Millenials are now the single largest group in the American workforce – that’s more than 55 million working people who have never known a world without the Internet. As a group, they are ready and willing to work long, and even irregular, hours – but in exchange for that they expect a certain amount of freedom and mobility.
Employees want to be mobile, and companies can benefit from providing that ability. A robust and workable mobile workplace solution can be extremely complicated to set up and run, and there is great potential for less than stellar results. Unified communications (UC) is an integral piece of the mobile puzzle and can make all the difference in successful implementation.
Device Independence
One of the biggest weaknesses of non-UC mobile solutions is that they depend on devices that are often out of the control of IT. UC, by comparison, allows an employee on the go to securely access the communications system from almost any connected device.
Availability Indicators
One of the often under-appreciated features of a UC system is “presence” functionality. Ranging in complexity from simple, self-selected availability statuses to signals automatically calculated by the communications system itself, this function allows workers to determine the availability of anyone on the network and avoid interrupting them unnecessarily.
Seeing Is Believing
One of the major drawbacks of traditional telecommuting is that, no matter how much employees attempt to stay connected to the office, they tend to be left out of the loop from time to time. UC‘s robust video conferencing capabilities allow mobile employees to virtually present from any location.
Transparent Medium
With the ability to seamlessly switch between numerous communications channels at will, the medium no longer gets in the way of the message. Employees can jump from text, to voice, to video as the demands of the conversation dictate.
Find and Follow
Mobile employees tend not to follow the strict work/break schedules of their office-bound brethren. This can make it difficult to synchronize between mobile and non-mobile employees.
Find me/follow me functionality makes it possible for calls to a particular employee to be automatically routed to the device that employee is using, to bounce from device to device until a connection is made, or to be routed to another employee if the original recipient is unavailable.
The Internet made mobile work possible. UC is the missing puzzle piece that makes a mobile workforce workable.