It's a topic that got a lot of airtime at the beginning of COVID season, but has since lost traction.
According to Forbes, 61% of employees prefer fully remote work and 74% of professionals expect remote work to be the new norm for them permanently. That said, what is the plan for your business to support remote work? In the second quarter of 2020, we saw a staggering number of businesses have to adapt on the fly to this new normal of work. Otherwise, they were going to be dead in the water. What ended up happening is small business owners cobbled together band-aid solutions to enable their employees to continue working from home. For most businesses, this was Zoom video conferences, calls and texts made on personal cell phones, and a lot of emails...
At the time of writing this, been over a year since we were all forced to stay home and do our jobs from our living room or our home office if we were lucky enough to have one. The reason I bring this up is a lot of those band-aid solutions are still in place today! Most small businesses are still using the free version of Zoom and are still using cell phones to communicate. The time has come to get serious about your business's ability to fully support your remote employees! Here are a 3 practices we've seen that have let small to medium-sized businesses in Louisiana hit the upgrade button on their remote work experience.
Implement a collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams, Webex, or Slack
This allows your people to seamlessly collaborate on problems, projects, and teams together without bothering with email.
Move their phones to a hosted solution like RingCentral, Zoom, or 8x8
Phones are still the lifeblood to a lot of organizations. A hosted voice platform gives your people the ability to use the phone system from home just as they would in the office!
Consider moving applications to the cloud
This allows employees to get away from the dread VPN connection to your data closet to connect to Quickbooks with laggy 12 year old hardware... yea - I'm looking at you
The truth of the matter is this. Even if you plan on having your employees in the office most of the time, your people will still demand the flexibility to do their jobs from home from time to time. It only makes sense to invest in that side of your business to make sure they are as effective and efficient from home as they are in your office!
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S1 Technology is a Managed Service Provider (MSP) that provides a security-first approach to a full range of managed IT services and support for small to mid-sized businesses.