In 2019, remote employment secured its position as more than just a trend but as a mainstay in American business. With 62 percent professionals working on a remote basis either full-time or at some frequency, according to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work Survey, remote work was quickly becoming the norm.

In 2020, this flexible option has abruptly become mandatory. In the economics of the Coronavirus pandemic, organizations were forced to switch in order to survive. And for this purpose, they need to keep their remote teams virtually connected, no matter how spread out they are. Not only to drive connection between employees, but also to ensure productivity.

Remote employees can be isolated, lonesome, or lacking in camaraderie and interactions with their colleagues. Even before the physical distancing trend started, research found that loneliness was the second biggest challenge for remote workers. What’s more, respondents said their third greatest challenge is collaboration and communication.

Unified Communications and Collaboration

If your business operates remotely to at least some extent and in order to tackle your team’s challenges of working from home, you need software that will make collaboration and communication possible. And this should also lead to a boost in productivity and to less lonely employees.

On the other hand, two-thirds of employees waste as much as one hour at work alternating between devices. This amounts to 32 days of lost productivity. When you consider the financial cost, you see that this is an issue worth addressing, especially because your remote workers constantly need to communicate while using various devices.

Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service (UCaaS) centralizes communication in one streamlined platform. More importantly, UCaaS is accessible from anywhere since it’s cloud-based, so remote workers can join from any location and any device connected to the internet. 

Such platforms are an absolute necessity for all remote teams, allowing everyone to communicate efficiently, stay connected, share documents, have virtual team meetings, and much more. More importantly, research compiled by Wrike in 2019 found that 85 percent of employees who use virtual communication and collaboration tools are satisfied in their current roles.

While there are many collaboration platforms on the market, Hubgets delivers the whole communication stack: from advanced IP PBX telephony features to browser-based instant communication and collaboration channels. Use it to:

• Make voice calls from your desktop, mobile or directly from the browser.
• Video call with your employees, customers or business partners directly in the browser.
• Chat one-to-one or one-to-many (group chat) with file transfer and screen sharing from the browser.
• Setup an auto-attendant (IVR) for your business and multiple queues where you can be contacted by customers and partners.
• Host conferences with employees, customers or business partners.
• Benefit from the advanced contact center features for local and remote workers.
• Centralize your company’s communication in one unified platform, available online, regardless of location.
• Keep your employees engaged and updated through the Team Board. Moreover, you can also use it to smoothen the onboarding of new team members.
• Take care of your external communication flows. Hubgets users don’t need to give out their phone number to be reached. With Hubgets Page, business partners and customers can get in touch with them in real-time on chat, voice and video. For free, from the browser, without installing any software.

So instead of managing multiple communication platforms, stick with one that makes it easy for everyone to stay in touch, no matter where they are.

Connecting the disconnected

When the members of a team are connected to one another with the right tools, they can work toward a common purpose, vision and goals. They’re also able to access information quickly and may even feel less lonely.

In our digital world, there are many tools you can use to ensure connectivity of both on-premises and remote workers. Use such platforms to bring your team together under one digital roof to drive collaboration, productivity, and engagement. And stay safe 🙂