Productivity is of critical importance for businesses, but with the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing, there are many professionals who are still stuck in crisis control mode and struggling to keep revenue coming in. Let’s take a look at how businesses have been able to make it thus far, despite the circumstances, and how technology has helped to shape the trajectory of this movement.
Business Owners
Before the pandemic, few businesses embraced remote work as the norm. Some positions may have been outsourced, but it was truly rare to see an employee, let alone the entire workforce, work remotely. For the most part, businesses accepted the practice as taboo, not because businesses want to maintain control over employees but because it is most effective to build a company identity and culture if you see employees on a regular basis.
When COVID-19 forced these companies’ hands, it became clear that this fear of remote work came to their detriment, as operations were forced to shift from traditional in-house operations to remote operations relatively quickly. That said, there are still several well-founded concerns for businesses as a result of remote work. Some of the most crucial include:
- Lack of face-to-face collaboration
- Individual dips in productivity
- Lease on brick and mortar location
- Depleting company culture
With these concerns in mind, businesses are working toward establishing plans to bring back in-office operations, but workers are of a different mind.
Employees
All companies have employees that are better off working in the office every day, but newly remote employees have come to appreciate the benefits of working from home. Since it is now evident that they can indeed perform their duties while out of the office, returning to the office seems unnecessary in their eyes. While this issue is not currently present due to the emerging variants of the COVID-19 virus, it does present an issue for when things do return to normal.
Workers enjoy the flexibility afforded them when working from home. Even those who work an hourly job at designated times of day are able to reap the benefits of the lack of a commute. There are some workers who simply cannot handle the responsibilities of working remotely, but most workers who have been able to manage their time effectively do not see a need to return to the office full-time--and if the business insists on this, there are so many remote jobs nowadays that they can just find work elsewhere.
To combat the turnover that these circumstances might bring, organizations are working to implement hybrid strategies where employees work in the office some of the time and work remotely the rest of the time. Make no mistake, this is a compromise, and companies are working to set up metrics that can measure an employee’s ability to work remotely compared to working from the office. This strategy might be effective in the long term, as it facilitates in-office collaboration and communication as well as out-of-office productivity. While it might seem like this makes things more complicated, it will allow organizations to reap the benefits of both remote and in-office work in the long term.
The Technology
It doesn’t matter whether you are in-office or remote; your motivations will remain the same. If you make a great product or provide a great service, you are still going to market and sell it. To make sure that your company can make this happen, we recommend the following technologies:
- Collaboration tools (cloud-hosted productivity, project management)
- Communication tools (telephone, email, video conferencing)
- Document management
- Customer Relationship Management (customer support, ticketing, client communications)
- Business management software (time management, task management)
- Training applications (security, software, process training)
- Human Resource Management (applicant tracking, onboarding/offboarding)
- Cybersecurity tools (network monitoring, firewalls, spam filtering)
- Remote desktop or Virtual Private Network
This is only a shortlist of technology that you will need to keep up in-house and remote operations. Many businesses have migrated over to cloud-hosted platforms that both cut costs and improve accessibility, but this is a decision that you should make only after consulting with your trusted IT resource.
If you do not have such a resource, Business Solutions & Software Group would be happy to fill that void in your operations. We can procure and support the remote technology you need to succeed moving forward. To learn more, reach out to us at (954) 575-3992.
