Over the last few years, the workplace has changed drastically. With the effects of the pandemic forcing businesses to adapt to remote working environments, a new normal has been established that stretches beyond the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Employees have stayed working from home or adopted a hybrid model that splits their time in and out of the office.
In the face of this evolved landscape, business leaders must be able to deliver the same level of service, innovation, and high-quality offerings as they would in the traditional workplace. Effective business communications are at the core of these functions, so without appropriate collaboration techniques, your business risks falling short.
A lot of team collaboration software and applications have arisen and been adopted by businesses in order to facilitate this. These offer a great solution to facilitate hybrid and remote working, but with businesses sometimes having multiple platforms in use, new problems around efficiency become apparent. This is where unified communications (UC) can help.
What is unified communications?
Unified communications refer to a single, unified platform that integrates multiple communication tools into one, easy-to-use application. This includes voice calling and conferencing, instant messages, file sharing, and more. Your UC platform can also be integrated into your existing business systems, including project management software and customer relationship management applications.
The features of UC include:
- Availability statuses
- Scheduling
- Instant messaging and chat
- Integrated telephony
- Video calls and desktop sharing
- Conferencing
- Presence management
- File sharing and cloud storage
Unified communications benefits in a hybrid environment
1. Improved team collaboration
Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of any successful business. Your team is undoubtedly full of talented individuals ready to offer meaningful contributions, so helping to facilitate their ability to do so means you can access a wealth of new opportunities.
With UC, you can provide a collaboration hub with useful features that help make teamwork as effective as it would be with everyone in the office. People can see when others are online and get in touch as needed, files can be shared instantly, and video conferencing creates a space for group communication.
2. Enhances productivity
Team collaboration tools are a must in a remote working environment, but too many can be a hindrance rather than a help. When your team spends a lot of time switching between different applications and devices, it can add up to a lot of downtime.
UC allows for seamless transitions between communication modes no matter if the user is on a desktop computer, smartphone, or laptop. For example, if team members are discussing something over chat and want to talk in more detail, they can switch to video conferencing with a click of a button. Or, rather than waiting for an important file attachment to come through over email, your staff can receive it instantly through file transfer.
Plus, the fact that UC can be integrated with other systems helps further minimise the tools your team needs to operate. Everything they need is in one place, leading to greater productivity and faster task completion.
3. A more consistent user experience
Regardless of whether they’re in the office, at home, or on the road, you want your team’s performance to be at a consistently high level. Having to adapt to different experiences in different environments creates a productivity barrier, impacting their ability to complete day-to-day tasks. If someone is splitting their time between home and the office, you don’t want their at-home days to be any less efficient. This can be a big impact to your bottom line and even affect customer service. Unified communications can allow you to create consistency, making high-quality outputs possible from wherever your workforce is connecting from. This also reduces confusion and helps to maintain work efficiencies and processes.
4. More reliable connections
Unified communications are cloud powered, which means your team can access its features whenever they need them. For example, if a staff member is away from their home or business network, this won’t stop them from accessing UC tools.
Plus, some unified communications platforms come with built in failover solutions. This means key processes and operations can keep moving even when network or data centres go down. Otherwise, if the issue is the UC platform, addressing this becomes much easier for IT teams since it’s a single application they need to deal with.
5. Greater peace of mind
With more and more business processes happening online, your data is at greater risk of compromise from a cyber attack. However, it becomes a lot easier to keep your tools secure when they’re all in one place, rather than spread across various platforms. This helps to minimise potential access points – which is particularly important when your team is connecting from a variety of locations – and helps make it much easier to maintain compliance around customer data. As your first and last line of defence, UC helps to ease pressures on your team around their cyber security obligations and aims to reduce the chance of breaches caused by human error.
Talk to TBTC QLD Central and Sunshine Coast about unified communications solutions
If you’re ready to get your hybrid team collaborating effectively, we can help. We’ll get to know your business, including your unique challenges, growth plans, and responsibilities, so we can help find a solution that suits the way you operate. Reach out to us today, and let’s get solving.
