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Bosses say "yes" to homework Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office - all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home. For the small business, there are additional benefits too - staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries. While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business. Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small and medium sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to be practising flexible working practices than a year ago. The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces. Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a no-brainer. "If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection," says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. "There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this." One is the ubiquity of broadband, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). "This is the enabler," Poulton says. Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading as business-friendly broadband. "Broadband is available for as little as ∈15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service," says Neff Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. "Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular outages and heavily congested networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support." Such services needn’t break the bank - quality services can be found for upwards of ∈30 a month. The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services. Internet-based telecoms, or VolP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker - facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company ← image for customers and business partners. By law, companies must "consider seriously" requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time. Marketing director lack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: "One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity - now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified." For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life. O’Hern says: "Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day." That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. "With Wi-Fi [fast, wireless internet connections] popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops," he adds. The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon. It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. "The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old," says Hargreaves. "But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ∈16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting." What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services
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Crippling health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily. Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The US takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician. A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries.The startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary care physicians and five specialists—in given one year. Contrary to a popular belief, the more physicians taking care of you doesn’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors. How did we let primary care slip so far The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed. Moreover, the amount a physician receive leans heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease.Combine this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income. Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to each-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care. Medical students aren’t blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. How do we fix this problem It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally managing their diseases and practicing evidence based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care
There are few more sobering online activities than entering data into college-tuition calculators and gasping as the Web spits back a six-figure sum, But economists say families about to go into debt to fund four years of partying, as well as studying, can console themselves with the knowledge that college is an investment that, unlike many bank stocks, should yield huge dividends. A 2008 study by two Harvard economists notes that the "labor-market premium to skilr " —or the amount college graduates earned that’s greater than what high-school graduates earned—decreased for much of the 20th century, but has come back with a vengeance since the 1980s. In 2005, the typical full-time year-round U.S. worker with a four-year college degree earned $ 50,900, 62% more than the $ 31,500 earned by a worker with only a high-school diploma. There’s no question that going to college is a smart economic choice. But a look at the strange variations in tuition reveals that the choice about which college to attend doesn’t come down merely to dollars and cents. Does going to Columbia University (tuition, room and board $ 49,260 in 2007-2008) yield a 40% greater return than attending the University of Colorado at Boulder as an out-of-state student( $ 35,542) Probably not. Does being an out-of-state student at the University of Colorado at Boulder yield twice the amount of income as being an in-state students( $17,380) there Not likely. No, in this consumerist age, most buyers aren’t evaluating college as an investment, but rather as a consumer product—like a car or clothes or a house. And with such purchases, price is only one of many crucial factors to consider. As with automobiles, consumers in today’s college marketplace have vast choices, and people search for the one that gives them the most comfort and satisfaction in line with their budgets. This accounts for the willingness of people to pay more for different types of experiences(such as attending a private liberal-arts college or going to an out-of-state public school that has a great marine-biology program). And just as two auto purchasers might spend an equal amount of money on very different cars, college students(or, more accurately, their parents)often show a willingness to pay essentially the same price for vastly different products. So which is it In this consumerist age, most parents ______.
Bosses say "yes" to homework Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office - all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home. For the small business, there are additional benefits too - staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries. While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business. Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small and medium sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to be practising flexible working practices than a year ago. The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces. Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a no-brainer. "If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection," says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. "There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this." One is the ubiquity of broadband, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). "This is the enabler," Poulton says. Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading as business-friendly broadband. "Broadband is available for as little as ∈15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service," says Neff Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. "Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular outages and heavily congested networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support." Such services needn’t break the bank - quality services can be found for upwards of ∈30 a month. The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services. Internet-based telecoms, or VolP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker - facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company ← image for customers and business partners. By law, companies must "consider seriously" requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time. Marketing director lack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: "One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity - now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified." For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life. O’Hern says: "Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day." That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. "With Wi-Fi [fast, wireless internet connections] popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops," he adds. The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon. It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. "The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old," says Hargreaves. "But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ∈16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting." Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote working by ______.
Bosses say "yes" to homework Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office - all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home. For the small business, there are additional benefits too - staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries. While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business. Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small and medium sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to be practising flexible working practices than a year ago. The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces. Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a no-brainer. "If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection," says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. "There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this." One is the ubiquity of broadband, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). "This is the enabler," Poulton says. Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading as business-friendly broadband. "Broadband is available for as little as ∈15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service," says Neff Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. "Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular outages and heavily congested networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support." Such services needn’t break the bank - quality services can be found for upwards of ∈30 a month. The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services. Internet-based telecoms, or VolP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker - facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company ← image for customers and business partners. By law, companies must "consider seriously" requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time. Marketing director lack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: "One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity - now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified." For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life. O’Hern says: "Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day." That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. "With Wi-Fi [fast, wireless internet connections] popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops," he adds. The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon. It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. "The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old," says Hargreaves. "But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ∈16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting." According to marketing director Jack O’hern, teleworking enabled the company to ______.
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