Business environments are ever changing and those that are agile enough to adopt new technology trends are set to thrive. One of the largest emerging movements today is the gravitation toward telecommuting.This growing prevalence of remote workers has come about not only from millennials’ desire for an equal work-life balance but also from employers’ focus on a more efficient workspace and talented workforce.
The benefits of a telecommuting policy are numerous including minimized overhead expense, reduced environmental impact, and happier, more productive employees. It’s no wonder so many leading employers have adopted policies allowing work-from-home arrangements.This ever-growing trend though is not without its own set of management and optimization challenges. The frequency of virtual collaboration will continue to increase, leading to a higher than ever need for a Unified Communications strategy.
The growing need to integrate communication tools will mean more frequent adoption of these strategies and overall good news for the UC market. Businesses must become well versed in not only the usage of but even more so the optimization of their UC environment to leverage maximized collaboration amongst employees around the globe. A stronger and more efficient network will translate to frequent and fruitful collaboration between employees and customers alike.
Before understanding how the rise in remote workers will change the UC landscape, let’s take a look at what’s driving this shift in the workforce. It’s really quite simple: millennials have different work habits compared to their predecessors and they’re now the majority of the workforce.
According to Global Workplace Analytics, millennials tend to aspire for a more optimal work-life balance where they spend less time in the office and more time doing whatever millennials do (uploading Snapchat stories of their avocado toast, probably). Additionally, millennials are vastly promoting work-from-home arrangements with an extensive majority supporting either a full-time or part-time agreement.
An estimated 50% of workers in the US hold jobs that are considered to be compatible with work-at-home standards while the actual number of employees who do work from home is less significant. In 2014, an estimated 3.7 million employees (2.8% of the workforce) reported working from home at least half of the time. Employees who telecommuted increased 5.6% from 2013 to 2014. Ultimately, statistics of telecommuting highlight a trend of steady growth as the sheer number of these workers is growing.
The growth of remote working should be a welcomed change by UC professionals as there will be even more use cases for collaboration software in the near future.
As more companies expand their networks to accommodate for changes in their work environment, so will the need to manage these complicated systems. Unified Communication system issues are standard across industries and firms alike: jitter, packet loss, and malfunctions in a network, all of which can lead to miscommunication. When a business scales their network, it can become an unreliable hindrance and an altogether UC nightmare!
Streamlining business networks will boost the productivity of work-from-home relationships, which can only operate at full potential with a fully functional and interruption-free network to support them. The extensive array of issues across several platforms can be diagnosed with a singular tool – vAnalytics. With this single-stream dashboard, a user can leverage historical and real-time analytics across their entire UC environment to make informed business decisions.
Remote working provides businesses with an opportunity to have a connected workforce despite geographic location. There is a continuing shift in the way people will work, only made possible through innovation in unified communications. Vyopta provides tools to ensure a network that functions and grows in a reliable manner, meeting the needs of businesses adjusting to new employment trends.
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