Following on from the forced change of working practices due to the pandemic, many businesses and employees are yet to revert to their old way of working, for many reasons.
There are many ongoing benefits to keeping the flexible working practices in place, both for the employees and the business.
The Benefits
• Cost Saving – Working flexibly can save a significant amount of money for both the employee and the business. Travel is one area, not only fuel but time wasted getting to and from the office. Also, people with young children are saving money on childcare due to the flexible working available.
• Work Life Balance – Having a flexible working practice allows for people to better balance their business and personal life.
• Increased Productivity – It has been proven that staff who are able to work flexibly are more productive and tend to go above and beyond. Instead of that 1-hour commute to the office, they tend to start earlier and finish later.
The Challenges
Due to the forced and swift change to flexible working for most businesses, many systems were implemented very quickly, with little or no planning, in some instances these still remain in place. The challenges they introduce are as follows: –
• Unreliable connectivity – Businesses are using substandard connections / what was there already, resulting in dropouts and slowness and sometimes loss of data.
• Poor security – Lots of businesses, in haste didn’t have time to look at security, the focus was getting staff working! This means businesses are vulnerable to hackers, malware and cyber-attack.
• Inconsistency in user experience – Often users connect / work differently, based on the above points, this leads to frustration, lost time and often staff leaving the business.
The Solution
There are solutions out there that eliminate the main challenges faced and deliver the benefits of allowing staff to work flexibly: –
• Hosted Desktops – This allows users to have the same, consistent experience wherever they choose to work from. It delivers reliability, performance, scalability, and security. This doesn’t have to be used by just remote workers, implement it across the business.
• Hosted Telephony – Similar to the Hosted Desktop, this allows telephony services to be used from anywhere, meaning employees can work consistently and flexibly from anywhere, with a consistent experience.
Let someone else manage IT for you!
