How Unified Communications Can Help in Keeping Remote Workers Engaged?
These days, it’s easier to come across a company with multiple offices in diverse locations. With flexible work-from-home policies and contractual assignments, companies are overcoming the geographical barrier in bringing talented employees onboard. Without any doubt, telecommuting has become a trend, allowing remote employees to work with better coordination.
Telecommuting may sound simple in theory, but it is hard to pull off in a practical scenario. The distributed workforce is often seen juggling around traditional communication tools to stay on the same page. But, the trend of unified communications is making it relatively simpler for businesses to manage diversely-located employees.
“The global UC market will exceed $75 billion by 2020” — Grand View Research
The growing influence of unified communications has transformed the way businesses collaborate with employees, clients, customers and other stakeholders. Telecommuters find it convenient to collaborate with videoconferencing, webinars, and other forms of virtual meetings.
“Around 62 percent of employees say improved collaboration is a top business driver for UC” — Information Week, “2014 State of Unified Communications”
Recent Trends Promoting the Adoption of Unified Communications
Making integration easier, unified communications has become an unavoidable need of the corporate world. The most recent trends that are driving the adoption of unified communications are:
- BYOD: Corporates have opened their gates to personal mobile devices of employees, as they are required for effective business communications. Employees can attend a videoconferencing call from individual workstations by using their own mobile devices like smart phones and laptops. To keep the communication trail going through all types of mobile devices, businesses need to make a transition to unified collaborations and access all communication solutions at one place.
- Mobility: As mobile and remote workers form an important part of the workforce of any organization, maintaining the right coordination with each one of them is equally important. Only through the UC (Unified Communications) technology, companies can maintain the communication flow with diversely-located employees.
How Unified Communications Help Businesses Thrive?
If you also have to deal with the diverse workforce, let’s see how unified communications can give you a head start.
- Increased Involvement of End Users
The convenience of end users is a priority for the UC technology, leading to an increased involvement at all ends. With the latest UC technology, it is possible for end users to receive communications in the format of their choice. Further, different web-based tools make it easier for businesses to track daily work updates of remotely-working employees and keep them in loop when taking any important strategic decision.
2. Flexible Infrastructure
All your communications can be archived at one place with the help of cloud-based UC solutions. If you put all your communications in the cloud, you can have one server and one interface without any chaos of hardware. You can also opt for hybrid UC solutions, which combine on-premise hardware with the cloud to ease the workload of IT managers in managing the flow of unified communications.
3. Reduced Carbon Footprint
UC solutions have turned out to be the greenest IT solutions, as they reduce the need of business travels and save on energy bills. UC technology creates a virtual platform to help participants involve in a conversation with the use of different communication tools placed at one platform. Also, there are not many hardware tools on-premise to be operated dedicatedly. This reduces overhead bills dramatically and helps businesses fulfill environmental responsibilities.
4. Increased Productivity
Internal communication is important for the smooth functioning of an organization. When all remote employees can access the same communication tools, unified at one location, they can check the status of co-workers in real-time and execute the tasks in hand with better coordination. Various online converging services allow employees to work as a team and achieve higher productivity.
5. Hyper Mobility
Employees can create a productive office environment at their individual locations, with every communication tool accessed easily in the cloud. They can work just as effectively by sharing ideas, tracking the status of co-workers in real-time, and working together at a virtual platform.
In today’s challenging environment, businesses strive to achieve higher productivity with limited resources. And by integrating real-time communication tools, they can create a unified user interface for their limited resources and help them work productively.
Originally published at www.techpillar.com.