With World Cup fever gripping Britain, statistics from a survey by FIFA sponsor Continental Tyres indicate that nine million UK employees will call in sick using 31,850,000 excuses so they can watch the World Cup.
To combat this potential drop in productivity, businesses are being urged to introduce greater flexibility, as the Trades Union Congress believes that without it employers “run the risk of de-motivating staff and losing hours through unauthorised sick days”.
Commenting on the unique challenges faced by businesses during the World Cup, Piers Linney, joint CEO of Outsourcery said, “Businesses need to prevent absenteeism, and by adopting greater flexible working practices, they will benefit from a happier workforce while allowing their employees to be productive and patriotic at the same time.”
For those companies looking to introduce flexible working during the World Cup, Outsourcery, the UK’s leading cloud computing and unified communications (UC) provider, offers businesses access to the very latest hosted IT and communications solutions including Office Communicator – which gives access to instant messaging, presence and video ‘chat’ - and provides a low cost starter for those companies looking to embrace UC and take advantage of the increasing need for staff to work from multiple sites or from home.
Outsourcery’s solutions can provide secure remote access to business applications, so that staff working from home are as productive and receive the same functionality as colleagues working from their head office. Office Communicator (OC) allows businesses of any size to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and the key to this is the ‘presence’ feature which ‘looks’ into your Outlook calendar and clearly shows team members’ availability, thereby enabling staff to see where their colleagues are and contact them in the most effective way. The biggest benefit is the reduction in wasted phone calls, which saves time, money and ultimately drives greater efficiency. By allowing these companies access to business applications that are hosted at their £10 million data centre, Outsourcery is transforming the market, which allows businesses to introduce viable flexible practices.
“This month’s football extravaganza is the perfect opportunity to develop a forward thinking HR policy which we wholly subscribe to” said Piers Linney. For those not in a position to work from home, Outsourcery will be screening the games for the benefit of staff who want to watch, and as over 86% of our staff has access to a remote working solution and 100% have remote access to their email via Outlook Web Access, we can be flexible without it impacting on our customer support.”