Technology and Workplace Wellness – Easing the Strain

Have you ever considered how technology can help improve office wellness?

We recently invited a company into our office to complete an ergonomic assessment. Initially, we braced ourselves for a hefty price tag of adjustments and a laundry list of purchases to help ease the discomfort some employees were experiencing. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that we had minimal adjustments to make and were reminded of how important it is to use technology to aid us in our workplace wellness.

One change for us was making sure that employees who are on the phone a lot use wireless telephone headsets. I’m not talking about the headsets you might be thinking of…the big, clunky, over the head ones with cords that tangled and limited your mobility. There was a day here at Taylored Systems when, prior to selling a telephone headset we’d ask , “Do you want an over the ear or over the head piece,” or “ Would you prefer a one-ear or two-ear piece headset”? And don’t even think about those headsets being wireless…these had a limited radius of mobility!

Today, thanks to blue tooth technology and the types of ear pieces prevalent with iPods and cell phones, most people have come to expect and enjoy the small size and excellent quality that is also available with business phone compatible head and ear pieces.

You may recall a scene from the movie Black Sheep where Chris Farley’s character is making campaign calls and he straps the phone receiver to his head using a sweatband in order to have his hands free to work. Now it’s easier – no sweat band (or sweat) required. In fact, we’ve seen business telephones adapt by providing “blue tooth integration”. This technology allows you to “pair” a standard Bluetooth headset with your office phone, so you can seamlessly answer, originate, and terminate phone calls directly from the headset. It provides the standard headset features with the mobility of Bluetooth.

We recently worked with a customer who decided to swap out their cordless telephones for cordless headsets because they wanted the mobility and convenience of a headset with the quality of a business telephone system. It means increased productivity for employers and convenience for employees.

So what does this all mean for us and our ergonomic study? We purchased a few foot rests, adjusted a few monitors, and encouraged everyone to utilize a headset…and things are working great.

This was Amy Hershman’s last conversation with Bill Taylor and Steve McDonald.

THANK GOODNESS FOR DISASTER RECOVERY PLANS

While talking to Bill at Taylored Systems the other day, he commented “Thank Goodness for Disaster Recovery Plans.” I asked him why, and Bill replied that on Friday, July 24th at 3:30PM when he was out of the office, someone cut the AT&T fiber outside the building knocking out the Taylored Systems phone lines. Of course, with our Disaster Recovery Plan, it didn’t matter if he was at the office or not because he has a strong team that knows how to execute the recovery plan. We have multiple ways to reroute all the telephone traffic in this type of situation:

1] reroute our calls to SIP trunks that come in on separate circuits to the building,

2] forward our extensions to cell phones, or other phones outside the office building, or

3] forward our lines to the live answering service we use for after hours and weekends.

So at 3:30PM that Friday we elected to send calls from our customers to the live answering service as the most convenient and efficient solution, since we would have forwarded our lines to them within the next hour and a half as usual. We could still call out using the SIP trunks( which are live all the time), so work went on for the rest of the day. Even our router for the internet according to Mark Sassman, an IT staff member, did its job correctly. It appears that when the main T1 internet connection drops for about one and one-half minutes it fails over to an alternate fiber internet connection on another carrier. This allowed for our SIP phone lines to keep on working even though our main phone lines had been cut, and email continued to flow in over the alternate connection to the server. This was a great example of disaster recovery technology at work compared to years ago when we might not have been able to continue helping our customers.

Bill checked to see that everything was up and working properly in the interim, and returned to the office at 7:00PM that night to let the AT&T repairman in to test the circuit, which came back up at 8:30PM. By Monday everything was back to normal as if it had never occurred. A Disaster Recovery Plan is something that we here at Taylored Systems use, as well as advocate for our customers. Please feel free to comment on this posting with stories of how your plan has saved your organization or how not having a plan has made it difficult to continue.

This was Mary Couch's most recent conversation with Bill Taylor.