Whether it’s a 30-60 minute bus ride, or squeezing into the subway during rush hour, morning commutes rarely put you in the right frame of mind for starting a day at work. But for a growing number of workers, the morning commute is as short as the trip from their bed to their home office, local cafe, or practically anywhere with a steady internet connection.
Today, the very definition of “going to work” is less about being in the office and more about completing projects and collaborating with colleagues outside of it. In fact, studies have shown that a remote workforce increases productivity while minimizing use of in-house resources like electricity and office space. Today’s mobile workforce demands more agile communications in order to maintain productivity, customer responsiveness and increase overall efficiency away from the office.
By utilizing unified communications (UC), remote workers can connect to work from any device, whether it be their smartphones, tablets, or personal laptops. With the help of cloud technologies, calling, messaging, and other interactions are all easily accessible in an intuitive user interface. This allows remote employees to redirect phone calls from one device to another, call a co-worker by clicking on their email address, and have incoming voicemails directly saved in their inbox.
A team of salespeople and designers are never in the same place. On top of that, your clients may be based in different countries. A purely email-based communications method just isn’t enough; you wouldn’t be able to establish good customer relations or participate in a team brainstorming session.
Collaboration is most effective when there’s immediate feedback and, sometimes, face-to-face interaction. To provide a platform for collaboration, UC tools such as video conferencing, Voice over IP (VoIP) calls, and screen sharing can make it possible for employees and customers to communicate as if they were all in one place.
While we lambasted a system based solely on text-based communications, that doesn't mean it doesn't play a critical role in a UC framework. Integrated chat applications eliminate the need to draft a new email every time an issue needs to be addressed, and, as its name suggests, instant messaging is one of the quickest ways to disseminate information to colleagues without spending extra bandwidth on voice calls.
Last but not least, these communication features include presence functionality, which indicate whether employees -- both in-house and remote -- are available or busy. Being able to track online presence is immensely valuable for employers who want to keep track of their remote staff’s current status and whereabouts. This also gives them the confidence that remote workers are actually working rather than abusing their work-at-home privileges.
No one said sitting in an office cubicle was the only way to increase operational efficiency. In fact, big name companies like GitHub, WordPress, and Upworthy have already seized the opportunities of remote working, and are growing their business leaps and bounds ahead of the competition because of it. And the best way to achieve this is by implementing a robust UC system with features that cater to your business’s telecommuting strategies.
Managing a dynamic and mobile workforce can be challenging, but the benefits can outweigh the challenges if your business has the right tools. Although UC is powerful on its own, combining it with a cloud productivity suite like Office 365 lets you realize the true potential of a remote workforce. Visit us at www.intelligis.com to find out how.
