In recent years, with the advent of the cloud and mobility in the enterprise, we’ve seen a rise in the number of people working from home in the UK. In the last decade, the figure has grown to almost 60% of people working remotely either full or part-time.
A good proportion of these can be attributed to technology. In the past, employees who wanted to take advantage of flexible working had to set up a VPN, rely on poor-quality, consumer-grade VoIP, or have another telephone line installed for work.
This has now all changed and the only real barrier to working from home lies in the trust between an enterprise and its employees. While some companies won’t allow remote working as they believe employees to be less productive, more than anything this suggests an unhealthy company culture.
Research has shown that remote workers are actually more productive than their office-based counterparts.
Research Supports Remote Working
Image source: CBI
Further to this, a recent study carried out by Stanford researchers found that employees who work from home are also happier in their work, less likely to leave their position and overall more productive.
The study followed call centre employees who were allowed to work from home for 9 months. It found that not only did the call centre company save revenue on space and offices furnishings, but those working from home:
- Made 13.5% more calls
- Left the job 50% less than office based workers
- Worked longer hours
- Took fewer sick days
“One-third of the productivity increase, we think, was due to having a quieter environment, which makes it easier to process calls,” Stanford research Bloom said.
“At home, people don’t experience what we call the ‘cake in the break room’ effect. Offices are actually incredibly distracting places.”
Flexible Working is Sound Business Strategy
With this in mind, it’s a sound strategy for any business to allow workers to carry out their jobs at home. This doesn’t have to be full time, and in fact it’s healthier for remote workers to come into the office a couple of days a week. This offsets anything that they might miss whilst working alone such as team meetings and the social aspects of being in an office environment.
In order to enable successful remote working for any business, it’s necessary to get organised and first source the tools that they might need to do so. These may already be available on the office network, or the business might have to invest in more up-to-date technology.
Hosted PBX and the Remote Worker
For businesses that want to facilitate remote working and the benefits that it affords, a cost-effective solution lies in hosted PBX. These offer all of the functionality and more than would be found in a legacy, wired telephony system. However, they also offer further benefits, such as:
- Call forwarding – so that customers can reach employees on the same work telephone number, no matter where they are.
- Reduced costs – in terms of installation and maintenance. Revenue can also be saved in the office by allocating shared desks and workstations. Choosing a hosted solution also means that there are no hardware costs. Hosted PBX tends to use a monthly payment model and as such, there are no capital expenditure costs either.
- Simple deployment – adding and removing users with hosted PBX is simple too. Once you’ve added user details, a provisioning link is automatically generated and just needs to be copied to the handset.
- Conferencing – an important aspect to any telephony solution, call conferencing allows more than two users to participate in a call at the same time.
- Voicemail – can be set up to be personalised and voicemail sent as text to email.
These are just a few of the functions you’ll generally find in a best-in-class hosted PBX system. When it comes to remote workers, they are simple to implement and yet offer a powerful telephony solution that can be used from any location.
Cost of Downtime
For example, one of the biggest worries for any business lies in downtime. This can quickly and easier run into the 1000s cost-wise, so must be minimised as much as possible. Using hosted PBX means that all of the hardware is hosted within the vendor’s data centre and the vendor is responsible for it. Data centres tend to have much more powerful hardware and better security than the average office and so when equipment fails, it’s usually a case of simply routing the hosted solution to another part of the network.
Businesses looking to invest in a hosted PBX solution should vet vendors carefully. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) dictates the terms of the hosting and as such, businesses should pay attention to the small print. Most providers offer a guaranteed uptime, so you should check this is as close to 100% as possible. When offering employees the option to work from home, it’s vital that downtime is minimised as much as possible.
Company Culture
Flexible and remote working success, as discussed earlier, does rely to some extent on company culture. A business that doesn’t trust its employees to work independently is one that will foster a culture of unhappiness and lowered productivity. Happier workers are more productive, more will to share knowledge and less likely to leave a firm for the competition.
With this in mind, consider how you can improve culture by allowing remote working and offering employees the tools to effectively and more productively carry out their jobs with hosted PBX.
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