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.

End of Part One

Other Parts in this Series

Read other stories in this series:

Part 2: Chorus establishes work-at-home policies and figures out how to provide remote tech support.

Part 3: Managers and staff adjust to telecommuting.