chorus CEO A.J. Schreiber made the decision to go virtual.

In making the bold move to close its offices and go virtual, Chorus demonstrates the positive bottom-line results that stem from applying workplace flexibility as a business strategy, says Cali Williams Yost, president and founder of consultancy Work+Life Fit. "Flexibility is a strategy for managing your business," she says. "It helps you recruit and retain talent and manage resources like real estate. There are more and more companies realizing you don't need to be in the same place every minute of every day."
RELATED STORIES
Everyone Works at Home at Chorus, Part 2
Everyone Works at Home at Chorus, Part 3

Chorus's transformation into a virtual company staffed with telecommuters hasn't been flawless, but none of the hurdles the company has encountered at this point have proven insurmountable. Through research, planning and some trial-and-error, the company addressed many of the cultural challenges associated with telecommuting and managing virtual workforces.
MORE ON TELECOMMUTING
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Telecommuting
7 Things the CIO Needs to Know about Telecommuting
Telecommuters Need to Develop Special Skills
Adventures in Extreme Telecommuting

Chorus established work policies designed to maintain employee productivity and customer service levels. The company is using technology to make workloads more transparent for managers, to transfer knowledge among staff, provide training and to enable them to collaborate. The IT department, whose members also works at home, also figured out efficient ways to provide remote tech support. Here, Boyd and other Chorus employees share the challenges they've experienced and the lessons they've learned thus far in the course of their company's transformation.

The first lesson is that you need the right infrastructure to support a virtual, telecommuting set of employees.
The Infrastructure and Equipment to Support Telecommuting

Marvin Luz had serious concerns about Chorus becoming a virtual company. The vice president of client services thought the transition was going to be a lot of work, and he wondered how the company would get through it.

"I was a little apprehensive," says Luz. "There's something to be said for being in an office and the security blanket of having your coworkers right next to you if you have questions."

Foremost on the client services exec's mind was Chorus's ability to meet its customers' needs with a staff of telecommuters. The company had to figure out how customer support calls would be routed to agents at their homes and in such a way that clients wouldn't know that the agent to whom they were speaking was working from home.

Chorus already had in place much of the telecommunications infrastructure it would need to support telecommuters, including a firewall and VPN. In 2007, CIO Boyd deployed a voice over IP (VoIP) solution from Cisco that included Cisco's IP Communicator and a high-end router in the company's New Jersey data center, which remains in operation, with staff visiting as needed. He also added a Windows Active Directory server (Chorus already had two in its office outside Houston) and two T1 lines to the New Jersey data center. Boyd says all of this technology made it easier for Chorus to go virtual. (For more on the technologies necessary to communicate telecommuters see, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Telecommuting.")

In preparation for the company's transformation, Boyd and his seven-person staff deployed the IP Communicators on every employee's laptop. Employees use the IP Communicators to make and receive phone calls.

The IT department ran into trouble when it first began deploying the IP Communicators on everyone's laptops. Because it was new technology for the company, Boyd and his staff weren't sure how to set it up at first. They were also just coming up to speed on the voice over IP system. Boyd says the first few deployments of the IP Communicators were very difficult, but once he and his staff got more comfortable with the technology, it went more smoothly. (They had help from Dynamic Strategies, a New Jersey-based VoIP services provider.) It took Chorus about three weeks to get all the IP Communicators on everyone's computers, he says.

To ensure the quality of the phone connections, Boyd and his staff had to give some employees higher-end routers than typical home routers that dedicate a certain amount of bandwidth to employees' Internet phones, says Boyd.

Most employees already had cell phones, but Chorus put together a policy and expense guidelines for all employees so that they could get BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile-compatible devices to use as a back up in the event their IP Communicator goes down. (Chorus also supports the new 3G iPhone.)

In addition, Boyd and team created "hunt" groups for each of the support groups: customer support, infrastructure support, application development and business analysts. So if customer support needs an infrastructure employee to help with a major client issue, the customer support employee dials the extension for the infrastructure team's hunt group and that number rings out to the entire group and whoever is available can answer the call.
Testing the Work at Home Arrangement and Technology

Before employees began working from home, Chorus tested the telecommuting set-up with Customer Support Account Manager Jairis Galvez. She worked at home two Fridays in a row, and all of the vice presidents called into her queue to make sure they could hear her, that she could hear them and that there wasn't static on the line.

