Work’s been going through some serious changes over the last little while. The old way of looking at things has had a shake-up.
Things are slowly returning to a kind of normal. But in many cases, it’s only a semblance of normality. One of the biggest developments is the rise of hybrid working. This blend of home and office work was very much a rarity in pre-Covid days. Now, it’s gone mainstream.
But what does it depend on? Workforce acceptance is a good start, which is largely in evidence – 68% of US workers stated a preference for their job to feature at least some element of remote working. But more than this, it has to have the right tech ingredients in place for it to really work.
Send in the Clouds
Most important of all is to have a communications system that’s provided by a cloud-based service. Only this can offer the high levels of remote access that your staff need in order to be able to do their jobs wherever they are.
Customer Care
Using UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service), employees can deal with the full gamut of customer queries, from phone calls to SMS, just as if they were sitting at their desk in the office.
Colleague Connection
Your employees, no matter where they are, can collaborate seamlessly with colleagues via teleconferencing (growing in popularity as a means of staying connected). Or they might prefer a quick email. The point is that they have a number of ways of staying in touch. These can involve both work equipment and personal devices, as deemed appropriate by company policy.
Dishing the Data
When staff is strewn all over the place, and work locations proliferate, it can become easy for information to end up in a variety of geographically distant places. Using UCaaS, information can be stored in databases that staff can access from myriad far-flung locations, meaning that your team will never be without that all important figure or report that could make all the difference to a deal.
Security Scares
Time was, people’s first thought with remote working was one of ‘that doesn’t sound very secure to me.’ A lot of this is down to the frequency with which workers take from work USB sticks replete with stacks of confidential information and opt to leave them in a nice prominent position on a train or similar high-footfall environment.
However, most remote work is very much based on virtual transit of information, in other words, via the cloud, not via public transport. Cloud-based service providers can now offer extremely high levels of protection from cyber snoops, via encryption and, where necessary, with the use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks).
For further details of unified communication systems, see https://www.gamma.co.uk/resources/blog/beginners-guides-to-uc-what-is-unified-communications/
Remote, Controlled
The key requirement for any remote workforce, whether they spend all their time out of the office or are in a hybrid model, is that they are connected via a communications system that is the same for all of them.
A traditional system operating out of a wire-filled room in the HQ building will deliver different levels of service depending on whether you’re in the building or not. UCaaS, on the other hand, will give a great service a team needs, wherever its members are.
