Are Your Employees Prepared to Work from Anywhere?

There’s nothing like having a great product or service and lots of satisfied customers. But none of that matters if business operations halt for an extended period when a major disruption occurs. Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is critically important, yet how many companies actually do it? If they do have a plan, does it address every type of disaster? Probably not.

Instead of being blindsided by a disaster, you should equip your workforce with cloud-based collaboration tools that would keep them productive at work or at home, during “business as usual” or under dire circumstances.

Doing so offers several benefits:

• Your workforce will be able to quickly shift to home offices or other workspaces with little impact on your customers.
• Depending on the type of business you run, it’s possible to operate successfully even if all employees work from home for weeks or months. Some businesses, such as Twitter, are allowing their employees to work from home permanently.
• You’ll be able to protect your business from future disasters and avoid the initial stress and ramp-up time required for a shift from business premises to home office.

CenturyLink Engage is an ideal solution that integrates calling with desktop and on-the-go features, accessible at work, at home or on the road. No matter where your employees work, the service and tools would be available. They should also be intuitive by design so employees don’t have to relearn a whole new system.

As a cloud-based service, one of the primary benefits of Engage is that employees can host or participate in audio and video conferences using an internet or cellular connection. Traditional phone lines and network jacks are not required. That means meeting participation is much more flexible for users. Salespeople can join a conference from a hotel lobby (with a headset, for privacy), and a consultant can “dial in” using their mobile device while in the office and continue the meeting while heading to an appointment. However, internet bandwidth or the cellular connection needs to be adequate for high quality calls and video.

Remote conferences feel like the Wild West at times, with conversations and other activities occurring in the background that distract from the meeting at hand. Management tools let the meeting host mute/unmute specific participants or all of them, as well as hide participants from view. While in a chat or conference, an employee can click a button to share their desktop to demo an application or run a presentation. The same applies to specific files—it’s easy to share a meeting agenda or a document that requires group input.

Employees can also message each other individually or as a group, during conferences or other times. Messaging is particularly useful for sharing links to pertinent information, and it’s a good substitute for calling when an employee such as a retail clerk needs quick answers to customer questions.

For greater mobility, employees can install the remote collaboration app to their desktop computer, laptop, table PC or smartphone, as well as a softphone app that enables them to make and receive work calls from that device. The softphone protects their privacy and presents a business “look and feel” for callers.

Engage also includes an administrator portal where anyone with administrative access can set up users and devices, configure auto-attendant, enable Emergency Call Notifications for 911 calls and more. Like the user features, these portal tools are easy to use: most of them are simple on/off slider buttons, enabling non-IT responsible parties to help manage the system.

Engage is also an over-the-top solution, which means you can use your own internet provider. However, customers with CenturyLink connectivity or internet services get the reliability of the CenturyLink backbone.

Converting from old, outdated or legacy hardware/phone systems and unified communications solutions to Engage can reduce IT staff burden and save your business money by greatly reducing capex costs. Engage offers predictable, recurring opex costs for the cloud-based service, which can scale up or down as needed.

One thing we all learned from the 2020 workplace shift is the value of preparedness. Your workers could have been productive at home much more quickly and seamlessly had a flexible remote collaboration tool already been in place. And they would be have been more efficient with conferencing had they been using it before the shift.

A cloud service like CenturyLink Engage makes sense for companies that need to be accessible to employees, customers and clients at any time and from anywhere. Adopting Engage allows businesses to more agile for the future.

Find out if Engage is a good fit for your company.

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