Working from Home, the Future of Work, and How UC Fits In

Many people today are thinking more about working from home, especially in the coming months. We’ll see how it all plays out, but it certainly is possible to work from home quite easily.

But even before this Coronavirus scare, there has been a lot of hype recently about the “future of work” with respect to what an “office” would look like in the future. As seen in the chart above from “The IWG Global Workplace Survey,” 75% of respondents believed flexible working represented the new norm. Employees basically expect flexibility in the work environment in terms of being able to work remote at least part of the time and being able to work some different hours. Of course, this is all millennial driven!

Don’t blame them! This whole topic has been evolving over the past many years. The advances in communication networks have made these conversations possible. Mobile phones. Internet capabilities and speeds. Applications on these networks.

When I first came out of school and started working, there was no real concept of working from home. You just couldn’t do it since there weren’t even laptops or servers readily available yet. I remember going on trips and not having to work the whole time, because all you had to do was retrieve your voice mail and return calls. Because that’s all you could do. So as I travelled around the country, I ended up going to quite a few baseball games!

Anyway, that was a long time ago. Today, we can work from home, and people wouldn’t even necessarily know. You have the same work phone number, you can access the same applications, you can be part of collaboration teams, etc. All because the networks are better, and the applications you use at work everyday can run on those networks. So no one really even knows where you are.

Unified Communications (UC) plays a huge role in this “future of work” movement, which as I said, isn’t really new. As I write this, I am on my laptop now in an airport. I’m connected via WiFi. I’m on the Sangoma Cloud UC system. Via our Zulu collaboration client, my phone just rang with my Sangoma number, and I talked just like I was at work or at home. A few people said, “Where are you? I can hear xxxxxx.”

And that’s the future of work. It’s not possible without UC. And it was made possible because of UC.

If you are thinking of installing a business phone system to help your employees work better from home, then Switchvox Cloud can help you.

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