AVer HQ is located in New Taipei City, Taiwan, and is where I currently show up for work every weekday. But I am not from Taiwan, I’m an expat. Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, (literally halfway around the world) like a lot of expats I sometimes experience the old feeling of home sickness.

So, I recently decided that I would take time to travel back to my home town and visit my family and friends, but in order to make this trip worth it I needed a decent amount of time off. I didn’t want to be just dropping in for a day before heading back to the airport.

As a marketer (as I am sure many of you marketers know) my schedule is normally pretty full with meetings, writing, editing, analytics, and planning. We needed to think of the best way to continue our work as normal.

To solve this problem, so that my break wouldn’t interfere with any of our team’s projects, AVer decided that telecommuting would be the best way for me to head across the ocean and still be able to attend meetings, planning sessions, and keep everything running smoothly.

With the decision made I grabbed one of AVer’s handy CAM340 Huddle Room Conferencing Cameras, threw it in my packed bag and headed to the airport.

Having worked from the office, telecommuting and working from home were relatively new experiences for me and my thoughts were that this could end up being something that might be extremely difficult to successfully pull off and a big miscalculation. Boy was I mistaken.

New to Telecommuting and Worried About Scheduling

The first thing that worried me when I began to attend meetings from Nova Scotia was that scheduling might be difficult. I ended up being struck by how easy this process was once we set up our first meeting.

The CAM340 is a Zoom Room certified portable conferencing camera and using Zoom to schedule our meetings made it a simple process. I could send invites out over my work email or receive them from my co-workers and easily set up a schedule for my calls. Zoom allowed for our team to avoid any confusion with time zones (12 hours) and connected me from anywhere that I could get an internet connection with its easy-to-use web-based platform, so I never had to miss a meeting because I was off being a traveler.

After our first meeting I really felt some of this stress melt away as Zoom and the CAM340’s easy plug-and-play made setting up and attending my meetings simple, efficient, and productive.

Swim Trunks Freedom

We always expect our trips to be a relaxing time and for the most part mine was, but I was juggling work with weddings, reunions, dinners, sight-seeing, and cold beers with old friends. This is where perhaps the biggest benefit of telecommuting came in.

As Zoom allowed me to schedule my meetings and the CAM340 allowed for easy setup, I had the flexibility to do all those great fun things and relax, while still being able to do work and attend meetings in a flexible manner.

Looking good and being in formal dress for your meetings has always been a time consuming part of everyone’s morning (especially when in the office), but a great thing about video conferencing is that you control the camera. So for my second meeting it was dress shirt and jacket with bright red swimming shorts (I had just got back from the lake) to attend our semi-weekly marketing discussion.

My Take Away

Telecommuting helped to relieve stress by stopping work from piling up and waiting for me on my return and allowed me to stay up-to-date with the goings on of the office, while still giving me the free time to do what I came to do. In fact, according to a study done in 2014 by PGi 82% of workers surveyed said that telecommuting helped lower their stress levels, which I now 100% agree with. In the end I found it a great way for me to continue to work, while keeping the work/life balance I was really hoping to enjoy while away.

But What Did AVer Receive in Return?

Although, I received great benefits from being able to return to Canada for a period of time, AVer also did not lose out.

While their employee was away he was still able to join into meetings and stay up-to-date with ongoing projects. He was able to contribute while being thousands of miles away from the team and add any assistance when needed. This helped to keep productivity steady and allowed teams to continue moving forward with projects rather than putting everything on hold.

They also received a rested employee who had more morale on his return back to Taiwan and was ready to jump into projects that he had been kept up-to-date on over his leave.

On to the Next Adventure