The scramble to adapt enterprise communications in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to many organisations experiencing issues with security, support and efficiency with their team collaboration solutions.
To explain, as the pandemic swept the world, enterprises found themselves having to rapidly transition from having a majority of their workers based in the office to sending most of their employees into work-from-home (WFH) mode. In fact, a global study from Nemertes of 460 organisations found that, from a benchmark of 34% of employees based at home in February 2020, the number had shot up to 72% by April.
Without adequate time to plan, a lot of the things organisations would like to have done to engender secure, optimum team collaboration went out the window. For example, many ad hoc WFH programmes made do with employees using a multitude of personally-owned devices, as well as a variety of cloud-based applications and services to keep in touch and get their work done. In a number of cases, these solutions were deployed without approval from – or even knowledge of – the IT department. And in others, even when the IT department was involved, there was not time for adequate vetting of how the new tools would integrate with existing business applications and enterprise communications solutions such as VoIP systems.
While some companies have since been able to introduce more structure to their WFH programmes, many are still grappling with the need to consolidate their employees’ various collaboration tools and solutions so their workforce is more efficient and secure, and compliant with company policies.
This situation will only get more complicated as companies slowly and carefully start bringing employees back into the office, as the focus of their IT teams needs to evolve from solely supporting WFH to supporting a ‘hybrid’ situation, where a growing percentage of workers will move back into the office over time, even as a fairly large percentage of workers continue to work from home.
So, what can an IT team do to adequately support team collaboration in this unprecedented, complicated time? How can they help ensure workers – whether they are working from home or back in the office – don’t feel isolated and instead feel like part of the team and have access to all of the resources they need to do their jobs? And, how do they prepare for future team collaboration needs when we are not quite sure what the ‘office of the post-pandemic future’ will look like?
Overcoming multiple platforms and a lack of integration
First, IT teams need to address workers’ use of multiple platforms that are not integrated with each other or with existing business applications and enterprise communications platforms.
To rectify the situation and help ensure that team collaboration will continue dynamically amongst workers based at home, in the office, or anywhere, organisations should:
- Reassess the aggregated array of tools being used now for calling, video-enabled meetings and team messaging. This must include all those solutions procured to address recent short-term needs, especially if currently ‘under the radar’ of the IT department
- Evaluate solutions that provide an integrated user experience and enable straightforward integrations with business applications and workflow processes
- Pursue applications that overlay onto and integrate with existing on-premises platforms, while introducing new cloud-based capabilities like video conferencing and integrated messaging
Addressing legacy investments – three different options
Second, organisations that have poured time and money into meeting the needs of mass WFH must also confront the prospect of stranding legacy infrastructure investments. The overwhelming prevalence of cloud-based platforms offers the potential for rapid rollout, global availability and tremendous scale at predictable cost. But, does it make economic sense to abandon existing on-premises platforms (e.g. IP PBXs) or, should enterprises find another way of utilising them?
Increasingly, organisations are adopting a mix of on-premises and cloud platforms. In these instances, both IT departments and users can face the challenge of coping with multiple platforms and navigating between different user and administrative interfaces. It also multiplies the complexity of integrating business applications.
As organisations emerge from WFH to a hybrid return to office, they have a few options to consider. They can:
- Adopt a single vendor approach to simplify infrastructure and enable a standardised technology strategy for UCC across the organisation. This achieves a unified user experience and simplifies application integration, but will typically involve an expensive, complex and time-consuming migration
- Continue with a multiple vendor approach, thereby exploiting invested assets, and potentially evolve to a more consolidated approach around a minimum number of vendors at the desired pace. This would compound the ongoing pain experienced by users and administrators and impinge upon attempts to gain value from UCC technologies as the business transitions to more progressive and dynamic working practices and support widespread WFH
- Explore opportunities to layer and extend new cloud-based collaboration capabilities that have native integration with existing phone systems. This provides users with a unified client while keeping ROI on existing PBXs intact. Capitalising on cloud-based solutions also enables rapidly emerging features that improve remote worker collaboration to be adopted easily
Softphones are key to collaboration
The last of these three options naturally precipitates adoption of UCC softphones, which cut communication costs, enable real-time presence and provide the maximum possible mobility for employees.
UCC softphones that are fast to roll out and capable of overlaying existing call services allow organisations to streamline communications without the waste of scrapping legacy infrastructure; at least until full cloud migration makes greatest sense.
The best UCC softphones continue operating successfully across all kinds of networks (e.g. comparatively poor bandwidth home Wi-Fi, choppy cellular networks, etc.), ensuring continuity of communications and collaboration.
Looking ahead
The inevitable shift toward cloud-based IT platforms has accelerated in the initial wake of the pandemic. As the return to office encourages organisations to mature their improvised workarounds into long-term UCC investments, success will hinge upon leveraging state-of-the-art collaboration tools that are not only cloud-based, but that deliver new functionality while integrating with existing applications.
Compared to the alternatives of consolidating to an expensive, locked-down single vendor infrastructure or persisting with a flawed and disruptive multi-vendor architecture, this third way greatly minimises cost, improves manageability and optimises the user experience.
Guest Blog by Todd Carothers, Chief Revenue Officer at CounterPath
CounterPath Unified Communications solutions are changing the face of telecommunications. An industry and user favorite, Bria softphones for desktop, tablet and mobile devices, together with Stretto Platform server solutions, enable service providers, OEMs and enterprises large and small around the globe to offer a seamless and unified communications experience across any networks. Bria and Stretto combination enables an improved user experience as an overlay to the most popular UC and IMS telephony and application servers on the market today.
