Are you holding your head in your hands today because you have woken to a barrage of calls from employees stranded at home due to the snow and poor traffic conditions. Unpredictable weather patterns are making it more and more difficult for business owners to feel confident in their business continuity strategies. From snow-storms to flash-flooding, the wrath of Mother Nature poses a serious threat to continuity, no matter the industry.
Not only does the lack of employees in your office affect productivity but ultimately, cost & customer satisfaction too.
Thankfully, with the right IT infrastructure and support, there is a way to ensure your company can continue its business activities regardless of weather conditions or indeed, any other incident which could lead to business interruption – welcome to flexible & remote working.
The concept of remote work is not new. The reason some companies still haven’t been practicing it all along is simple: they couldn’t. The technology just wasn’t there. Nowadays, good work no longer happens only from 9am to 5pm in offices within cubicles. A key transition to remote working is going from traditional synchronous collaboration to asynchronous collaboration.
To achieve that, you need the right technology to allow employees to work anytime, anywhere—it’s as simple as that! There are three main things required for flexible working:
Connectivity – Having a good internet connection
Devices – The rise of tablets and phones makes it far less cumbersome to carry around a big laptop and work on
Applications – There are great range of apps that you can use to help you work efficiently as you work on the go.
With some many ‘business apps’ out there, it can be hard to figure out the good from the bad. That’s why we’ve pulled together a selection of handy apps to help you work smarter, faster and more effectively, with benefits you can see immediately.
Group video meetings and voice calls are made easy with Zoom. Zoom offers a full suite of video conferencing and communication tools for businesses.
Key features
Office 365 enables your team to work wherever they are. Whether they are based in the office or visiting our customers, Microsoft Office 365 is cloud-based which means that all of your team’s emails, documents, contacts and shared calendars are always with them. And always up-to-date.
Key features
Slack is a messaging platform designed for teams and it’s the ideal communication tool for remote workers. Instant messaging is organised into channels, which team members can join and leave, as needed, so nobody receives messages or notifications irrelevant to them. Team members can also chat outside of main topics in separate threads which prevents these messages from interfering with the most project-centric conversations.
Key features
Box is a powerful online storage and collaboration tool that allows businesses of all sizes to securely share and store content online. With Box you can share and collaborate easily, both inside and outside the company. And with the Box app on all your smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, your team can work together virtually anywhere.
Key features
Trello is the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything, trusted by millions of people from all over the world.
Key features
McAfee Multi Access is an online security app that can protect all your devices at once, against viruses, spam, malware and identity theft. It combines a powerful suite of protective services from the world’s largest security company to protect your phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers, both Macs and PCs.
Key features
We have many years of experience helping businesses improve their efficiency with business apps and technology that are right for their business and that performs just as it should.
Get in touch with us today on 01748 835599 for a free no-obligation chat to see how we can help you and your business adapt to remote and flexible working.
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