It's all in the preparation

Learned my lesson yesterday, came home last night with a box of files to review and other paperwork to deal with, including a business plan which is just the sort of thing you want to do in the peace and quiet at home rather than in the office.

Our recent investment in more laptops has meant that most of our professional staff have the option of working from home, which has proved its worth this week. And they can all access email remotely, from an office laptop or their home computer, using Outlook Web Access, so we can contact them wherever they are.

The weather forecasts seem to indicate that the ice and snow will be with us for quite a while now, so flexible working is going to the the way forward for many firms, provided they have the appropriate technology in place.

Of course it helps if you test out your contingency plans first! I discovered that my new Windows 7 laptop doesn't like Outlook Web Access if you log in the way you do in Windows XP, so there was a bit of a delay until our IT support sorted it out. Frustrating to be able to reply to emails on my smartphone but not on my laptop until this glitch was fixed. A few "attachment to follow later" messages sent in the meantime!