Another technical issue Chorus's IT department had to address was how far-flung employees would make internal phone calls now that they're distributed. When Chorus maintained two offices, employees in Texas and New Jersey could dial four-digit phone numbers to reach each other across the country. The company found that the four-digit dialing didn't work when each party was logged into the VPN from their home offices. The firewall (PIX 506) was not capable of allowing a VPN to VPN data transfer so the call would connect but neither party could hear the other. They had to dial 10-digit numbers to reach each other. Boyd discovered that the company's firewall needed to be upgraded to enable the four-digit dialing so he installed a new Cisco 515 firewall in late June. Now every employee is just a four-digit dial away.

New Work Policies for a Virtual Company

Chorus developed work-at-home policies for telecommuters designed to maintain their productivity and the quality of service they provide to internal and external customers.
RELATED STORIES
Everyone Works at Home at Chorus, Part 1
Everyone Works at Home at Chorus Part 3
Hospital Pilots Flexible Work Arrangements in IT
7 Things the CIO Needs to Know about Telecommuting
Telecommuters Need to Develop Special Skills

One aspect of the policy pertains to employees' work at home environment. Every employee needs to have a separate space in their home that they can use for work—ideally a separate room in their house or apartment with a door that they can close to separate themselves from their kids, pets, spouses or roommates. Employees also need to have a desk where they can work, even if it's just a folding table. The company doesn't want people working in front of the TV in their living rooms with their notebook computers on their laps or coffee tables.

Another aspect of the policy outlines the work equipment Chorus will provide to employees. In short, the company provides employees with all the computing and telecommunications equipment they need to do their jobs, such as laptops, monitors, keyboards, headsets and Internet service. Client services reps get paper shredders since they have to destroy certain documents to comply with HIPAA regulations. In one case where an employee needed a chair, the company gave the employee a chair from one of its about-to-be-closed offices. Employees pay for basic office supplies like paper, ink and toner cartridges, pens and Post-It notes out-of-pocket and submit expense reports for those items for reimbursement. (For more on the equipment and expenses companies should cover for their telecommuting employees see, Out of Pocket: Financial Questions for Telecommuters and Managers.)

Chorus also set up a policy on work hours. Employees have to be at their desks in their home offices during normal business hours. They can't opt to work odd hours. All employees have to use instant messaging (IM) applications, and they have to put their phone numbers and their IM handle in the global address list on company's Microsoft Exchange Server. (Read about the flexible work policies at healthcare provider CareGroup and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.)

In addition to the general work policies at Chorus, Marvin Luz, vice president of client services, says his group had specific, common-sense rules it had to follow. For example, they can't have TVs or stereos on in the background. Nor can they eat while on the phone with customers. These rules are meant to send the message that even though employees work from the casual confines of their homes, they must maintain a certain level of professional decorum while on the clock.

Every employee had to agree to and sign off on all of these policies. Existing policies, such as those pertaining to computer and internet usage, remained in place.
How to Provide Remote Tech Support

One question that lingered in Chorus employees' minds through this transition was how the company was going to provide tech support. What if a virus infected someone's computer or an application crashed? After all, even though the company maintains a data center in New Jersey, its IT staff also works from home and visits it on an as-needed basis. It's not like a help desk staffer can walk over to someone's desk to troubleshoot and fix problems.

The processes the IT group put in place to resolve technical support issues remotely aren't much different from the measures they took when an employee was working at a client's office and needed help from an IT staffer in New Jersey or Texas.

For example, if an employee is having a software problem—if they get an error message or they can't connect to a particular drive—Aron Schneider, who works in Boyd's IT department, says IT simply takes control of their computer using remote desktop software like iTivity or by setting up a WebEx meeting. Boyd says Chorus uses WebEx extensively to shadow clients and remote workers when troubleshooting and as a teaching and collaboration tool. "If there is something we are trying to resolve or accomplish (loading Citrix at a client site, for example), the team will get on the WebEx and we will talk through the activity. This is a good way of keeping contact and providing training and knowledge transfer," he says.

If an employee's hard drive crashes, the IT staff replaces it with a loaner laptop it has preconfigured with all the basic software apps the employee needs to function. "If they're close enough where I can drive it out to them, I can make a swap," says Schneider. "If they're on site with a client or in New Jersey, we FedEx it to them, and they send their laptop to us."

