How to stay connected with a remote workforce

Connect your team in a meaningful way

What makes business communication meaningful, productive, and effective? Generally, your employees need to:

• Speak with, meet, and engage with employees and coworkers when needed

• Work and collaborate with them in a way that makes everyone productive

• Easily share information while keeping it secured.

• Have visibility into project status and task assignment to ensure well-defined roles and responsibilities and stay productive

According to a survey of new and experienced remote workers in the U.S., remote work, collaboration, and productivity don't always go smoothly.¹

• Nearly 1/3 of workers reported that being away from the office diminishes their productivity

• 45% of new remote workers said their sense of belonging suffers working at home

• 2x more new remote workers find it more difficult to communicate and coordinate with coworkers than those who regularly work from home

Collaboration has gotten easier with a host of cloud applications and communication tools, but keeping your people productive and engaged remains a challenge, especially in our ever-evolving world of business.

But how can we do that?

Videoconferencing

The March 2020 spike in videoconferencing searches makes this a no-brainer for where we start.

You can find a lot of videoconferencing tools on the market. Some are free. For a business though, you should investigate whether any of the communications tools you currently use offer videoconferencing.

Why? It’s easier to expand the use of a tool that employees are familiar with than get everyone using a new one. For example, if you use Microsoft 365™, you may have access to Teams™ or be able to easily expand your license to include it. This would reduce the learning curve more than introducing some new third-party platform, even if it were free.

With all the videoconferencing tools available today, it seems like video meetings should be a seamless and unexceptional way of getting work done. But in a KRC Research survey commissioned by Ricoh, more than 80 percent of workers did not agree that videoconferencing and real-time collaboration was “very easy” for them to do.

Using a video conferencing console that requires no special knowledge or complicated hookups to operate can help remove barriers to collaboration. all-in-one style tools, which can include everything from a camera to an address book, can be used both in the field and in the office — any room with an electrical outlet, really — providing the same level of connectivity no matter where they are.

And if we’re being honest with ourselves, videoconferencing is here to stay. We should approach it as a cost of doing business now and ensure it meets all your security and compliance requirements.

Cloud networking

Cloud networking and services make sharing, accessing, and communicating information simple. Employees can reach public cloud services for critical business tools like Outlook, file sharing like Dropbox™, or CRMs like Salesforce – anywhere they have an internet connection. Private clouds can be reached through a computer with an internet connection and a VPN.

For simplified cloud hosting, many companies turn to managed cloud services. To learn more about managed cloud services, check out our article “8 benefits of managed cloud services.”

Integrated end-user communication services

Videoconferencing and cloud applications and networking empower users. But there are other tools to consider as well to keep your remote workforce connected. Some of these are: