Remote workers: how do organizations keep employees connected?
Teleworking, working from home, remote workers, however, you call it, it clearly is more than a fad. It is a real trend in the industry as it grants organizations and its employees’ multiple advantages, a big plus in this era of full employment and recruitment issues. However, it still is a challenge for organizations to keep employees connected.
Unified communications solutions from IP4B allow organizations to create rich communications channels that contribute to increasing productivity.
What Are Unified Communications in 101 Words
Unified Communications solutions allow organizations to collaborate with their customers and reach out to colleagues and collaborators more efficiently. Unified Communications applications help make a powerful difference by empowering companies like yours to provide exceptional customer experience, to reduce costs and to increase productivity.
With unified communications, you can take and make voice and video calls from your desk phone, your smartphone, your computer or your tablet based on the device most suited for the moment or the location.
Unified communications empower stronger collaboration among colleagues and associates with business functions like instant messaging (also known as chat) and presence. This later provides visibility on whether colleagues are on the phone, in a meeting or away from their desk.
Presence for remote workers
When your work colleague is also your cubicle neighbor, it is easy to see if she is busy, on the phone or away from her desk. Presence in the unified communications world is just that!
If your smartphone is so “smart” why would it not give you visibility of your colleagues’ immediate availability? Would it not be “smart” if you were able to see if they are in a meeting based on their enterprise calendar, on a call or away from their desk? That’s what presence is all about.
Presence gives you a real-time window over your expert colleagues as if you were peaking over a cubicle … with your smartphone!
Instant Messaging
Let’s go back to our cubicle colleague example. At work, it is easy to peek across the cubicle wall and ask her a quick question. Instant messaging is, again, just that.
Text messaging and chat applications like Facebook Messenger are now part of our everyday personal life. Why is this not a business feature yet?
With unified communications, it is now possible to securely exchange instant messages with your colleagues and remote associates.
Instant messaging increases productivity by reducing the time to get answers and by increasing the quality of the customer experience. It also contributes to lowering the number of emails you receive any given day.
Videoconferencing for All
Videoconferencing solutions are known to be a productive and cost-saving way to create rich group meetings. However, there exist several obstacles on the path of acquiring such systems. The first that comes to mind is the acquisition cost. Other “free” solutions do not easily integrate with your existing communication tools. IP4B solutions come with videoconferencing.
With IP4B unified communications solutions, video calls are a standard built-in feature. Video calls provide rich communication channels enabling colleagues to share the full subtleties of each conversation.
Real-Time Collaboration – Even Remotely
Let’s burry the preconceived idea that teams must absolutely meet in person to collaborate on any given project. A virtual meeting room enables team members to share their screens, to exchange their ideas and comments via group chat and to see each other live over video, even from a mobile device.
The collaboration solutions from IP4B are fully integrated and empower colleagues, remote workers, and external contributors.
A pure software solution
For organizations, it is super important to simplify the IT infrastructure required to support remote workers. Maintaining remote hardware is a nightmare. Sending technicians on-site to resolve issues is close to impossible. And remote workers do not want to be bothered with cumbersome equipment.
The IP4B solution is a pure software solution. Simple to use, simple to support providing a low total cost of ownership.
Conclusion
In this strong economy with full employment, organizations must be attractive to a new generation of employees. Having a remote workers strategy is key. Millennials are an ever-increasing part of the workforce and organizations must provide them with winning conditions.
Unified communications solutions with presence, instant messaging, video calls and remote collaboration, all in a software-only solution, is how IP4B empowers Canadian companies to better compete.
Does your organization have a remote workers strategy? Have you explored the gains that this might provide? Engage a conversation with one of your senior advisors and find out!