UC
Do you ever feel like you live at the office? Then imagine the plight of the teleworker, who literally does. (Unless, of course, you’re among the minority of IT folks who are teleworkers themselves—in which case you don’t have to imagine—you know exactly what I’m talking about!).
And while teleworking may be isolating, teleworkers today have plenty of company. A large majority of the organizations I work with (86%) plan to increase the number of teleworkers this year. The primary driver for increased teleworking support is to attract and retain valuable employees, cited by 82% of organizations. Additional drivers include the opportunity to save on facilities costs and the ability to drive both green and virtual worker initiatives.
For employees use to working in an office setting, the transition to teleworking can be daunting. A common fear is that of becoming “disconnected”. But with the right tools and technologies—particularly unified communications—being disconnected is the least of a teleworker’s worries, falling somewhere after “remembering basic hygiene”, “taking out the trash” and “keeping pets and children quiet in the background”.
Key UC technologies for teleworkers? Start with infrastructure: broadband connectivity, security (including VPN capability and two-factor authentication where needed), and proper hardware (access router, computing platforms).
Then look to the applications. Benchmark research participants tell us that the tools most required for the virtual workers (including teleworkers) within their organizations were, in order, telephony services (84.4%), including legacy systems, IP telephony, and mobile telephony. Then email, at 57.8%. Then business applications: about 41% of workers cite access to business applications as important for virtual workers to maintain effectiveness. For example, virtual salespeople need access to CRM applications to update customer interactions and sales.
Along with access to enterprise applications, 32.8% require access to their organization’s central database to be able to access and store information as seamlessly as if they were sitting at their desk within headquarters. Other capabilities virtual workers require include; access to Web applications (25%), messaging (12.5%), VPN (12.2%) and the ability to use web conferencing (7.8%).
What else? One of the biggest challenges to virtual workers is document and content management. The key consideration for document sharing is version control—your system (whatever it is) should be able to ensure that it’s always perfectly clear which document is the current working version. Also consider social networking tools, like wikis, where users can embed links to point to other pages or content, attach files and embed links. These can prove valuable in sharing company information, storing project workbooks, and retaining training sessions.
The bottom line? If you’re considering adopting teleworking within your organization, make sure your employees have access to the communication and collaboration tools required to most effective do their jobs.
