A Survival Guide for Business Owners. Today the coronavirus epidemic continued to prompt new travel restrictions and emergency declarations around the world, with the U.S. State Department on Sunday warning citizens against cruise travel and Italy resorting to a massive lockdown affecting millions of people. Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies are probably going to become the new normal. Not only could it become a temporary law, but it's also the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level?
Here at Safe Haven, we are seeing certain technology buying behaviors that are the tech equivalent of loading up on bottled water, batteries, and toilet paper. For traditional businesses that still have an on-premise phone system, email server, or file servers, you're going to need to get to the Cloud if you're going to get work-at-home enabled. Here is a quick list of "ingredients" we've compiled to help step you through this transition. Not to worry, you got this!
Ingredient 1: Usable Broadband / High-Speed Internet
The first thing you need to do as a business owner is to survey your employees to see what kind of broadband they are using at home. In order to run business voice and video calls, they're going to need plenty of throughputs. A good standard that should provide enough horsepower is 50 Mb down, 5 Mb upload speed. If your employees aren't getting those kinds of speeds, you may consider offering to subsidize the difference to upgrade them from their current plan to 50 Mb x 5 Mb. There are some cable, best-effort fiber, and 4G internet providers that will allow your executives and other employees to get a business-class service delivered to their residence.
Ingredient 2: Move Your Phone System to the Cloud
You've known about UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) for some time, and now maybe the time to finally make that jump. In the past, many on-premise phone system users cited quality issues related to running essential traffic over the internet as a reason to NOT move to the cloud. Those issues have more than been addressed through SD-WAN technology, which fixes packet loss and other factors that degrade voice and video quality.
Here are the key features of UCaaS that will enable your work-at-home employees by leveraging the benefits of unified communications in the cloud:
1. Video Conferencing - if your team is forced to stay at home, having a high-definition video conferencing bridge will enable you to stay connected as a team and to stay connected to your best customers. Almost every unified communication as a service provider we offer has video-conferencing built into the monthly price, or you can buy it stand-alone from our newest provider: Zoom. Know that we have a lot of options here, including some familiar names: 8x8, RingCentral, Fuze, Nextiva, GoToMeeting (Jive/LogMeIn), and others.
2. Mobile App - when you move to UCaaS, every employee will be able to download an app to their iPhone or Android phone. Once installed, the app will become the phone system, allowing them to receive and make phone calls from their work number, to transfer calls to fellow employees, and for a general IVR to route calls to your team's softphones by department, skills, etc. The BEST part about using a cloud-based phone system is reporting - YOU as the manager can see call volume, call duration, and dozens of other metrics about your team, all at once.
3. Collaboration - using tools like Glip (RingCentral), Slack, 8x8, Nextiva, or Microsoft Teams, your teams will be able to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, much like a group text that never goes away. Add employees at a future date and they'll see the entire history of the chat as well as all of the files that have been uploaded to the specific groups. Caution: you're bound to see more animated gifs than you ever would have dreamed possible!
4. CRM Integration - UCaaS was built to integrate with other cloud-based systems, especially CRMs. Many UCaaS providers have already built API's into the most popular CRMs: SalesForce.com, Zoho, ZenDesk, Method CRM, MS Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Hubspot, etc. If you have a homegrown CRM or other internal systems you've built specifically to interact with your phone system, we have many providers that can build a custom integration with a new cloud-based phone system for you.
Ingredient 3: Move the Desktop Workspace to the Cloud
One of the reasons many companies require their workforce to come into a centralized office is the specialized software required to do their jobs. Another reason is access control, employers want to control who has access to what file and inside a physical office, using Active Directory, you can ensure certain file-sharing rules within your own Local Area Network.
We have two up-and-coming technologies that address these features and move them all to the cloud while maintaining centralized control over access permissions.
1. Workspace as a Service - allows you to run ALL of your fully-licensed software programs in the cloud, all while giving you full control over who has remote access. This would allow you to fully virtualize your office while maintaining your current level of production.
2. Desktop as a Service - This service allows you to virtualize your employee's individual desktop computers, putting the actual computing in the cloud, and allowing your employees to "see" it through a light-weight app that mimics the PC's workspace.
Ingredient 4: Remote File Share
When you send your workers home, it's imperative that they be able to share, collaborate on, and store files in the cloud. The most popular cloud file storage providers are:
1. Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive
2. Google G-Suite - Google Drive
3. Dropbox
4. Box.com
Using file share you'll be able to sync desired folders and files to your local machine, you'll be able to share files with JUST the people you want to see it, and most importantly, your entire enterprise will be immune from data loss caused by failing, damaged, or stolen hardware.
Time Frame: How Fast Can You Make the Pivot?
The good news is, our network of independent Trusted Advisors and Service Providers can get these new services set up for you quickly. The thing that takes the longest time is the transfer of your current phone numbers, which requires paperwork to get your existing provider to release them to the new one. We typically see this taking around a month to transfer properly. Everything else can be done in weeks and in some cases, days.
Looking on the bright side, once this virus has been contained (and it will), you'll have the most advanced cloud-based technology working for you well into the foreseeable future, making your workforce dynamic, adaptable, and mobile.
In the meantime, stay safe, work smart, and know that we are proud to play a small part in helping contain the Coronavirus outbreak and to protect our most vulnerable from this terrible virus through practical work-at-home strategies. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by this outbreak.
For those companies that are not in the Cloud and need IMMEDIATE help, several companies are offering FREE collaboration tools. If you are in a bind, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
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