Flexible working is something that has been used across various businesses for years. It allows employees to work flexible hours so they can arrange their work life around personal life to assist them with things like child care. Working flexible hours can help an employee to create the perfect work-life balance, which not only helps them to manage their personal lives, but helps promote positive mental health and enables them to work more efficiently too.
More recently, the working lives of many people have undergone some serious adjustments. Thankfully, flexible working has enabled us to adapt to the unusual circumstances that we have found ourselves in so we can continue to live our lives to the best of our ability.
The Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 has forced schools, healthcare, childcare, leisure facilities and many more supportive businesses to temporarily close. This means that those of us with children are left trying to care for our families and carry out our jobs simultaneously. We have also had to change our shopping habits, popping to the shops is not as simple as it used to be and those that are shielding face even more challenges. This has made balancing work and personal life more difficult than ever before.
Fortunately, many businesses have been able to continue to operate effectively and many of us have been able to remain in employment. This is where flexible working has helped us to stay afloat.
By altering our working hours, we have been able to make adjustments so that we can take care of the children and organise our shopping while fitting in our work at more convenient times.
Remote and Flexible Working
We are advocates for remote working; it offers a host of benefits to businesses and helps both support and motivate employees. Thanks to modern software and technology, we can access video conferencing, collaborative tools and the company database from anywhere in the world – features that most of us couldn’t have lived without over the last few months. Remote and flexible working is proven to increase productivity, morale and happiness, saves money on overheads and gives companies access to a bigger pool of talent.
However, like any business critical system, if not managed properly, communication can fail and leave us and our customers in the dark. Fortunately there are a range of tools that are readily available for companies of all sizes to assist them in their transition to remote and flexible working and help them to adapt to the new age of work practices. We can work from the kitchen, the living room, the home office or the business office and still maintain critical access to everything we need.
How Cloud Telephony Can Support Remote and Flexible Working
Cloud telephony gives us all the tools we need to work flexible hours from any location effectively. It offers a host of features to support us in our working lives including:
- Mobility
- With cloud communications, your work phone number can be accessed from anywhere, whether it’s your desk phone at home or in the office, mobile phone, tablet or laptop. This means wherever your agents are, they have access to their calls.
- Omnichannel Communication
- Cloud communications platforms also give you access to emails, chat facilities such as Facebook messages, webchats and WhatsApp messages and more all from one piece of hosted software. They also give agents the ability to access all the information they need to deal with customer enquiries quickly and efficiently, all through the same piece of software.
- Flexibility
- Hosted telephony solutions are extremely flexible. Users can be added and removed as required and getting everything set up is extremely easy. Remote workers can be set up and ready to go within minutes without even leaving their home or having to have any face-to face interactions with installers.
It’s safe to say that we won’t be able to return to “normal” for quite some time. Therefore, it’s essential that we put a communications strategy in place to ensure that our employees can work flexible hours from remote locations without causing any additional stress to them or the business.
However, don’t look at this as an inconvenience or a necessity but an opportunity to embrace the advantages that remote and flexible working have to offer.
Kane Can Help
Kane Communications are here to help. We provide free, impartial advice, every step of the way to help you find the best solution and can deliver the perfect cloud-based telephony and collaboration system with all the features necessary to aid remote and flexible working.
Many of the systems we offer can be deployed remotely. This means we can get you up and running quickly without needing to meet face-to-face or come into direct contact with anyone.
We understand that no two businesses are the same and use our knowledge and experience to deliver secure and reliable phone systems to help you provide your customers with an experience that is second to none, even when your circumstances can change in an instant.
Please feel free to drop us a line to discuss your needs in more detail.
