Often though we need to make sure we are choosing the right method of communication for the right situation.

For clear facts and tasks plus communication that doesn't require much emotive input; email,Instant Message(IM) or leaving a messageboard post on BaseCamp should be ok.
This is fine when what is needed to be done is very concise and is results based.
The more uncertain or ambiguous the message, brainstorm or conversation and the more you need to convey emotion, we need to start looking and making phone calls, video chatting right up to face to face meetings.

Choosing the right method is almost as important as the message.
For Example… delivering really bad news via a txt message or email… the message is not as important as the method here as it shows a lack of respect or tact.

as always… USE YOUR BEST JUDGMENT!

Following on from a post from the other week regarding Rackspace Cloud technology to help businesses affect by the Christchurch earthquake, I can now confirm that with the help of a good friend (an account manager) at Rackspace we have managed to secure a number of coupon codes for free Jungle Disk cloud file storage accounts.

UPDATE: 14 March 2011 - I have been working in with my Account Manager friend at Rackspace and it looks like we have secured a number of Jungle Disk accounts to aid in backups and restoring files somewhere that will be accessable while staff and businesses are working remotely from their homes and temporary office space.
More details to come this week, if you need something like this to help you out, perhaps you have an offsite backup you need to make some of the files sharable to your staff please drop me a line on the form below.
I am also looking and intereseted to hear from any IT support comanies that are on the ground in Christchurch that could do with something like Jungle Disk Cloud Storage to help their customers and just add another tool to deploy to solve a problem.

oogle to the rescue again after the great help and success of their Person Finder and Crisis Response applications during the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake. Businesses rely heavily on email communication these days and if you are running an in-house mail server or simply downloading your emails directly to your individual workstations; due to the power outages, police cordons or your building being damaged this may no longer be an option. In fact I have a client that had this EXACT setup which we switched over to Google Apps for them post the Sept 4th quake who are now in this situation with the recent earthquake but are able to still access this vital communication tool. Google Apps is a great email infrastructure not to mention it gives you shared calendars and also wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools via their Google Docs application all available 24/7. It is very simple to setup and transition over to, at this point I will however point out that you will need access to the following:

What can I say, the Christchurch earthquake has been an extreme tradgedy and totally devistating to the Canterbury region and New Zealand as a nation. Having been in Christchurch on business for the September 4th quake last year and experienced the original quake that started this all we were very lucky, no loss of life and business re-opened in the CBD in a relatively short space of time... this time however it is a beast of a different nature. Being stuck here in Wellington while many of my family, friends and clients are roughing it out in the shaken city I thought I could help just a little through my skills of consulting, technology advice and blogging by offering some how-to's and advice for businesses needing to get back up and some-what operational as they start to work out "where to from here?" and start to rebuild and re-open for business. One thing is for sure, this time the CBD will not be business as usual for a very long time.

I recently moved to a new city and I have been working from my newly set up home office doing my job completely via teleworking, so far so good. Technically everything is working a treat. Before I moved we had setup a company wiki, project management through BaseCamp from 37 Signals, a bug and issue tracking system called Fixx and the all important VPN enabling me to connect to our main office, files and server.
Technology however is just a tool to help make possible what is really more important in business and company culture, that is communication and relationships. I had many questions when I set about researching, putting together and trialing my teleworking program at the start of this year (2010). Most of these questions were around how to keep the company culture alive, make sure everyone has equal access to information and of course keeping those inter-personal relationships tended to in the workplace... while not being in the workplace.

Here are 3 important concepts in workplace communication with remote teams.