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BetterWorld is happy to welcome Bigelow Laboratory to the BetterWorld customer family! Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences is a nonprofit research organization based on the coast of Maine which studies the ocean. Their research ranges from microbial oceanography (examining biological productivity and phytoplankton community dynamics in the world’s oceans at the molecular level - phew!) to large-scale biogeochemical processes that drive interactions because ocean ecosystems and global environmental conditions.
Through their research, they work to understand and illuminate the key processes driving our global ocean ecosystems, their evolution and their relationship to the rest of life on Earth.

Bigelow Laboratory was named after Henry Bigelow, a pioneering ocean researcher who laid the foundations for modern oceanography. Bigelow’s work stressed the interdependence of biology, chemistry, and physical science in studying the ocean. Today the Laboratory trains the next generation of ocean scientists.

Their research and programs take Bigelow scientists around the world to every ocean and to the polar seas.  With an upcoming expansion into a new 64-acre site for their Ocean Science and Education Campus at the East Boothbay, the Laboratory is growing and widening their research and educational impact.

We’re proud to welcome Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences to the BetterWorld family,  one of many organizations working to educate and help preserve our environment for generations to come.

- The BetterWorld Team

Giving Back
BetterWorld Telecom was founded with a vision of giving back and engaging with the communities we serve. We believe in the value of giving both our time and 3 percent of our top of the line revenue back to the areas that are key to our collective future, such as children, our environment, education and insuring fair trade.

Serving Lunch at Berkeley Food & Housing Project

Volunteering
BetterWorld company policy supports and encourages all employees to volunteer up to two full days each month in their local communities. Over the years BetterWorld team members have volunteered in many different capacities.

Recently the BetterWorld team has been building houses and serving food to help those in need.

Some of the BetterWorld team based on the East coast works with Habitat for Humanity, as well as with the Nature Conservancy, working on trails and planting indigenous species.

BetterWorld Team volunteers with the Nature Conservancy

You can also find them working with Friends and Food, packaging and delivering meals to those in need.

Earlier this year, BetterWorld President Matt Bauer joined with other Bay Area executives to build homes for those in need with Habitat for Humanity’s Executive Build.

BetterWorld President, Matt Bauer with Habitat Executive Build 2011

Donations and Active Community Involvement
We believe in the capacity of business as a lever of change in society to help build a more sustainable future. To that end, we support local living economies in the communities where we work and BetterWorld team members have helped in the founding of two chapters of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). BALLE is a network of socially responsible businesses in more than 80 community networks with over 21,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada, bringing together business leaders, government officials, social innovators and community leaders to build local living economies.

BetterWorld also donates time and expertise to the William James Foundation, an organization that curates an annual competition for sustainable business entrepreneurs to submit their business plans and connect them with teams of world-class experts.

We believe in investing in the change-makers of the future and donate time and money to Ashoka Youth Venture, an organization that invests in teams of young people to start and lead their own social ventures around the world.

What causes are important to your organization? How do you find ways to give back to your community?

In service,

The BetterWorld Team

Telecom for Good
BetterWorld Telecom provides services that enable and support a virtual work environment, as a donation partner with TechSoup Global. However, BetterWorld itself works as a virtual team, with team members scattered literally across the U.S. With TechSoup’s focus on virtual work this month, we thought we’d share some of the tips and practices we use to make ‘virtual work’ work for us.

Democratic Workplace
The primary organizing principle behind all the practices that our team implements is a democratic and horizontal management structure. This means that decision-making is pushed out as far as possible to the people actually doing the work. Two outside organizations that help to track this and provide best practices are B Corporation, (whose online assessment is available in full for free) and WorldBlu (providing 10 Principles of Organizational Democracy).

One of the benefits of working virtually is that a Results-Only Work Environment, naturally arises, making efficiency and clarity of focus the working norm. (ROWE is management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence.) A democratic workplace and management style establishes trust, maintains adult relationships, avoids micromanaging, and is a key component of successful virtual/distance based teams.

Regular, Structured Check-ins
Each member of our team emails their main achievements from the past week and their primary objectives (A’s and O’s) in the coming week to the team every Monday. This is followed by a Monday morning conference call where each member shares weekend highlights, top three A’s and O’s, and a review of company progress towards monthly goals. Having consistent and structured check-ins helps keep the team connected to each other, accountable for their work, and up-to-date on company direction and goals.

Easy Access to Team/Colleagues
Using BetterWorld Telecom’s Unified Communication platform (one of the services we provide), our team members can see who is available and who is on the phone at any time. Clicking a team member’s name causes the system to call their phone and to call your phone to connect. Our team also utilizes Google chat for quick questions, although this has more limited reliability.

Easy Access to Tools
Members of our team use different tools and platforms for their jobs, but everyone is connected to Jungle Disk, which allows for instant sharing of relevant files with the rest of the company. Everyone is also connected to Salesforce, which is a cornerstone for much of our customer care and company activity.

BetterWork™
We commissioned a nine-month study with Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the environmental and business impacts of adopting a virtual work environment, the result of that study was a framework called BetterWork ™. BetterWork ™ is an organizing strategy that physically provides substitutions for commuting, travel and building activities through the implementation and adoption of current virtual work tools (audio, video conferencing, Unified Communications, etc.). Many of the tools and solutions we provide to our customers support virtual work and we use them ourselves to optimize our work environment.

More Tips & Tools
Below is a summary of tools, practices and tips from our team.

Virtual Work Tools used by BetterWorld:

• Customer Relations Management in the cloud with Salesforce
• Backup and file storage in the cloud with Jungle Disk, shared files, redundancy, security
• Unified Communications - central platform for phone, fax, departments, routing calls, visible availability, instant messaging
• Business Info tools - all business information is accessible anywhere via CARE, Salesforce, Jungle Disk, Nagios, etc.

Virtual Work Practices used by BetterWorld:

• Weekly sales funnel review
• Weekly and bi-weekly phone check- in’s with departments and team
• Weekly email progress reports/updates
• Tracking of tasks in Salesforce

A Few Work Tips from BetterWorld Team Members:

• Use a hotspot internet, it allows more environments to support productive work
• Budget time between online and offline activities
• Use time in transit to get things done (calls, etc.)
• Always have your office with you
• Control email downloading, choose when to see it
• Keep some stretch of time digital-free each week (e.g. 24 hrs. each week
• Lessen the rigidity between work and rest of life, be flexible
• Identify “boulders” of the day, first things first
  

Telework Productivity
Virtual work can be a daunting shift for organizations, but it also has been shown to decrease costs, increase employee retention and satisfaction, and catalyze greater productivity (“Filling the Tank with Telework, 2011”). Taking the time to create structure and put policies in place can insure a successful transition to a virtual work environment for your team.

Salem Kimble is Social Media Development Manager with BetterWorld Telecom.

What organization doesn’t need some form of audio conferencing these days?

That’s why we’ve paired up with go-to technology resource for nonprofits, TechSoup Global to provide a highly discounted audio conferencing service for nonprofits. We’ve had an amazing response from nonprofits of all sizes since launching earlier this month and are happy to support these organizations in their operations and help them do the important work they do every day.

Below is a video of Barbara Shaughnessy, Program Manager of Donation Partners and Implementation with TechSoup Global, talking about the BetterWorld and TechSoup partnership.

You can find out more about our discounted audio conferencing as well as our donated phones and discounted phone service program with TechSoup Global on our partner page at TechSoup.