The New Work From-Home Landscape
What will the world will look like when the Coronavirus pandemic finally retreats? What happens when office life revives? And what becomes of remote working?
One outcome of the Coronavirus pandemic has been a substantial increase in the number of our clients working from home, not to mention people across the UK. It seems clear that remote working will likely continue long after the pandemic to comply with social distancing.
Granted, some jobs simply can’t be carried out at home. But the outbreak is hastening the trend towards working from home, possibly for the long term. Up till now, remote working has been slower to catch on than many anticipated when remote work technology first materialised.
Can Your Infrastructure and Technology Sustain a Remote Workforce?
There’s now severe pressure on the servers, security, storage and network of any company. To manage these needs, IT departments must implement more progressive capacity management in order to successfully meet these requirements.
Having the correct technical infrastructure in place to permit secure access to the services and information needed to support remote workers is vital. We’ve been supporting customers in varying ways during the pandemic, including looking at infrastructure and software to accommodate with the most popular support software.
Ultimately, this has made remote working for our clients a lot more efficient, as our recent survey showed.
Remote Working Survey
Our friends from Prism Digital Recruitment sent a survey to 1,777 of their participants who work in a variation of industries and roles and found that people are actually feeling more productive and positive about working remotely.
One of the questions asked was how effective participants felt home working was, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being unbelievably more effective and 1 being very ineffective). The survey found that the majority of participants found home working to be more effective than working in the office.
For example, 394 of the participants rated the effectiveness of home working as ‘unbelievably more effective’ (10), compared to only 25 that rated it ‘1’.
Another question asked, was if they would they like to continue working from home after the lockdown period was over. 554 respondents said that they’d 100% like to continue working remotely compared to only 80 who would prefer to remain in the office full-time.
The respondants said that some of the most positive aspects of home working are not commuting at all, more focus time, less commuting time and flexible working hours.
However, some of them mentioned that they felt more isolated, that information transmission was far less fluid and that remote working can get lonely.
Our Customers’ Most-Used Online Tools
Here’s a list of our most-used tools by customers:
- Microsoft Teams. This video conferencing and collaboration app is a part of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. It’s great if you’re keen on Microsoft’s online platform of tools. Hold one-on-one meetings, small group conferences, and web discussions of up to 10,000 users. Highlights include; scheduling support, screen sharing, note-taking, conference recording in addition to instant messaging.
- Microsoft 365 Docs. This app enables your organisation skills to be more efficient with experiences that cleverly revolutionise the way you work, modernising business processes with personalised apps and workflow automation tools and utilising the power for intelligent security to safeguard assets without impeding productivity.
- Microsoft Planner. Microsoft Planner comes with office 365 and is a to-do app. It can be used for teamwork planning or personal use. It has a card-based interface for tasks or other lists and can also open up to their “Planner Hub” which allows someone to see the plans that have been created by the user, or other team members.
So, if you’re considering working from home as an ongoing trend, now’s the time to review your software and infrastructure to maximise efficiencies.
If you’re thinking about a move to the Cloud for any software, we’re also able to provide you with a full cost analysis to identify the hidden expenses of what can sometimes be seen as a money-saving tool. Contact us today for more details.
