The Covid-19 pandemic has had a widespread impact on many things, not least of all on how and where employees work.
Hybrid working – a set-up in which employees spend part of their working week working from home and part of it working at the physical office or business premises – has become a term that permeates almost all industries.
Many businesses have had to make significant adjustments to their ways of working to accommodate this new trend, from setting up secure servers to ensuring a safe transfer of data and information to communication tools so that teams can remain connected regardless of location.
A recent survey has shown that online meeting tools and apps such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype and Google Meet, account for nearly 50% of all work calls, in stark contrast to pre-pandemic figures under 30%.
One of the biggest challenges has been getting consistent connectivity for all employees so that work calls – whether between team members or between employees and clients – can be conducted with minimum delays, buffering and disruption.
One of the most compounding factors is the increase in the use of video calls which transfer a lot more data per second than voice-only calls and therefore require both a higher-quality connection and a device that’s set up properly to handle these sorts of calls.
The Employee Workplace Technology Survey 2022 which polled over 600 businesses in the USA and Europe has found that slow fixed networks in offices (37%), poor mobile signal (30%) and unreliable home and business Wifi (29%) are the leading cause of frustration for workforces adjusting to this new way of working.
The challenge is not only to have stable and reliable connectivity across multiple sites, but also a growing need to have the flexibility for employees to be able to switch from desktop or laptop calls to mobile calls without breaking the connection, for example, if a salesperson needs to leave to a client but wants to continue being part of a current internal video call.
And whilst during the pandemic there was a great deal more tolerance if people experienced drops in connectivity or signal strength, as more and more people return to the office in a hybrid working capacity, the expectation that strong connectivity will be present has risen significantly.
For business owners, this means that an audit of existing setups and investment into upgrades is needed. The hybrid working model is likely to become a standard and established way of working for the foreseeable future, and businesses that lag when it comes to connectivity are likely to experience frustration not only from employees but ultimately from customers too.
Fortunately, there are many solutions available to help set your business up with a powerful communications network.
Find out more about our network cable installation services as well as our managed IT support and other services. Contact us today on 01223 834844 or fill in our contact form and we’ll get back to you right away.
