COVID-19 has forced organisations to completely rethink the concept of ‘working from home’ (WFH) with businesses suddenly having to accelerate their remote work plans and get employees completely equipped to WFH. Even now, WFH policies are still in place for many organisations and this is now likely to be the ‘new normal’ for many of our workplaces. A Gartner survey of HR leaders in April revealed that post-pandemic, 41% of employees are likely to work remotely at least some of the time.
However, what ‘WFH 1.0’ looks like for most organisations is going to be quite different to WFH 2.0.
The vast majority of organisations weren’t completely prepared for the lockdown, which meant quick decisions had to be made about what technologies and services to use to equip this new home-based workforce.
While these short-term solutions kept businesses going, now is the time to consider more sustainable, long-term strategies – both to manage a larger and more permanent WFH cohort and to be fully prepared for the future. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that remote work is critical to surviving major disruptions.
The short-term productivity WFH boost is under threat if we aren’t equipping remote workers with the right technologies. As our CIO Trevor Schulze says, “No matter when or how we go back to the office, we’ll need to work differently going forward. The patchwork solutions created as a quick fix are likely to slow teams down and hinder organisations in the long term. Employees need to be able to communicate naturally, from any place, using any device, and at any time.”
Most organisations approach messaging, video, and phone as separate point solutions – using a different solution for each.
However, deploying multiple apps and using multiple vendors presents a major problem for employees and employers: too much workplace technology is killing productivity. In a survey by CITE Research on behalf of RingCentral among 2000 knowledge workers in the US, UK and Australia in January 2018, they found that workers waste up to 60 minutes each day navigating between apps, with the majority of them toggling between 10 apps in a single hour.
So what do we need to do to prepare for WFH 2.0?
To find out what we have learnt from WFH 1.0 and what key components do we need to have in place to upgrade to WFH 2.0, we have put together a detailed discussion paper. “How the Combination of Message, Video, and Phone Will Reshape the Future of Work” is available to view and download now.
Originally published 02 Sep, 2020
