How do you work from home with the office PBX?

Why this is possible at all

With an old PBX that sits in a closet in the office, every phone is connected to it by a cable. Anyone who wants to work from home has to forward calls to their mobile, and then the caller sees a different number, the call costs money, and there is no way to transfer it onward.

With a cloud PBX, the situation is completely different. The PBX sits on servers on the internet, and every phone connects to it over the internet, from anywhere. As far as the PBX is concerned, there is no difference between a phone on a desk in the office and a phone on a table in the kitchen at home. Both are simply extensions.

This means the employee at home receives calls from the queue, transfers calls to colleagues, calls out with the organization's number, and appears in the call log — all just like in the office.

Four ways to work from home

There are several ways to connect an employee from home, and each one suits a different situation:

You don't have to choose just one method. An employee can keep an IP phone at home and a softphone on their laptop, and both will ring together.

An office phone at home

The simplest way for a permanent work-from-home employee is to give them an IP phone, the same phone they have in the office. You connect it with a network cable to the home router and to power, and it registers with the PBX by itself, just as it would in the office.

The advantages are clear: familiar keys, a comfortable handset, transfer and hold buttons, and no need to leave a computer on. The employee doesn't have to learn anything new.

What's worth checking in advance is the router at home. Home routers sometimes come with settings that interfere with calls, especially a setting called SIP ALG. If there are problems such as one-way audio or calls that cut out, this is the first place to look. More on this in the articles on the router and on NAT.

Softphone: the office inside your computer

A softphone is software that turns a computer or smartphone into an office phone. You install it, enter the extension details, and get a window with a dial pad, a contact list and transfer buttons.

It's an excellent solution for someone who sits at a computer all day anyway, and for someone who works from different places. There's no need to carry a phone, and you can answer from home, from another branch, or while traveling, with the same extension.

Two things are important: a good headset, because a laptop's speaker and microphone create echo and noise, and a stable connection, preferably wired and not only wireless. A softphone on a mobile, when the app is closed in the background, may not ring on every device — it's worth testing this before relying on it.

SIM extension: no internet and no app

A SIM extension is a SIM card that behaves like an extension on the PBX. You put it in a mobile phone, and the phone receives the office's calls and makes calls with the organization's number, without installing anything.

This is a solution that suits especially well people who use a kosher phone, which has no apps and sometimes no internet either. Calls go over the regular cellular network, so they don't depend on Wi-Fi reception or on the quality of the home internet.

It also suits people who don't sit in one place: a driver, a field worker, a manager who moves between branches, or a gabbai who wants to answer the synagogue's calls even when he isn't there.

Follow me: the temporary solution

Follow me is a setting where a call to an extension also rings on an outside number, such as a private mobile or a landline at home. No special equipment is needed, and you can turn it on within minutes.

It's a good solution for temporary situations: an employee who is sick and staying home, a day when the office is closed, or a backup when the office internet is down. But it has limitations. The call goes to a regular phone, so the employee can't always transfer it onward easily, and outgoing calls from the private phone will show the private number and not the organization's number.

For permanent work from home, it's better to connect a real extension: an IP phone, a softphone or a SIM extension.

Internet at home: how much you need

A voice call doesn't need much. A call using the common G.711 codec uses roughly 87 to 100 kilobits per second in each direction, including overhead, and an economical codec like G.729 uses roughly 30 to 40. Any modern home connection is easily enough for this. See also bandwidth.

What causes trouble at home isn't speed, but stability. Children watching videos, someone downloading large files, or a weak wireless network in the far room — all of these create choppy audio and delays. More on this in the article on latency and jitter.

A few simple tips: connect the phone or computer to the router with a cable, if possible; sit close to the router if you work wirelessly; and on routers that support it, prioritize calls using QoS.

Security when working from home

Working from home extends the office into places the organization doesn't control. A few simple habits protect the PBX:

• A personal password for each extension — don't write it on a note next to the computer, and don't share it with family members.
• An up-to-date computer — especially if the softphone runs on it. System updates close security holes.
• Don't leave the control panel open — on a family computer, log out at the end of the day.
• Be careful with public networks — in a café or at a station, a SIM extension or a connection through the mobile is better.
• Restrict outgoing calls — an extension that doesn't need to call abroad shouldn't have permission to. See telephone fraud.

Limits: home is not an office

When the work phone sits at home, it's easy to find that it also rings at eight in the evening, on Friday night before candle lighting, and in the middle of a family meal. Without clear limits, working from home turns into working all the time.

This is where the PBX's own settings help. Time-based routing makes calls go to a voicemail box after work hours rather than to the phone at home. Do Not Disturb mode lets an employee stop calls for a short time. And a hunt group can skip anyone who isn't available.

It's also worth thinking about noise: children, a washing machine, a slamming door. A quiet corner and a headset with a noise-filtering microphone make a big difference to the caller.

An example from the field

Rachel Cohen's bookkeeping office works with three clerks. Two of them are mothers of small children, and work from home three days a week.

Each one received an IP phone for home, identical to the one in the office. They are connected to the same hunt group as in the office, and a customer who calls doesn't know where they're being answered from. When one needs to transfer a call to Rachel, she presses the same key as always.

In addition, Rachel herself keeps a SIM extension in her kosher phone, so even when she's in a meeting at a client's, the calls that reach her arrive with the office's number, and she calls back from that same number. Setting up the two phones at home was simple, because they arrived preconfigured.

Checklist before the first day

Before an employee starts working from home, it's worth going over a few small things together. It takes half an hour, and saves a lot of "it doesn't work" calls on the first morning:

1. An incoming test call — call the organization's number and make sure the call reaches the phone at home.
2. An outgoing test call — call a mobile, check which number appears, and that audio works in both directions.
3. Transferring a call — transfer a call to a colleague in the office and make sure it arrives.
4. Voicemail box — make sure the employee knows how to listen to messages, and that they also arrive by email.
5. Hours — check that after work hours the phone at home really stops ringing.
6. A contact for problems — make sure the employee knows whom to turn to when something doesn't work.

After going through this list once, you work from home just like from the office.

Managing a distributed team

When the team doesn't sit in the same room, the manager can't see who is talking and who is free. Here the PBX control panel replaces the glance across the room: an active calls screen shows who is on a call right now, and a live view of the queue shows how many are waiting.

The call log lets you see at the end of the day what was answered and what wasn't, regardless of where each employee sat. And for training purposes, many PBXs let the manager listen in on calls even when the employee is at home, exactly as in the office.

The important rule is the same as for any team: agree in advance on availability hours, what to do when someone isn't available, and how to transfer a call when help is needed. The PBX allows all of this, but the procedure has to come from the people.