5 Ways to Improve Business Communication
Does your business agility need a boost?
Most organizations are familiar with the principle of distributing IT systems to minimize IT service failures. Fewer organizations give adequate thought to maximizing the availability of their most valuable asset, human resource! By distributing both, organizations can eliminate single points of failure and survive a wide variety of threats. Here are 5 ways you can improve business continuity by relocating or distributing your workforce.
1. Relocate your employees to alternate locations
Empty desks are a sign that work is changing. How often do you look across your office and see half the desks are empty? On any given day, individuals may be working at another office, working at home or meeting with customers and suppliers. We no longer rely on tangible objects such as paper diaries or filing cabinets, anything and everything is accessible online.
2. Use homeworking as part of your plan
Imagine if your organization had an office for every employee. Denial of access at any one location would only affect one employee. Homeworking embraces this principle by securely extending an individual’s desktop over a broadband network into their home. Individuals have access to communications, business applications and data just as they would in the office.
3. Improve availability with mobile
Integrate mobile devices into your enterprise communications. Unified Communications enables mobile devices to be integrated into an enterprise communication solution. ‘Single Number Reach’ allows individuals to be contacted via a single enterprise directory number on any device that can be directly dialed. When disaster strikes, individuals can choose to answer their calls on their smartphone or tablet.
4. Create a disaster recovery site
In the event of denial of access to a building or metropolitan area, your key workers can relocate to a disaster recovery site. Mission critical organizations commonly deployed disaster recovery sites in the 80’s and 90’s. These facilities were largely the domain of larger enterprises that placed a high priority on business continuity, for example government organizations and investment banks.
5. Distribute your contact center
For many organizations, the contact center will define success or failure in a crisis. Until recently, most contact centers were single site solutions. Agents travelled to the contact center, logged in and completed their days work in a fixed office location. Today, contact center agents can work at another office, at home or from a mobile device. And there is no impact on reporting either. Real time and historical reporting is centralized and available from ‘anywhere’. Consequently, organizations can apply the same business continuity principles to a contact center agent as any other key employee.
Contact Connecticut Communications for information on improving your business communications. We represent the best unified communications companies in the world with NEC, Mitel and Star2Star Communications. Visit our website www.ctcom.com or call us 203.985.1000.
