Staff illness is something that all businesses have to overcome at some point. It’s inevitable that every member of staff will fall ill during their career and require time off work and, unfortunately, these are seldom isolated incidents. It only takes one member of staff to struggle through their symptoms, put on a brave face and fight their way into the office for your whole team to be struck down with the same illness. While a reluctance to take a sick day shows a fighting attitude and good work ethic, an epidemic in the workplace could lead to missed deadlines, a decline in customer service, loss of revenue and ultimately, damage to your staff’s wellbeing and those close to them.
With the recent outbreak of the Coronavirus, the likelihood of business downtime becomes more severe and looks to be an almost certainty in the coming weeks and months. Companies are faced with making a proactive decision to help them protect individual employee health, keep critical work on track and prepare for the potential disruption to business while staff are sent home to stop the virus from spreading.
Many companies are being forced to revisit policies, consider new technologies, cancel conferences and restrict business travel. We are also encouraged to consider remote working as an option, allowing our staff to stay out of harm’s way from this potentially deadly virus.
These precautions all make perfect sense. But how can we adhere to these practices while ensuring our businesses continue to operate at their best?
Unified Communications
Ultimately, we need to be prepared for anything. Having the right software and procedures in place, a clear plan of action and the right tools to support a remote or virtual workforce will help us stay afloat and give us a significant competitive advantage.
Fortunately, we are in the age of collaboration. Regardless of potential threats to business, virtual collaboration is already becoming increasingly popular and a variety of cutting edge tools are available, such as Horizon Collaborate, to help us communicate with our colleagues and customers quickly, efficiently and across a variety of different communications platforms. These tools are available and accessible to businesses of any size, allowing our staff to communicate with our customers efficiently whether they are in the office, out in the field or at home.
Business Benefits
Horizon Collaborate offers a number of key benefits to help businesses endure the potential circumstances that epidemics such as the Coronavirus create.
- Instant Messaging
- Staff and customers can chat online, reducing email inefficiencies and allowing them to communicate quickly and efficiently.
- Video Calling
- Video calls can be made from desktop or mobile devices creating a visual communication experience from anywhere.
- Presence
- Horizon Collaborate’s “Presence” feature shows a user’s personal status such as ‘available’, ‘busy’, ’meeting’ and ‘away’ which helps determine the best way to communicate, regardless of whether they are in the same location.
- Ad-hoc and Planned Conferencing
- Quick and easy multi-party collaboration using My Room, a personal and fully managed conferencing space for voice, video and sharing, can be used to host conferences. This allows teams, customers, and prospective clients to collaborate without the risk of meeting face-to-face.
The reality is that a pandemic such as the Coronavirus could happen at any point. OK, so this is the first incident of its kind since 2003, but it most likely will not be the last and we could easily find ourselves searching for ways in which our business can continue to operate smoothly in times of crisis.
Not only does a communications tool like Horizon Collaborate help you stay afloat in times of crisis, but it also improves the workplace experience, reduces business costs and complexity, helps to streamline IT operations, improves responsiveness and can help you to attract the next generation of candidates.
Find out more about Horizon Collaborate here.
It’s essential for any business to keep everyone connected and in the loop, regardless of whether they are in the middle of a crisis or not. Unified communications and collaborative tools can do just that. Make sure you are prepared and get something in place to help you deal with anything that is thrown at you. Although Horizon Collaborate can be deployed very quickly, don’t wait until it’s too late.
Kane is currently offering Collaborate free for the first four months, with no long-term contract, it’s just based on a monthly rolling subscription.
Kane has worked with a range of different suppliers to provide successful communications packages for a variety of different businesses. We pride ourselves on getting to know the individual needs of each and every business to ensure that we advise and deliver the best possible communications solution to help organisations fine-tune their communication practices, improve their customer experience and prepare for times of uncertainty.
If you would like to learn more about the collaboration tools that are available and how you can use them to your advantage, please feel free to get in touch on 02921 111202 or sales@porthlas.com.
