Adopted as a rapid reaction to enable businesses to keep working, services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype and others have become the means by which employees maintain communication with customers and colleagues as they work from home.
Now, as the focus turns to what the new normal will look like, it’s clear that traditional working patterns will be changed, at least for the medium term and maybe forever. Platforms like Microsoft Teams have the led the way, partly because employees typically have Office 365 subscriptions and that includes Teams. Now, though, the knee-jerk phase of wondering how to keep everyone connected and working is over. We’re moving into a situation in which fewer employees will be able to come in to offices and working days will be staggered to avoid rush hour congestion on public transport.
“Businesses are at a crucial crossroads and they now have a choice of which way to go,” confirms Nicola Hollerhead, a Client Account Executive at SCB Global, which provides its OPTO4Teams offering that combines the company’s cloud PBX capabilities with Teams. OPTO4Teams brings together a range of advanced features and services including operator functions, disaster recovery, MiFID PCI compliant call recording, call queuing, advanced reporting, IVR and others.
“They’ve had to go into remote working because of the virus but now they can decide what they want to do next,” she adds. “Previously, businesses have thought about remote working in theory and understood its potential to deliver better work-life balance for employees. However, businesses have historically not been willing to move from traditional offices.”
“During lockdown, most companies have found remote working beneficial - and not just in theory,” Hollerhead explains.
“The crossroads we’re at involves deciding whether to move forward and take this as an opportunity to digitally transform and modernise how business will work in future or to go back to the traditional office and not take a new approach”
In reality, a blend of both directions will be adopted by most and, with staged ending of lockdowns likely, this combination is likely to become the normal mode of business. Organisations recognise that the solutions they adopted to address the initial crisis were valuable but temporary and a step-up is needed to make them permanent.
