The pandemic forced an army of employees to embrace the home working life, whether they wanted to or not.
As it turned out, quite a few of them appreciated the experience. They liked the work/life balance that remote work made possible and it’s fair to say they didn’t miss the commute to and from work every day. Many of them want an element of home working included in their post-pandemic working week.
Businesses would be well advised to take note. If your most valuable employees want to work from home some of the time, you risk losing them if you don’t offer flexible working arrangements. After all, your competitors probably will.
At the same time, the great remote work experiment of Covid has had benefits for business, too. In general, productivity was not negatively affected by the move to home working, and in some cases it actually improved.
That opens up some intriguing possibilities for business. Offering remote or hybrid working could benefit your recruitment and retention strategy and allow you to make use of a much wider talent pool. It could let you reduce the size of your office or other business premises. It could cut utilities and equipment costs.
But before we get too excited, it also needs to be pointed out that employing a fully remote or hybrid staff is not without challenges. In the rest of this article we’ll explain what those challenges are, and how cloud connectivity can both help you meet them and make your business more secure, cost-conscious and efficient.
The challenges of remote work
In the early months of the pandemic, remote work was an emergency measure for a crisis situation. Everybody understood that, and everyone made allowances. Bolting on a video conferencing tool to your normal IT stack was a perfectly reasonable solution to a temporary problem.
But if you’re adopting hybrid or remote work for the long-term, emergency measures are no longer enough. Remote workers need to be able to work as effectively from home as they can from the office, all the time. Customers will no longer accept Covid as an excuse for poor communications or inefficient customer service.
Adopting permanent remote work creates real challenges for businesses, including:
Communication
Staff need to be able to make and take professional business calls from anywhere, and contact colleagues at any time and in the way they want. Your old communications system might not support either Unified Communications (UC) or full “work anywhere” functionality.
Collaboration
A major anxiety for businesses is how well teams will cooperate when their members are no longer in the same physical space at the same time. How do you replicate formal meetings and informal watercooler chats? Sometimes inspiration is entirely serendipitous, the result of two (or more) colleagues talking informally over coffee.
Security
Sending employees home and letting them get on with it is a potential security nightmare. Will you let them use their own devices, and their own internet connection? How will you monitor the software they’re using to make sure it meets your security guidelines? For that matter, how do you ensure they’re regularly backing up data and staying bang up to date with patches and upgrades?
Customer service
When your teams are in the office, you can easily monitor how quickly calls get answered and stay abreast of the progress of customer service issues. But how do you make sure customers are being promptly and properly served when teams are at home? Remote and hybrid working can’t be allowed to undermine your reputation for keen customer focus.
Productivity
Can staff do everything at home that they can in the office? It’s not just about communication, it’s also about productivity. Can they access all the tools and services they need, or will projects get delayed by out-of-date applications that don’t integrate with other office systems.
These are some of the main challenges businesses face when switching to permanent remote and hybrid working models. But there is an answer. Cloud connectivity solutions are designed to let your employees work from anywhere, with no loss of effectiveness. In the next section we’ll discuss what those solutions can do.
Cloud connectivity for remote working
Accessible from anywhere
Communication made easy
Collaboration in the cloud
And cloud collaboration goes further, letting users edit documents in real time and see everyone’s else’s edits in real time, too. It replaces endless email trails with one version of the truth that everyone has access too.
A cost-effective alternative
At the same time, most cloud tools are easily and infinitely scalable. You don’t need to buy a whole new software bundle when a new employee needs access to Word, Teams or Salesforce, you just add a new licence to the service. It takes just minutes to get up and running. And because you don’t invest in software, you can scale the service down just as easily, so you’re only ever paying for exactly what you need.
Safe and secure
And at the user level, edits to documents and files tend to be saved automatically, as soon as a change is made. There’s never any danger of a distracted colleague wiping a day’s worth of progress.
The power of integration
Cloud connectivity sets users up with the tools they need to work effectively, and then lets them work where they want. It reproduces the systems and services they’re used to in the office wherever they have an internet connection.
And if you choose the right provider, cloud connectivity has another major benefit. Many of those separate tools and systems can work together. For example, Everything Voice offers an integration service that reduces frustration and increases efficiency.
The service integrates many of the most popular cloud platforms, including Teams, Salesforce, Zendesk and HubSpot. It lets remote or in-office staff access most tasks from the main CRM platform, including calling, messaging, video conferencing and more. This greatly cuts down on app-switching and enables your team to stay on task more easily, creating a more streamlined experience and enhancing efficiencies.
Cloud communications from Everything Voice
As we’ve seen, good cloud communications are a fundamental ingredient in equipping a remote or hybrid workforce. They let your staff communicate and collaborate with each other, and allow for smooth and efficient customer communications.
Everything Voice is a specialist provider of cloud communications solutions, from basic VoIP to full-featured UC that brings a complete range of communication and collaboration tools together under one umbrella, streamlining operations, increasing efficiency, saving money and improving the customer experience.
In other words, our cloud communications can help you transition to a new world of remote or hybrid work in a way that meets all your business challenges.
Contact Everything Voice
For more information on future-proofing your business communications, please contact Everything Voice. We would be happy to help. Simply book a call, fill in an enquiry form, or chat with us now online.