In 2020, many businesses throughout the UK were told to lock their doors and offer home working where possible. Now with light at the end of the tunnel, is everyone desperate to get back to the office or has the pandemic normalised home working for good? And what are the must-haves for a good home working set-up?
Hybrid opportunities
For a long time, the idea of remote/home working has been seen as a luxury, usually only offered to those working in management or field sales. The world was turned upside down in the blink of an eye, and remote working suddenly became a necessity. So, will we all just go back to the office one day and the option of remote working becomes a distant memory? Or will businesses now realise that productivity can remain consistent even with 90% of their workforce doing Teams calls in their PJs?
Cloud telephony has offered a flexible approach to remote working long before the Coronavirus pandemic took hold. We feel that giving employees the opportunity to manage their home lives around their working day has led to less distraction and increased productivity. We understand that life doesn’t stop at 9am and start again at 5pm once the working day is finished, and it’s potentially this approach combined with our remote working solutions for business, Microsoft Teams calling and much more that has allowed our workforce to essentially pick up at home, what they left at work, allowing greater flexibility and choices about where to work from!
It will be interesting to see how many other businesses will carry on with approaches similar to this, or whether all office based staff will be recalled back once it’s safe to do so?
Essentials for remote working
In one of our previous blog posts we discussed what was next for remote working and how new technology can be leveraged to offer a business advantage. In addition to this, we’ve put together the top 5 essentials for a good remote working network.
- A good internet connection – Internet providers have taken a hit on bandwidth over the last 12 months, and you may have noticed your upload and download speeds have been slower than usual. Hopefully as people return to the office, you may experience a positive shift, but if you’re a small business owner there are other business internet solutions available to you if you find yourself ditching the office making a permanent move to home working.
- Cloud Storage – If you want to be able to access the same documents at home as you do at the office, then you need a decent cloud storage solution. Many businesses like to use Dropbox and similar, but with our whole range of cloud services you can make your mind up which option would suit your business the best!
- Private VPN . offers full anonymity and privacy to users, transmitting data from public networks via a secure and encrypted tunnel. Still not sure what it is?
- Communication tools – Yes mobiles are great, and having a ‘bring your own device’ policy can be good for keeping costs down and ensuring you can actually reach your employees when they’re away from the office… but offer a single application that allows you to communicate across multiple platforms and devices. If you want to continue remote working policy can be good for keeping costs down and ensuring you can actually reach your employees when they’re away from the office… but offer a single application that allows you to communicate across multiple platforms and devices.
- Cyber Security – A Major consideration for business laptops and other devices that could be vulnerable to cyber attacks. Protect it and you won’t lose it! Business Cyber Security Solutions are becoming more popular than ever now, so if you don’t have anything in place beyond a firewall, then now is the time.
We could have added a 6th point about casual clothes but we didn’t want to draw attention to the obvious!
These are just our top 5 things needed for essential remote working, for more details you can visit our products and services section of our website or contact us today. Interested in a free IT audit?
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