For the time being, we have no choice but to work from home.
In my previous post, I talked about the benefits of the cloud that give companies flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. I also considered how best for contact centre managers to motivate and manage their team while working remotely.
Keeping your staff safe, maintaining service level excellency and fulfilling your business communication needs are pressing priorities for all organisations. Some businesses have been blindsided by the sudden switch to working from home, and employees are coping with the fact that they can’t just walk over to their colleagues’ desks to ask for help.
To cope with the sudden demands of maintaining business continuity from a remote situation, it’s tempting to adopt free short-term fixes, but this can give rise to more challenges than solutions, and undermine business continuity in the long run. In the scramble to enable the capacity for staff to communicate, collaborate and keep projects on track from a distance, some organisations have picked up a combination of communications applications and are now finding it difficult to navigate between them.
Given the uncertainty of the situation, some organisations are reluctant to move their communications setup to the ideal solution due to fear of disruption and risk of investment, but this reticence causes businesses to suffer as a whole.
The right communication tools
It’s crucial to know how to overcome communication barriers in the middle of the crisis. Communication problems arise when teams don’t have the right tools or processes for staying connected. It’s so much easier to achieve effortless collaboration when you can have all your communications apps in one place. For example, video conferencing makes perfect sense as a bridge between ‘in-office’ and remote employees.
Our private lives are now turned upside down, and we are educating and guiding older family members to use video so they can see their grandchildren or their friends, to keep in touch and be a part of the family. As with in-person communication, video naturally brings your relationship with your colleagues closer and helps you solve problems faster. Visual communication creates stronger bonds in teams and helps remote employees feel happier and more engaged as a result.
With the right communications tools in place, your staff can thrive. There are indeed tools available to overcome communication barriers when working remotely: Team messaging apps that also facilitate HD video and traditional phone calls, making it easy for teams to connect. This kind of instant, effortless communication makes team collaboration faster and more productive.
The best part is you can keep communication in one place. No time wasted on digging through old emails or text messages as all communication is integrated in a single place, making it easy for team members to find just what they’re looking for right when they need it. Gone are the hours spent searching your email inbox for attached files.
As a solution it sounds ideal – but how can you put that in place without interrupting your operations?
Empower your WFH employees without interruption
What if you could quickly deploy a cloud-based communications solution, that is location-independent, that provides multiple-channel communications and allows you to seamlessly continue business operations working from home?
What if your employees had a simple-to-learn desktop with powerful collaboration and team messaging tools to make their job easy and efficient from any location?
RingCentral has revolutionised how companies of all sizes are deploying communications solutions across all their sites. Quick-start deployments allow your employees to be up and running in no time, taking calls and servicing customers from any location in a single unified experience.
Desktop and mobile collaboration allow team messaging, phone calling, video conferencing and screen-sharing in one smooth transition.
A future-proof communication platform
Cloud-based telephony systems are the most viable technology for mobile and distributed workforces. RingCentral’s unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution scales globally, making it easy to administrate across countries from a single platform.
With the new way of working, our business models have changed forever. In a rapidly-changing environment, it’s crucial to be agile and responsive. That’s why RingCentral has adapted its deployment package to enable enterprises to adopt cloud based communications without disrupting service delivery. With this process, RingCentral focusses all functionality in a single app to support teams get up and running in 48hrs.
Originally published May 07, 2020, updated Jan 16, 2023
