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Why do so many companies have a do or die approach to flexible working? Many companies, especially those within the financial sector, are finally waking up to the need to put in place contingency plans for remote working in the event of a pandemic. If it will work in a crisis why are more companies not leveraging always available voice and data communications technology to deliver the same level of customer service while offering staff the flexible working environments that are proven to improve productivity?
Flexible working will be essential if organisations are to continue to operate effectively during a pandemic. So why not leverage the business continuity investment to drive down overheads, improve the working environment and adopt flexible working as standard business practice, asks Graham Chick, Chief Executive GemaTech?
New Threats
Over the past decade disaster recovery and business continuity plans have become increasingly sophisticated. However, such plans typically revolve around the loss of a building due to flood, fire, theft or terrorist attack, with complex arrangements designed to rehouse critical staff and provide rapid access to data and telephony systems offsite.
However, with the looming threat of a pandemic that could affect a high proportion of the working population, the building is not the problem – it is the people. There is a clear need to put in place technologies that can enable remote working to minimise infection rates while mitigating business risk.
At the first sign of a pandemic, many individuals will opt to stay at home in any event - choosing to be with and look after their families – despite what the best laid corporate plans may dictate. Indeed, it is expected that the initial response of civil authorities will be to discourage large gatherings of people. If organisations want to achieve business
as usual they must put in place solutions that provide not only access to key corporate data resources but also achieve a telephony solution that can replicate an office environment when staff are scattered across multiple remote locations.
Effective Operations
Without doubt, if and when an a pandemic hits, the authorities will strongly recommend home working. And while many companies can encourage – even support – staff to adopt broadband at home to enable access to core data systems, distributing the telephone calls is a tougher challenge. And those opting for Voice over IP (VoIP) as a simple solution will be disappointed: VoIP currently offers neither the security nor resilience to support business communication.
What is required is a solution that can automatically forward calls made to the traditional head office number – or individual DDI’s – to staff in their new location, wherever that may be. Furthermore, it also needs to be able to intelligently forward calls to a colleague should the intended recipient be unavailable.
Critically, this technology must be easy to use and set up, enabling organisations to remotely change call forwarding numbers and employee locations at the touch of a button. Furthermore, by locating the solution within the telephone exchange – a location that requires technical resilience of 99.999% up time – an organisation also has a solution in place to cope with the traditional business continuity requirements.
Embrace Flexibility
Employees should be encouraged to work at home intermittently to test the technology and their ability to communicate effectively with their co-workers. But if organisations are prepared to put in place facilities to enable employees to work from home in times of disaster or crisis, why can this same technology not be deployed on a day-to-day basis? Indeed, why do so many businesses have a do or die approach to flexible working?
Yet organisations continue to endure poor productivity as staff undertake ever longer commutes and struggle to adequately combine the work/life balance, a problem that leads to increasing levels of time off due to sickness or long term ill health. Furthermore the expensive office location represents a major overhead for many organisations. Does this make any kind of commercial sense?
Trusted Business
It is, however, understandable. As many start up companies have discovered, offering potential customers or suppliers a mobile number as contact raises immediate warning signals. Other businesses like the comfort of an office address and geographic number. They also prefer the lower cost geographic number to the far higher costs incurred when calling the location independent 0845 or 0870 numbers, which also have a whiff of suspicion about them.
With technology that can reroute even geographic numbers, however, the problem is overcome. An organisation can retain, if required, a smaller central office location – which will also support those individuals who prefer an office to home working. But the rest of the employees can be distributed across other lower cost offices or at home as required.
Even small organisations that prefer employees to be office based for most of the time can use this technology to more effectively manage staff time – enabling home working on the day of a hospital appointment, for example, or in response to a rail strike. It is this flexibility that fundamentally transforms productivity and avoids the massive overhead associated with time lost to day to day, as well as crisis, situations.
When, not if
While the scientific experts believe it is a question of when rather than if a flu pandemic will arrive, businesses cannot wait to put in place solutions to ensure business continuity. So why waste it? Flexible working should not be a perk. It should be just one more way organisations work effectively to meet contractual obligations. With the ubiquitous deployment of broadband and good firewall technologies the data component has become straightforward. Now, with the ability to replicate office based telephony across multiple, often changing, locations, organisations can begin to explore the value of flexible working in day-to-day business.