Staying connected with your off-site workers

With so many remote workers today, staying in touch requires more than just a smartphone. Demanding schedules, unexpected disruptions, and constantly changing customer and partner needs can make remote work a real challenge. With so much going on right now, you need employees to be available, responsive and quick to act.  We simply don’t have time to be out of touch with co-workers.

While most employees have smartphones, research shows that meaningful communication and collaboration with off-site workers can present a challenge. Quite simply, far too many remote workers don’t feel connected to their organisations. As a result, productivity and communication suffer.

Connect your team in a meaningful way.

What does it mean to be connected? It means being able to:

• Speak with, meet, and engage with employees and coworkers when needed
• Work and collaborate with them in a way that makes everyone productive
• Easily share information while keeping it secured.

Yet, according to a survey of 500 remote workers in the U.S.,¹ this sort of connection isn’t all that easy:

• 84% said that working remotely means they can’t collaborate effectively
• 43% claimed they lack the information they need to complete their work
• 54% reported that being away from the office diminishes their productivity

If employees aren’t getting what they need, then companies need to find ways to make it happen, especially with our current challenges. But how can we do that?

Communication and collaboration in a mobile world

When meeting with your team in the same room is impossible, meeting over video is the next best thing. With all the videoconferencing tools available today, it seems like video meetings should be a seamless and unexceptional way of getting work done. But in a KRC Research survey commissioned by Ricoh, more than 80% of workers did not agree that videoconferencing and real-time collaboration was “very easy” for them to do.

Unified communications tools are vital for connecting a remote workforce. Using a video conferencing console that requires no special knowledge or complicated hookups to operate can help remove barriers to collaboration. These all-in-one style tools, which can include everything from a camera to an address book, can be used both in the field and in the office — any room with an electrical outlet, really — providing the same level of connectivity no matter where you are. A truly business-ready solution will even allow workers to connect to these meetings using just their phones.

Empowering your workforce and sharing information is easy with remote collaboration tools that make use of cloud services. And it takes powerful tools like these, intended specifically for business communications, to make collaboration over long distance as interactive and productive as meeting in person.

Sometimes, it can be easy for a company to think that remote workers have what they need. Often, this is not the case. When it’s not, productivity, collaboration and your bottom line suffer.

Whether you’re building a team or equipping the one you have, you need to give direction and support. This requires you organise, equip, and empower with scalable technologies that bring everyone together, just like as if you were in an office.

Fortunately, technology today makes it possible to connect your teams wherever they are working.  Have questions or need a solution to make your business friendly for your remote workers? Visit Ricoh Change Makers today for more information or to have us contact you.  Our experts are ready to help.