How to enable flexible working and increase productivity

With work wise week in full swing – which celebrates and promotes modern “smarter” working practices such as agile, flexible, remote and mobile working, as well as working from home – BBC 5 Live Wake Up To Money has revealed research from the ONS Labour Force Survey which shows that there has been a 74 per cent increase in the number of people working from home between 2008 – 2018.

The article covers some great points around why flexible working has positive effects on flexibility and productivity, if your considering flexible working in your organisation can you be sure your business software and communications are fit for purpose?

Here are a few considerations and approaches to ensure that your employees can remain productive from home and aren’t hampered by connectivity or mobile handsets with poor network coverage.

What your employee needs: access to documents, connectivity and support 

Office 365 enables your staff to access their files and applications from anywhere, so this could be at home but likewise the office or at a client’s site. It will help your employees to collaborate more effectively on documents too.  

Sage CRM can help your sales and marketing teams collaboratively manage your entire contact base in a single place, which avoids duplication of work and empowering your teams to work faster and smarter, even when not in the office.  

A key benefit of flexible working is the productivity it drives. However, this can be hampered if your employee has poor network coverage. We work with our customers to suggest mobile packages that consider network coverage of employees when working away from the office, especially if working from home regularly.   

It’s also important to remember, if introducing new software, solutions and procedures that your staff are fully trained so that they have the confidence to use the software in and out of the office. Our expert team can also provide training on existing software and advice on how to utilise software that enables better flexible working.  

What you need to support and manage a flexible workforce: visibility, control and a connected workforce, wherever they are  

MaaS360 is a mobile device management solution that enables you to manage and safeguard your business’s mobile devices, wherever they are, all from a single screen. It also offers a wealth of security features that can provide you with peace of mind. 

Hosted PBX/VoIP is valuable to keep internal telephones within a business connected together, as well as enabling shared outside lines. It also has another of benefits specific to supporting flexible working such as hot desking and routing a number to a mobile, ensuring you can stay connected when away from the office.

As well as ensuring your have the right type of broadband at your office we can enable business broadband to be supplied to residential homes to support staff who work remotely. This ensures they are able to effectively use cloud services.  

If you’re looking to increase productivity and enable staff to work from home, contact us to see how we can integrate business communications and systems into your organisation to help you implement more flexible working practices