By Rahul Sharma, Director – Managing Director – India & SAARC, LogMeIn
As confirmed COVID-19 cases cross the mark of 1500 in the country, more businesses and corporate organisations are ramping up remote working orders. The provision has been implemented at most of the workplaces to encourage social distancing that can curb the spread of coronavirus infections and avoid lost productivity. Although, it’s not uncommon for organisations to allow their employees to work from home once or twice a week, the practice has suddenly become the new normal during this epidemic. Employers are now creating remote working policies to manage and monitor the process.
Evolution of remote working
A decade ago, most employers would have hesitated at the idea of employees requesting frequent working from home options. Their major concern was losing their productivity considering they would not be under constant supervision by co-workers and supervisors. It was the lack of technology that restricted this policy only for the telemarketing and customer service positions. Today, with the ubiquity of communication technology and most business applications available through cloud services, remote working has become an accepted practice in many offices, especially during times of crisis.
So what exactly is making the transition of the bulk of work from the office to home, an easy process?
The country’s business ecosystem is constantly undergoing major modifications driven by increased digitalisation. While this has been working in favour of the employees to a great extent, businesses are required to adopt a dynamic communication system that integrates internal and external workplace communication tools. The dawn of advanced technologies like cloud computing, AI, machine learning, and IoT are helping the businesses redefine the underlying IT infrastructure, which is simultaneously enabling them to eliminate the technical barriers and costs involved.
For any organisation to thrive in the modern business environment, seamless communication strategies are essential and in the present crisis scenario tools like video conferencing become essential. Videoconferencing ensures face-to-face experience without the environmental impact of traveling somewhere to be face-to-face. Platforms offering video conferencing enable unified collaboration opportunities with screen sharing, chat, transcriptions and recoding to ensure uninterrupted productivity regardless of where the employee is present.
However, there is a major difference between scheduled remote working and allowing unexpected provisions of working for home policies to every employee in an organisation in the wake of the spreading coronavirus threat. Large enterprises as well as the small and medium-sized will from now on want to keep their technology in place to enable remote working.
Cloud based Software as a Solution (SaaS) products certainly make having the latest technologies and security systems available far easier offering businesses flexible, mobile, efficient and productive ways for companies to have their people remotely work in a crisis. Companies also need to consider not just video conferencing and remote IT security, but also remote access now.
No longer are more and more people working from home, we’ve now seen that almost all are now doing it if they have the capability. So companies need to give their people fast, easy, and secure remote access solutions enabling professionals to instantly access their computers they are using at home from anywhere to correct IT issues and update applications. Also, employees need to be able to remote into a system within seconds and access files, programs, and applications from home to stay fully connected and productive even away from the office.
We have now come way ahead of the old 9-5 physical setting in an office. With simplified communication platforms becoming easier to access, employees can ensure effective business communication anytime and anywhere. And, agile businesses that can integrate such solutions to maintain business growth during a time that’s stretching every company to the limit, but should see them now develop new ways of working and engaging with customers in the future.