Schneider couldn't say how having to wait to get a replacement laptop would impact employees' productivity because at that point he said no one had needed a replacement computer. Boyd said most employees would still be able to check e-mail on their home computers and use their cell phones to make calls, but he is aware that having to wait for a replacement laptop could temporarily impair the customer support team. To speed software downloads in the event IT needs to get a fully configured replacement computer to an employee, Boyd is looking for a software-based WAN accelerator.

Boyd says that he hasn't received any complaints from managers about poor tech support now that everyone in IT is working from home. "I gauge most of what I do by the number of complaints I get as head of IT, and I haven't had a lot of issues other than, 'It's really tough for me as a developer to move a big file.'"

The CIO adds that all of the development, testing and quality assurance is done through a corporate Citrix farm using a Microsoft SQL backend.

Chorus's experience shows that providing remote desktop support is not impossible. It just involves some planning and workarounds.

Adjustments to Telecommuting Include Periodic Meetups, Daily Conference Calls
MORE STORIES ON TELECOMMUTING
7 Things the CIO Needs to Know about Telecommuting
Hospital Pilots Flexible Work Arrangements for IT Department
Telecommuters Need to Develop Special Skills
Flexible Work: Lots of Talk, Little Action

Although most employees were delighted to start telecommuting, adjusting to the new lifestyle took more time for employees in Marvin Luz's client services department. The vice president of client services says his staff began e-mailing him to ask if they were ever going to go back into the office two weeks after they all began telecommuting. They missed the social contact, he says.

"You have to understand the dynamics of a person who is in customer service," says Luz. "They're very social creatures, and being in an office fills that social need we have."

Luz decided to bring his staff back into the Houston office two days week. "We did that for three weeks," he says. Then his group went down to one day in the office a week for a few weeks. Now they're all back to working from home five days a week, and they all feel much more comfortable with the arrangement having gone through that transition period, says Luz.

Luz believes his staff had trouble adjusting to the new lifestyle because they couldn't get into a routine at home. Once they settled into a rhythm, the change became much easier. (For information on the skills telecommuters need to develop to effectively work remotely, see, Telecommuters Need to Develop Special Skills.) Luz plans to organize get-togethers for his group every quarter so that they can meet socially. CEO A.J. Schreiber is also planning quarterly, in-person outings for New Jersey and Texas staffers so that employees can maintain personal connections.

Luz notes that if he were to go through this transition again, he wouldn't have his staff go "cold turkey" from cubicle life at first. He would have started with a transition period.
Some employees outside of client services were also wary of telecommuting. As much as Aron Schneider was excited to work from home, the IT staffer was concerned he'd be distracted by his TV and the contents of his fridge, and that he'd be bored without any co-workers around.

Schneider quickly realized he didn't have to worry. His home office is far enough away from both the TV and refrigerator. Some days he doesn't eat lunch until two or three in the afternoon because he's so busy, he says.

As for the social contact, he communicates regularly with his team. The IT department has a conference call every day, and Schneider keeps in touch with individual co-workers over the phone and via e-mail. "If I need to get in touch with any of the DBAs, they are readily available," he says. "I really don't see that anything has changed working from home other than proximity."

How Managers Learned to Love IM

Many companies resist flexible work arrangements that involve telecommuting because their managers don't know how to manage staff who work remotely and because they don't like the idea of not being able to see the people they manage. (See also Telecommuting Gets a Bad Rap.)

Indeed, the adjustment to telecommuting may be hardest on managers since they're the ones who need to fundamentally change the way they do their work of managing. But those companies that don't allow telecommuting because they believe it's harder to measure employees' productivity when they telecommute are making a weak excuse, says Luz.

"In today's companies where you are so wired and connected, giving the excuse that you can't measure someone's productivity doesn't fly with me," he says. "In a call center environment like my group, there are so many tools to measure productivity."

Specifically, the dashboard that's part of Chorus's Cisco call center system shows Luz when his call center workers are logged in, when they're on a call, when they're on break, the duration of their calls, whether they answered calls that went to their extension, the number of calls they took each hour and whether calls were abandoned. The VP can even listen in on calls, interrupt calls and record them.

Luz also uses Salesforce.com as the client services group's case management system for tracking customers' problems. Through the dashboard on Salesforce.com, Luz can see every account manager's queue and the number of cases they've opened and closed. He says his staff has been "more productive from home than we ever dreamed they would be."

CEO Schreiber concurs. He says the client services group's key performance indicators have been "stellar" and that the company as a whole is more productive.

