Remote teams are clearly changing the workplace, as forward-thinking businesses are paying less attention to where their employees are and more on what they can do. In fact, the Office of National Statistics believes 50% of UK employees will be working remotely by next year.
However, that doesn’t mean your business will automatically evolve to keep up with the demand. Here’s how to prepare for what’s quickly becoming the norm.
Don’t make work a nightmare
Remote workers are used to to instantly connecting, engaging and collaborating with their team members, customers and suppliers across the world. It’s therefore crucial companies rethink the tools on offer to employees, particularly when it comes to getting bogged down with communication and collaboration.
Indeed, there are many apps promising to facilitate instant communication and collaboration. So many that research by RingCentral, the cloud-based communication system provider, shows today’s UK employees use four communications apps on average, with 20% working with six or more. It’s no wonder 66% just want a single platform for real-time information sharing, saving staff time and boosting productivity.
Efficiently efficient
Integrating team messaging and key business apps improves access to critical information and boosts productivity – regardless of location, roles or the apps being used. For example, fusing a customer relationship management system with a telephone means workers won’t need to juggle between multiple systems and windows, leading to a more streamlined experience. Even seemingly simple features like ‘RingCentral’s click to call can dramatically increase productivity while removing room for error.
Cloud communication platforms tend to support a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs) and often have open software development environments. This encourages more bespoke integration, allowing even highly-specialised apps to benefit from enhanced options.
Gear up
Employees engage with one another in entirely new ways compared to the old-fashioned face-to-face approach. It’s no longer necessary to spend hours travelling for meetings, an experience both frustrating for employees and expensive for employers. Instead, teams today want to connect and share all types of media-rich content from any device at the click of a button, regardless of whether they’re at the office, home or out in the field.
Team collaboration tools like Glip, for instance, see remote workers upload and manage tasks, work together in real time, edit and comment on documents, communicate through chat, video and audio and track performance and progress.
Modern staff must learn to work collaboratively but also do so when they’re not even in the same building as their team. The good news is remote teams can be just as effective – if not more so – than their in-house counterparts. With the right tools, you can keep your people on the right track. 
