Whether it’s a global pandemic or a one-off snow day, working from home can provide the true business continuity you need to keep on operating, whatever disaster is going on in the world, or locally. Here are the things you need to think about to make your business agile enough to work from home, or anywhere else.
Access to email and documents
With cloud options available, such as Office 365 and G Suite, you and your employees can access email, calendars, documents and drives from anywhere, via your phone, tablet or computer. Wherever there is Wi-Fi you can send and answer emails to each other and clients, access and work on all the documents you need to and still operate just as you would as if you were in the office.
G-Suite and Office 365 both offer the option of secure, full suite business applications that enable organisations to be agile and mobile. On the move, or from home, work can continue with full access to business documents and calendars. You can email just as you did before, from wherever you are. You can see colleagues’ calendars and book events and meetings, just as if it were a normal day in the office.
Your calls
Missing a call because someone isn’t in the office sat at their desk, is a thing of the past. Hosted telephony means you can answer calls to your office/business number from an app on your mobile or laptop; as well as enable conference calls so that many colleagues, all working from different locations, can collaborate and get tasks done.
Your calls will still be handled professionally, with the caller not knowing any different to if they’d called you in your office; and your numbers all stay the same.
Your staff
Maybe your staff have never worked from home before. Culturally, is it something you will face issues with when implementing amongst your workforce? If the answer is yes, then there are ways to introduce working from home gradually. For instance, some organisations have policies of staff working from home one day a week, for environmental and/or work-life-balance reasons.
The sooner you start to implement, really quite simple, policies, practices and levels of infrastructure to enable home working, the quicker you’ll be ready with the business agility you need to face any eventuality.
Not only can rush hour become a thing of the past, whatever the circumstances – flood, virus lockdown or pyjama day, your meetings, your work and your communication can all carry on just as they need to, with no loss of service to the customers you serve.
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