The IT group uses Salesforce.com, too. (In fact, the entire company uses the system). Boyd says Salesforce.com gives him a "right now" view of what is happening in his department, but since the software isn't geared toward an IT shop, he can't see what his team has done two days ago, a week ago or last month. To get visibility into his staff's workloads, the CIO holds a daily, hour-long meeting to review and coordinate everyone's activities.

Boyd also uses an instant messaging (IM) system to keep tabs on his IT staff. "Since you don't see someone walk in the door every day, when you see them become active on IM, you know they're up and ready for business," he says. Boyd realizes that employees can log into IM, or any system for that matter, and then walk away from their computer, so he pings members of his staff every once in a while to keep them honest.

Not that he needs to keep his employees on their toes. Boyd says his staff's productivity—as measured by the number of cases they close—has increased dramatically since they began working at home. Everyone is working longer hours because they don't have to commute.

"I'll start answering e-mail at six in the morning, and I don't get up from my desk, with the exception of getting something to eat, until six in the evening," says Boyd, who adds that he often gets work-related instant messages from his staff even at 8 P.M.

IM goes a long way toward helping the entire company stay connected. Employees and managers alike use it to discuss work issues and to chat informally. Sometimes IM can be a pain, says Boyd, such as when he gets four simultaneous pings when he's on the phone or trying to concentrate, but overall, he thinks its an excellent replacement for the water cooler and for yelling over the cubicle wall.

Clearly, productivity and its measurement is not the problem for Chorus. The soft side of management, however, is more difficult and requires more effort.

Luz says he has to make a concerted effort to reach out to employees and see how they're faring. "I call them each individually throughout the week to chat with them about how things are going, how their families are doing. You need that type of social interaction with employees," he says, adding that this type of interaction was easier in the office. "I also need to make sure that I have them reach out to each other. I have been calling them and saying, 'Have you talked with the senior account manager?'"

In addition to the informal phone calls, Luz conducts formal group WebEx meetings twice a week to make sure everyone has everything they need.

Both Luz and Boyd say the experiences of working from home and managing a staff of telecommuters have improved their management and communication skills.

"I'm not sure I'd say it made me a better manager per se, but it has made me a better communicator," says Boyd.
How Chorus Keeps Everyone in the Loop

Since Chorus employees began telecommuting in June 2008, the provider of practice management systems for community health centers has established a series of meetings and communications designed to align employees around top business priorities and keep everyone on the same page. Here's a list of what Chorus does:

1. Daily morning executive team meetings. The vice presidents and CEO have a conference call every day to discuss high priority items, issues and projects such as technical work, systems implementations, customer support, client implementations, development and quality assurance. As a team, they affirm what needs to be done that day, the following day, the next week and longer term.

2. Daily morning reports. This report goes out to the entire company every day and compiles all of the internal and client projects that each team inside the company is working on. The daily morning report gives non-executive staff visibility into high and lower-priority activity inside the company and let's each group see how their work fits into each project.

3. Daily infrastructure team call. CIO Rick Boyd and his DBAs, application support team and IT infrastructure support team review the items that came up during the morning executive team meeting to ensure that everyone in IT has what they need to meet the daily and weekly objectives.

--M. Levinson

Next: Lessons Learned and Keys to Success
Lessons from a Virtual Company, and Keys to Success

In spite of the few challenges Chorus has encountered, its transformation into a virtual company has proceeded so smoothly that its customers don't even know the company has closed its offices and all employees are working from home. (Of course, that cat's out of the bag now.)

"As someone from customer service, I measure success based on whether our clients have noticed anything," says Luz. "Our clients haven't felt any interruption or noticed something is different in the way we're handling things. That tells me this process is working extremely well."

Even if your company is not planning to close all of its offices, it can still learn a great deal from Chorus's experience about how to support and manage telecommuters—the number one lesson being that it isn't all that difficult. The keys to success, as Chorus's experience shows, are proper equipment and technology, careful planning as to how employees will provide tech support and customer support, workload transparency, trial runs in telecommuting, help establishing a routine for working from home, and the occasional in-person meeting to keep everyone together and their spirits up.

All of that effort at Chorus has led to productivity and service improvements—not to mention the annual cost savings.

"We've been able to quantify that we are more productive now than when we had physical offices," says Boyd. "Our number of open cases has reduced dramatically and the time it takes to resolve them has been reduced dramatically. It truly has been a byproduct of going 100 percent virtual."