Businesses need to find a smarter way to work in 2021 - a way that's flexible and adaptive to their needs, argues Jason Rowles of PFU (EMEA) Limited
The past year has forced organisations to adjust their business strategies overnight, shifting their businesses online with employees working out of home offices wherever possible. The results have been mixed, as over a third of UK mid-market businesses are estimated to have been forced to reduce capacity or close/suspend operations.
This is sobering, but it's not just a global health crisis that can cause severe disruption to business. Erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, or political upheavals can have a similar effect on transport and daily commutes. This year has been a live test for business continuity plans and how effective they really are, what works and what doesn't. From homeworking equipment that is fit-for-purpose to reliable communications infrastructure - if it wasn't already in place when lockdown started, then the scramble was on to enable productivity.
THE CALL CENTRE CASE our percent of the UK's working population. Organisations that couldn't change to the new way of working descended into turmoil and, although the public had a high level of acceptance with the extended call waiting times and poor customer experience at first, tolerance levels have been fading through the autumn and winter.
It's been tough on contact centre remote agents. Closing brick and mortar retail outlets led to a massive increase in online shopping and an equivalent need for online sales assistance. For many contact centre employees, finding themselves working from home for the first time and having to handle some tough customer calls must have been hard especially when no team members are around to offer support. When working from home is necessary, the right technology to keep remote workers more connected to their colleagues and their organisations is critical. It's just as important from a customer experience point-of-view; just because a contact centre agent is working from home, the experience for the customer doesn't have to be compromised.
REGULAR FLEXIBLE & REMOTE WORKING Business continuity plans need to be in place, tested and working, not just as a response to health pandemics - or the more traditional disruptions such as floods, fires or power cuts - but more generally, so that organisations are covered for when employees might need or want to work remotely.
An updated business continuity plan is one that is not just taken down and dusted every now and then. Putting resilient systems in place that have the flexibility and adaptability to support employees and their changing circumstances, including family and heath situations, is a good way of also ensuring an organisation has the best systems in place to help it recover from much more dramatic shocks.
The most important ability during a crisis is adaptability as when things suddenly and rapidly start changing, it's vital to that organisations are fluid enough to be able to keep up with new conditions. This means that flexible work schedules should not just be in place only during times of crisis. Having a flexible working policy in place during so called 'normal' times, is proof that when that normality changes, everyone is familiar with working flexibly and understands the processes involved.
With robust remote working technology up-and-running and a flexible working policy being used as a matter of course, the next step is to test crisis procedures using a variety of scenarios so that business recovery can be maximised regardless of what might happen. There is no point having state-of-the-art homeworking solutions if a fire in the physical office destroys vital paper-based legacy information. Businesses need to find a smarter way to work in 2021 that's flexible and adaptive to their needs.
"When working from home is necessary, the right technology to keep remote workers more connected to their colleagues and their organisations is critical. It's just as important from a customer experience point-of-view; just because a contact centre agent is working from home, the experience for the customer doesn't have to be compromised."
DIGITISATION'S ROLE IN BUSINESS CONTINUITY According to Statista, the world's paper and cardboard consumption increased to almost 422 million metric tons in 2018. This is not to say that all paper use is bad thing, but it is an indication of just how much we still rely on paper and need better access to the information stored on it.
In business and the public sector, the information held on paper is often required again after its first use. Patient notes need to be referred to, lesson plans repurposed, and client campaigns refreshed. This means that, ideally, the information should be easy to both access and share.
The need to be able to easily use, store, access, share - and keep protected for legal as well as business continuity purposes - all the valuable data held on paper, points to digitisation as an ideal answer. One of the best and simplest ways to digitise paper-based information is to use a smart document scanner, which can save scanned document to the cloud, automatically naming and filing them in the correct predefined place.
Business continuity plans don't have to be complex or convoluted. 2020 will have shown most companies where their weaknesses lay and what steps they may need to take to better secure their future. If part of that plan is to protect and make data held on paper more versatile and useable, then an investment in document scanning might just be the deceptively simple, but decisively crucial step that was missing.
More info: www.ScanSnapit.com