How do you keep in touch with your teams, and how do you facilitate their habits, meetings forums, and what platforms are there to do this? Through the COVID-19 pandemic, most people moved to a video and/or voice only conference calling. What is the best practice and how do you engage your whole team via an online communications solution?
What is a distributed workforce?
A collocated workforce is where employees are all in the same physical location, whereas a distributed workforce entails employees being in different physical locations during working hours or when running collaborative projects. This brings about both advantages and challenges and requires using various effective communication technologies.
Distributed workforce management
For employees to be engaged and productive they need to know that doing their job efficiently and effectively is extremely important and beneficial. Access to the relevant and correct resources is extremely important for employees who are working in various locations. Distributed workforce management is therefore an integral part of running a distributed workforce efficiently.
For employees to be fully productive and engaged, they will require a foundation of:
- Meaning: Giving each employee a clear picture of how them being immersed in their work has value to a common shared goal.
- Sense of trust: Providing trust that employees can work independently without fear of negative consequences, by trying to complete their tasks and projects.
- Planning capacity & scheduling: Making sure that employees have both access to the right resources and the right time allocations to get the job done to the required standards.
- Measurement: You can can’t improve what you are not measuring. So, to help improve employee engagement, you will need to quantify what is happening among your distributed workforce.
Being able to physically see a person when communicating is important to be able to pick up on body language and is easier to hear and see what the other person is feeling. With this in mind, it is important to make sure that your business makes use of effective communication solutions to help manage a distributed workforce, where face to face “in-person” communication may not be possible.
Things to consider are, video conferencing, internal chat platforms, easy file transfer or employee access to files (see collaboration software) and application sharing.
We designed and built our own communications platform that caters for all your voice, video conferencing and calling needs. It is easy to set up and gives you a centralized platform or dashboard to manage your employees, their spend and usage data from, as well as an easy to download app for their mobile phones equipping them to work remotely with no additional hardware costs. All data and conversations are encrypted end-to-end with military grade security, so you can rest assured your data is safe at all times.
Our communications platform provides crystal clear voice calling and can quickly be configured and deployed to your remote teams. Our user interface has been carefully designed to help maximize user efficiency when needing to switch between calls and conferences.
The real power of our services comes through the pairing of a great communications application with an enterprise data connection. We also offer flexible and low-cost data connectivity options, either through fixed line fibre (business and residential), or LTE connections. LTE can be a great failover back up, for when fixed fibre experiences outages. Or for remote workers who do not have access to fibre services at their residential address.
Mytelnet’s integrated systems help keep your distributed workforce connected while remote working. Our packages are flexible, month-to-month removing the worry that comes with long-term contracts.
To get your teams, fully connected no matter where they are, start your free trial and be a part of the business communication revolution.