The big debate is to keep your physical office space and continue to pay a monthly lease even if you are not sure when employees will be back or switch to a remote mobile workforce and invest in technologies such as Unified Communications to support remote employees.
What the experts from Cloud Collaboration Consultants have seen firsthand is Customers addressed the future workplace requirements in stages. When the pandemic first hit in mid-March, Companies quickly sent all their employees home and closed the office.
During the pandemic, many businesses slowly eased employees back in the office, mostly voluntary. Business owners quickly found out that employees could be as productive working from home as they were in the office. Most businesses now have deployed a hybrid approach letting employees work from home 2-3 days per week, and the other days work out of the office.
No matter what you decide, Unified Communications will play a big part to ensure your employees are as productive as they would be remote as they were in the office, or perhaps even more productive. Unified Communications offers business owners the opportunity to pay monthly for communications delivered over the internet. Phones, Video Meetings, and Chat accessed via the Cloud, which means business owners can pay for what they need, when they need it, and avoid having to shell out thousands of dollars for equipment, maintenance, training, and servers.
In our previous blog <insert link>, we covered the four Unified Communications features your business will need to implement to ensure that you have the technology you require to serve your customers, vendors, and employees. Our research has found that employees will use the communication tools they are most comfortable with to perform their job.
Critical Considerations for an optimal Unified Communications Set-Up:
- Home Network – on average, a video meeting requires 300k of bandwidth. Your internet connection upload speed is more important than the download speed to ensure a high-quality video experience. If you can prioritize traffic on your network (at home, you are competing with social media, Minecraft), you will have a better experience.
- Physical Phones vs. Softphones – Interview your employees to see if they are more comfortable with a physical phone/handset or ok using a soft client. A soft client is an application that comes with all Unified Communication solutions and mirrors the phone handset but deployed on a mobile phone, laptop, IPAD, or Tablet.
- Headsets – Invest in a high-quality headset. Most employees want the flexibility to multi-task and stretch their legs and not tied to a cord.
- Video – The Unified Communications solutions will include a video meeting application as part of the offering. It is essential to invest in at least one device, for example, an iPad, Tablet, or MAC computer, that will provide your employees with a high-quality video solution.
RingCentral, a 9-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader and one of the vendors we support, authored a couple of great blogs titled:
Why unified communications is critical to long-term remote work
Why You Shouldn’t Wait for a Pandemic to Overhaul Your Entire Internal Communications Platform
Conclusion
Unified Communications will be a big part of your remote mobile workforce strategy in the future, and eventually, things will return to “normal.” But the reality is we will move into a new normal where remote offices could be the norm and not the exception. Business owners will need the flexibility and the technology to support their employees no matter where they are. In the office, visiting customers, or working from home. The right Unified Communications solution will ensure that your employees feel connected to the business with the tools they need to do their job effectively.