According to telecommuting statistics 2018, there were 4.3 million remote workers in the USA, which makes up 3.2% of the entire workforce. We haven’t seen data on new stats since the pandemic, but it’s increased significantly.
As such, many companies haven’t been prepared for the majority of their workforce to work remotely. We are seeing many companies scrambling to get short term solutions in place that include collaboration tools, videoconferencing solutions, VPNs, and access to critical documents. At the very least, Town Hall meetings where CEO’s can broadcast by video from one to many, has been an effective way to keep morale up.
Perhaps most important is keeping all lines of communication wide open – between you and your employees, as well as between the company and its customers. Many are enacting weekly check-ins with staff to ensure no one feels isolated.
Wayne Sadin, chief digital officer at Affinitas Life, says that if you don’t have everything in place for a fully functioning, work-from-home plan right now, it is a good time to test what you do have and make optimizations.
There is so much uncertainty right now in the global economy and CIO’s will have to make difficult decisions to cut areas of their budgets. When companies get past the first phase of getting by with what they have the next phase should be to think about what a reliable and stable cloud communications solution would look like.
Many companies will have to push for faster adoption of IT Platforms that allow teams to collaborate more efficiently and effectively globally. Livtech is assisting companies evaluate these platforms and build ROI models that help justify the investment by delivering savings of up to 40% YoY.