Preparing the Post-Pandemic Workforce

Ready or not, the way you and your colleagues will be working in the future has been forever transformed by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb

In 1994 I read a book titled "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett. I had just co-founded Home Access Health, an at home testing company and was concerned with how vulnerable society was to novel diseases, especially ones that were difficult or impossible to treat upon emergence. The book, all 750 pages of well researched epidemiological research on novel disease, haunted me. It still does.

The world is out of balance and completely unprepared. It was only a matter of time. A quarter century later, we have experienced AIDS, Ebola, Lassa, Marburg, H1N1, SARS and MERS and yet were caught with our pants down for COVID-19. And as deadly and frightening as COVID-19 is, it is hardly even close to a worst case scenario. Think about a virus or prion that has a sixty or ninety day asymptomatic period. It is time to get ready. Businesses need to prepare for the post pandemic way to work. At Mutare, where I work today, we develop software solutions that enable a mobile workforce to work from anywhere at anytime.

While part-time telecommuting has been on an upward trend for the past few years, the work-from-home order to stem the Coronavirus infection rate saw nearly 30% of American employees shifting their full-time work to home offices. This sudden, forced change has left management and their teams scrambling to maintain business continuity without the benefit of normal office or person-to-person interaction.

But as business adapts, it is likely that attitudes about the virtual office for a much larger segment of the working population will shift as well.

Kate Lister, author of Telework in the 21st Century and noted researcher in telecommuting trends, has been following the effects of recent say at home orders and now estimates that American business will see 25-30% of the workforce consistently working at home on a multiple-days-a-week basis within the next two years.

In other words, what used to be an occasional accommodation for specific job types or a temporary response to a pandemic will likely become an expectation for job applicants going forward and a competitive recruiting  tool for those organizations that choose to embrace it.

Which actually may be a good thing for the bottom line.

According to Lister, occupancy studies have shown just how inefficient office space is being used, noting that worldwide, employees are not at their desk 50% to 60% of the time. That is a huge and wasteful overhead cost that could be reduced with work-at-home policies.

True, supporting a remote workforce still requires some capital outlay to equip employees with the appropriate hardware, software and security tools, but the savings realized through reduced office overhead should easily justify the investment in a modern online communication ecosystem.

Making sure employees can remain responsive to each other and their customers is key. While online collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams help bridge the geographic gap between remote workmates, it’s still the phone that facilitates close customer relationships.

As with email and text, it is essential that telecommuters establish a clear separation between work-related and personal calls. Businesses can facilitate this by maintaining employee business extensions behind the company PBX connecting business calls through a VoiP VPN to a client on the employee’s PC and/or mobile device, keeping business and personal calls and numbers separate.

Not only does this provide clear focus on the calls that matter most, but it also gives employees access to the more robust voice management tools available with enterprise phone systems. Digital distraction has become a significant source of lost productivity for employees in general, but even more so for the telecommuter who is likely juggling both work and personal communications from multiple channels. It’s important that employees, particularly remote workers, have the tools they need to triage important business communications and not waste time on unnecessary intrusions like voice spam.

 As the first company to develop an enterprise voicemail to email solution, Mutare knows a thing or two about saving customers time and money through digital technology.Three years ago, Mutare introduced its light weight Mutare Voice application, completing the digital transformation of voicemail by eliminating the voice mailbox altogether.

Taking it one step further, Mutare has since taken aim at what many now consider the leading source of digital disruption and frustration – spam calls. Spam an robocalls now account for nearly 50% of all calls, and the problem is only going to get worse.

While carriers are working to institute protocols to identify spam and flag it in the caller ID, those calls are still ringing through. With its revolutionary Voice Spam Filter, Mutare has found a way to block the majority of spam and robocalls from ever entering the enterprise voice network, protecting both the intended recipient and the network itself from disruptive and often fraudulent call activity. The Mutare Voice Spam Filter solution can be applied to any voice system, but when combined with Mutare Voice creates a powerful voice message management service, assuring employees that when their work phone rings, even at home, it is worth the attention.

We recognize both the real opportunities and unique challenges that companies are facing as they adapt to the needs of the post-pandemic workforce. Creating a consistent, unified, and distraction-free digital communication network will be key to the successful integration of on-site and remote workers.

To quote Derek Thompson in a recent Atlantic article, “A pandemic is not an appropriate time to determine what kind of labor arrangement is optimally productive on a per-worker basis. It is rather a moment for companies to build out the kind of technology and culture that, when the economy is back to full force, could make remote work easier for those who want to take advantage of it in a future where white-collar work might involve a little less commuting and a little more home.”

It seems like that moment is now.

#Coronavirus #COVID19 #Telecommuting #spam #workfromhome #pandemic