Work has changed for good

Technology advances: How work has changed for good

Communications technology and the way that businesses use it has been advancing at a rapid pace for the last decade. It was 2011 when Microsoft bought Skype and then four years later that Skype for Business was released. A mere two years on in 2017 Microsoft Teams was launched, and Skype for Business was on the way out. In 2020 the demand for unified communications soared worldwide due to the pandemic. Did your requirements for increased communications this year match that of other businesses similar to yours? Did you deploy Microsoft Teams as a tool to keep your business going?

We asked the leaders of our SME customers across a wide range of sectors, together with our own team of tech experts about their lockdown communications experience. We took the collective feedback and created a report, crammed full of interesting statistics.

Communicating face to face

Whilst face-to-face and email remain the most popular ways of communicating with customers, prospects and colleagues, applications like Teams increased the use of video conferencing and persistent chat whilst we could not be in the same location. But this surge in communications apps has also been coming for other reasons.

Partly due to the technology changing and partly the new generations coming into the workplace, the amount of time people spend in the office compared to other locations has also been changing. A demand for more flexibility and working from wherever has become a top priority for people looking to change job. The phrase ‘work life balance’ has become much more popular, and regularly appears in blogs and articles around employee well-being, the changes in the office and pieces on generational changes at work.

WFH – The new buzzword

Too many people the pandemic has proved that they can work effectively and efficiently from home, can avoid the daily commute and spend more time with family and loved ones. You can be sure that working from home and work life balance will be top of mind for many employees now if it wasn’t before. What this means for business is the big question of whether they will be happy with a hybrid working environment once the pandemic passes and how can they best support it. There is certainly a lot for business leaders to think about, with the numbers of people working from home expected to double.

Many businesses had to rush to deploy technology from multiple vendors in order to support their staff working from home, which has led to application overload for staff and IT. One thing that came out of the report is that businesses know that their technology landscape must change going forward. Consolidation of the most suited technology for their requirements being supplied by service providers who will support them at every step of the way is necessary. What ever they decide to use going forward must be easy and enjoyable to use.

Our in depth report not only gives you the facts and stats of how other companies have fared this year, both good and bad, but it discusses the important issues of what you should be doing to move forward and grow next year and beyond.