The inevitable increase in Working from Home and the move to VoIP

As you are surely aware, working from home (WFH) has been the primary way that white collar, office-based jobs are being handled during stay-at-home rules. As everything began to shut down with the virus, WFH–what used to be called “telecommuting,” became the only safe option for work to be conducted.

For companies that had already been utilizing WFH policies, they probably already had the tools and devices selected to make the transition from office to off-site thoroughly transparent. For those organizations that eschewed WFH, being forced into it overnight probably created a lot of dissonance, as workers struggled to find the ways to conduct their jobs using tools designed for office-based work.  No matter what your situation, now is the time to start adopting technologies that facilitate work from home, because even when things begin to “open up” it is likely that even those who once looked askance at WFH will have discovered it is a productive and potentially money-saving approach to conducting business. Right now WFH isn’t just an option and you need to be as agile and productive as possible. Old tools won’t cut it.  And don’t view what you are doing to facilitate WFH today as just papering over a temporary problem. WFH will never go away. WFH may decrease, but it will probably never drop back to the levels prior to the start of the Covid crisis. And even as companies adopt only partial WFH, they may continue to move away from permanently assigned offices/cubicles and adopt “hotelling” style workplaces. Inherently, these will require VoIP technology to be functional.

One of the simplest and most significant changes you can make to facilitate off-site collaboration and improve productivity is the adoption of the VoIP telephony model. It is time to abandon that on-site PBX and move ahead to internet-based voice communication and the array of new collaborative tools that accompany this communications model.