Remote Working: The New Normal

In the space of just a few months, the world has been turned on its metaphorical axis. Government policy has been made at breakneck speed to limit the spread of coronavirus. Businesses and public sector organisations have been knocked sideways. Of those that survived, nearly all have had to alter the way they and their employees work.

The impact of Covid-19 is mounting, politically, economically, culturally and socially. But while many yearn for a return to normal, others are considering what the new normal could, and should, look like.

Although the full ramifications for business are not yet clear, the lockdown has provided clear evidence that many companies and contact centres can continue to operate, while the majority of staff stay home to wo

A successful work from home experiment?

Urged by ministers and public health officials to stay home to protect lives as part of the lockdown across the UK, more people than ever have worked from home.

A survey by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed that in the ten days up to April 13th, 2020, 49% of adults in employment in Great Britain worked from home. That’s in stark contrast to an ONS survey in 2019, which showed that only 5% of the UK’s 32.6m people in employment worked mainly from home. In the period between January and December 2019, less than 30% of the UK workforce said they’d worked from home at any point.

Some organisations will have found the enforced period of remote working a successful experiment, as they managed to continue relatively smooth operations, perhaps even thriving, while staff worked from home. Other businesses which were less prepared will have been left desperate for employees to return to their offices and get back to full working speed, partly because reliable and secure remote working options were absent when the UK lockdown was put in place, virtually overnight.

The ONS survey suggests that more than 80% of businesses which continued to operate in the fortnight after lockdown took additional steps to manage their workforce as a result of COVID-19. But many businesses, including contact centres (see page 8), insisted that their staff continue to come to work during the lockdown.

Growing numbers of organisations and contact centre operators may find, as they crunch the numbers in the coming weeks and months, that remote working offers opportunities for growth which their rivals have already seized. This may provoke a broader shift in corporate thinking. Others, rather than pressing ahead with a planned move to larger premises in a costly new office block, might discover savings can be made by turning this unexpected foray into home working into a long-term strategic shift.

A study by IBM in April 2020 appeared to signal a shift in attitudes towards home working, with growing numbers of workers less willing to use public transport. Among 25,000 US adults, 75% also wished to be able to work more often from home, and more than half – 54% – wanted it to be their primary way of working.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, a survey of GB and EU employers by Willis Towers Watson, suggests 15% considered that home working as a result of coronavirus had had a positive impact on productivity, with another 15 percent saying there had been no impact. Only 3% of employers thought there had been a large negative impact.

As a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and for a multitude of reasons, remote working could become the new normal.

The coronavirus pandemic sent shockwaves through the business sector, in Britain and around the globe. The financial impact for individual businesses and diverse sectors across the entire economy is still being assessed.

Forced to adapt to an unprecedented set of lockdown rules, many organisations – among them key contact centres – struggled from the outset to keep employees connected from home because of inadequate resilience planning, outdated technology or poor network systems.

Thousands of UK organisations were not set up to deal with the lockdown fallout and were left scrambling to keep operations afloat. Many firms will have made swift decisions, for the right reasons, to cope with the coronavirus outbreak, but without the time or space to properly understand the impact of some of those crucial decisions.

As a result, they may have failed to utilise the best systems and technologies available to them and, with the benefit of hindsight, will find some of their decisions could hinder rather than assist their remote working processes and employees.

As organisations took urgent decisions about how best to hold their meetings online, using an array of different platforms – Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, etc – a string of security concerns and privacy issues emerged over some video conferencing systems. Within some organisations, as different departments chose different systems there will have been little time for thought about the the way in which those platforms would integrate into the office network or systems, or how they might impact data security and GDPR regulations.

In the haste to make swift decisions, many will have plumped for technology which, at the time, was considered best for their organisation, given the circumstances, but may have inadvertently opened their network security to unsafe and insecure practices because of the way in which employees access systems remotely.
The rapid nature of the lockdown in Britain turned normal boardroom decision-making on its head. These decisions could have crucial consequences for business outcomes in the future.

Remote working also allows organisations to collaborate easily and to react quickly to demand, whether it’s adding or reducing capacity or taking and sharing overflow capacity with partners.

This type of shared community cloud and digital technology service is being pioneered in Wales, where FourNet’s ‘Connecting Wales’ initiative enables all public sector organisations – from councils to health boards – to share new technologies, unified communications, omnichannel contact centres, dual language services and even workforce optimisation tools. Seamless technology integration and cloud-based contact centres enable agents to work from home, some in remote rural communities where jobs are scarce.

Delivering the appropriate tools for your employees to work securely and remotely, when the need arises, leads to a happier workforce, more engaged teams, increased job satisfaction and retention, higher productivity and a better work life balance. It also means less commuting time – a bonus which reduces the risk of your employees becoming unwell from germs picked up on public transport, lowering the likelihood of sick days.

Given the correct technology, contact centre agents working for businesses of all shapes and sizes can be enabled to work remotely. Although many organisations permitted and even encouraged staff to do so during the lockdown period, a significant number of contact centre businesses insisted on employees turning up to the office.

ithin just eight days of the UK lockdown being imposed, FourNet – working with innogy’s internal IT team – assisted 2,000 employees to work from home, with full functionality, including voice recording, and workforce management (WFM) tools. In regular times,
such a wholesale move would normally take 12 weeks.

Since FourNet provides a fully Managed Service solution for innogy, there was no additional cost to the utility company for the switch to remote working.

Across the board, whether agents are working for blue light services or dealing with sales, complaints, admin, or payments, they should be able to work as efficiently in a virtual contact centre as they can from an office – provided they have the correct technology and fully integrated systems to assist.

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) non-emergency 111 service was among those experiencing unprecedented call volumes. It’s 111 agents were already enabled with remote working tools, which were swiftly put into action. But SECAmb also wanted its own IT team to work from home during the peak period. With FourNet’s expert assistance, the request was complete in just 48 hours.

Contact centres with remote working capabilities pre-lockdown will have fared much better than many of their rivals. But could they have done even better? Did all of their agents’ systems integrate with each other or was time wasted each day with outdated applications and endless screen switching?

Operators who were unable to work seamlessly through the coronavirus outbreak should be considering their options and planning for the future now.

Enabling contact centre agents to work remotely can help reduce office costs, cut agent attrition, improve work-life balance and cut sickness. With the right tools, managers working from home are just as able to monitor and analyse calls and workloads.

Virtual contact centres with agents and managers working remotely can include:

FourNet can help you with a raft of complex decisions you’ll need to make about the most appropriate technology solutions to allow your business to thrive in the new normal.

For successful remote working, we offer a range of unified communications, technology and managed service solutions, including: