Using the Internet and social media to stay connected to those whom your business depends on is a standard practice of any self-respecting enterprise. Enormous attention is paid to maintaining relationships with clients and customers through web portals, yet it’s increasingly crucial for companies to utilize this connectivity to not only find talent but further workforce efficiency.
Just like wrangling up and making sense of consumer data, today’s business leaders ought to be determined to organize the hodge-podge of workforce communications to more optimally deliver and receive information within their organization. The benefits of doing so are too good to pass up.
Working in the cloud means flexibility – and some challenges to tackle, too
Optimizing your mobile workforce for reaping the goodness of the cloud begins with the assumption that your business seeks out individuals who will likely be working remotely. The pros for such a system are a tired subject of discussion but we’ll briefly recap for the unfamiliar few.
Using the web and cloud tools to find and employ talent from anywhere enables you to put better-skilled players on the roster, replace them faster when needed, and reach out to a wider range of clients and customers at a faster pace than would otherwise be possible.
Where many startups and seasoned entrepreneurs alike tend to stumble is the communications strategies of such a mobile workforce, according to Masergy, a Texas-based firm focused on introducing cloud network solutions to enterprises. Lacking a core “headquarters” presents a series of communications challenges for most companies with remote employees. Ensuring the fastest delivery and receiving of information, invoices, and instructions gets difficult when everyone is scattered about.
Unified communications is the key
Too often business leaders make the mistake of thinking the solution is to wrangle workers under “email only” rules. It’s a great theory on paper but truth be told for a mobile workforce to work effectively some consideration must be made for the fact that the preferred method of communications for people varies from hour to hour if not minute to minute. Not to mention, a vast amount of solutions seemingly found only through contacting co-workers can instead be accessed with greater ease via unified communications.
Unified communications is exactly that: a system wherein all forms of information sharing, whether it be through phone, email, video, video conferencing, or instant message, are available under one umbrella. In order to streamline communications between and among remote workers, having a unified communications system is critical. It’s a way, the way, for multiple team members executing vastly varying tasks across a wide range of turf to be able to work quickly as a team.
Perhaps most useful of all in the application of unified communications to your mobile workforce-based enterprise is the element of a presence service. Functioning as a monitor of user action or inaction, presence information allows for remote workers to know when they are effectively reaching out to a fellow employee and when they’re better off finding solutions elsewhere. In addition this service provides an opportunity for employers to audit remote performance without infringing on employee privacy.
Unified communications are undoubtedly the key to fixing the kinks of mobile workforce communication. Integrating the many methods of messaging and collecting the references needed for most solutions under one easy-to-access system are no-brainers if your goal is to speed up the problem-solving duties of your cloud workers.
