If you’re a manager or a project leader, you need to stay in touch with your team and what is going on at all times it’s crucial. It would seem that this need is at cross-purposes with the idea of business travel and the only problem with business travel is that you’re not in your office. But with modern technology and a bit of coordination on your part, you can maintain a reasonable level of connectivity to your important projects and team activities even while driving in the rental car or waiting out a flight at the airport.

The actual technology you use to stay connected may change over time. Whereas in the past we could only use pay phones at airports, we have evolved technologically so you can travel and access your network via your cell phone, wireless PC or an assortment of other devices. So the first step is to identify the type of technology that satisfies your need for connectivity as well as enabling you to work productively in diverse locations such as the airport, your airplane seat or your hotel room.

As you conduct a technical review of the available technology, be careful to research the durability of the equipment you are taking on the road. You may be able to afford the most sophisticated equipment on the market today. But if that equipment can’t survive the rigors of travel including being banged around in your luggage, exposure to heat, cold and moisture or just about any other harsh condition you might throw it into, it isn’t going to be the kind of equipment you want by your side on a long business trip.

Once you settle on the equipment, you should configure it or have it configured for internet access as well as the ability to tap into your corporate intranet and network. It is crucial that you can communicate with your team and access corporate files so you can stay on top of what is going on with your projects at home.

For example, if you have your project team file status reports each Friday morning, you must be able to review those and give directions for action items to take that come from those reports quickly and efficiently, even if you are on a ten hour flight from Europe.

To manage your phone contacts, the idea of just putting the “out of office” auto-answer on your office message service is so last decade. Instead, you can forward your office phone to your cell phone and receive your phone calls in remote so you can conduct your business as though you were on site throughout your trip.

There is adequate technology available currently for you to be able to access and operate your desktop computer on your desk back at the office even while your traveling. One such service is gotomypc.com.

There are many such services or your IT department may have a methodology to enable that access that you can use if you get them involved in your trip planning. By accessing your PC daily or several times daily, you can activate your instance of Microsoft Outlook or whatever your email software is and read and respond to important business emails as you relax in your hotel room after your business meetings out of town.

These are just a few of the technologies that make it possible to perform virtually any function from remote that you could have done only in the office in the past. So don’t accept the limitations of the road. Investigate how to be fully connected as you go about your business travel and the outcome will be that you can keep all of your important business projects moving forward simultaneously. Read the posts about VoIP below.

In January of 2007, the federal government raised the national minimum wage. This was old news in some states where the minimum wage had been raised months before congress took action. No matter how you look at the increase in the cost of labor, it’s going to have an impact on business and on how businesses will make key decisions in 2007 and onward.

In theory a raise in the minimum wage should be a nonevent economically. It should be a simple adjustment for inflation which the business has already adapted to. When inflation raises the cost of goods and the prices the business charges, one might expect the wages of workers to rise naturally to match that upward slope caused by inflation.

How you view the good or the bad of the minimum wage increase may depend on which side of the fence your on, the employer side or the employee side. To the employer the rise in employee costs makes doing business more expensive and affects the bottom line. To the employee, the employer is just being competitive and paying his or her employees a salary that they can live on. In many cases, you may be on both sides of the issue if you own or operate a business, but have people in your family who are trying to get by on the minimum wage.

The hardest hit businesses by this upward push in wages is small business. Enterprises that employ a large amount of unskilled, lower paid workers can see a huge jump in the cost of keeping employees because of state or federally mandated increases in employee pay. Many times small business enterprises operate on a thin margin of profit and any change to the cost structure can be a deadly hit to their budgets. Moreover, since the small business model is intensely competitive, there is little room to raise prices to clients or customers without risking losing business to a larger competitor who can absorb the minimum wage increase without increasing prices.

These concerns are part of the reason from a governmental stand point that congress is slow to increase the minimum wage. There is already a tremendous resentment in the population for businesses that are relocating their production or support facilities over seas to take advantage of low paid workers to keep their bottom line on track. You have to know that employee costs are a big issue when a business is willing to relocate much of their operation to a foreign country and incur all of those costs just to tap an employee base that will work below the minimum wage.

From the worker perspective, it’s hard to understand how this trend to take low paid jobs out of the country can be changed. We are slow to stop businesses from taking actions they need to take to compete in the markets which is why passing legislation to stop the exporting of jobs is not a popular idea. While it might help the plight of the worker in this country, it goes contrary to our priority of letting the free market and capitalism play out. Sadly, when the free market does reign, sometimes good people get dealt out of the program.

The best way for American workers to combat competition from unskilled workers overseas is to stop being unskilled. By taking advantage of educational opportunities and gaining valuable skills, they can enter a new market where those skills will land them a good paying job that is not likely to go overseas because of the specialized skills the worker offers to employers.

So the best way for government to fight the export of jobs due to high employment costs is not to artificially suppress the market to hinder free trade. The best move is to make our workers more skilled, more valuable and for workers to simply outwork their competition overseas. This is capitalism at work at its best and if that line of attack is followed, the outcome for everybody is a stronger work force, the retention of jobs in America and a stronger national economy as well.

There’s lots of benefits for small businesses to incorporate voip services. Mobile employees can stay connected to the main office and rates are very affordable and voip can be used anywhere you have a high speed internet connection. So if you or one of your employees do a lot of traveling you can receive those business calls right on your laptop. Not only are you saving money, but your able to get that business call that might have gotten lost.

I have been checking all of the voip providers and comparing the services that I know I’m going to need someday and today happens to be Packet8 and some of their features include unlimited minutes, personalized voice mail, local number porting, caller id, caller id blocking, and unlimited in network calling plus much more. They offer both phone and video phone plans. Business telecommunications can be operated from a single location or satellite for global or homebased employees and depending on the size of your business there are different plans to choose from.

PBX Phone System offers the complete package and also there seems to be so many extension plans and options you can add as you grow. At this point I would only need the minimal plan, but before choosing any voip service that you may require for your small business compare all the features then decide. These are just a few to check:

$14.99 Virtual Attendant which I am leaning toward, You can use as a standalone plan or with other Virtual Office extensions and there are many and this includes a main Virtual Number and auto-attendant.

$49.99 Unlimited Extension if you make a lot of calls and your business is growing then you may want to check all the features that this one entails with unlimited calls to US/Canada and other advanced PBX features.

They also have a metered extension which provides 250 minutes and 2.9 cents a minute thereafter it’s cheaper at 24.99 a month, but you would have to see which extensions would work best for your business needs.

I am going to have to read a lot more before making any decisions, but I’ll probably go with the number 1 USA ranked voip provider and that would be Packet8. They have so many people standing behind them that recommend them highly.

At this point I would probably opt for the virtual attendant. They also have a residential service that provides a lot of benefits and savings and it works through a broadband phone adapter. Another possibility for me to check out for my home.