Over the last few years, public transport has been disrupted with various bus, rail and even taxi strikes. 2016 will be remembered in Dublin for non stop Luas strikes.
Each day that a Luas strike has occurred, thousands of commuters have been left scrambling to find another way of getting to work. An estimated 90,000 people take both the Green and Red Luas line every day. That’s almost 15% of all daily public transport users in Dublin(1).
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Luas Strikes Affecting 30% of your workforce
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Even though 15% of commuters are directly affected, in reality up to 30% of your employees can be affected (2). Chances are, some of your employees have been late to work in the recent weeks or maybe some have given up on showing up altogether . On Luas strike days, the daily commute time doubles on average and the cost of commute can increase substantially for people that live on the suburbs of the city, and have no other choice than to get a taxi (3).
Luas strikes are extremely stressful for both you and your employees. Imagine spending 2 hours in a bus one way or having to pay €25 for a taxi. Or maybe you have first hand experience
Recent research from the UK’s Office of National Statistics found that people with a commute longer than 45 minutes “reported higher anxiety” than those who don’t have a long commute to make each morning (4).
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Your Employees could be spending their most productive hours of the day playing Candy Crush
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There are also substantial day to day productivity costs of a workforce that make long commutes or get delayed due to strike action. Researchers at Boston Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that for every hour someone is awake, their productivity and capability to perform tasks declined. This means that many of your employees could be spending their most productive hours of the day playing Candy Crush for two hours on the way into the office (4).
Even though this study relates to people whose daily commute is higher than 45 minutes, it stands to reason that by the time your employees get to work after a long and stressful journey on the Luas strike day, they are already tired, annoyed and stressed and their productivity is in decline.
That is, if they do get to work at all. If they don’t, you, as an employer, have to cope with your human resources being very limited on the Luas Strikes days (and there are 8 more scheduled for only next 3 weeks – check out more details here).
So what does this mean for your business? The people that actually get to the office are not only stressed from their journey but also face the reality of an increased workload covering for someone who may not have made it into the office that day. That has impact not only on your employees but customers, vendors, suppliers, other people in the office and you.
Considering all of this, wouldn’t you want to prevent your employees from going through this public transport nightmare whenever services are disrupted and enable them to work remotely instead?
With Blueface, you can.
Here at Blueface, we embrace the best in unified communications features across hosted voice, virtual landlines and business mobile services, messaging, call conferencing, global services, workforce mobility and a suite of cloud based business applications.
Here is how your business will benefit if you move to Blueface:
Allow Mobile Working
Blueface makes it possible for your staff to work remotely, provides intelligent call routing and allows you to manage your business account online. Once your employees have a broadband connection at home, the Blueface phone will work as if it’s in the office. Internal transfers, ring groups and all other aspects of the service will work as normal.
Blueface Mobile Service – Even More Mobility
Blueface also offers businesses maximum flexibility with our 30 day SIM only contracts. We can supply you with a SIM that allows you to have one extension, one voicemail and one bill. Blueface allows you to easily add more SIMs to the same account as you wish to connect more employees. Blueface is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) using H3G coverage to power our network. With 99% coverage, your business can be truly mobile with Blueface.
Easy to Switch
Moving phone service should involve as little disruption to your business as possible. When you switch to Blueface you can keep your old numbers. Simply fill out the Blueface porting form on the customer portal after picking your Blueface plan, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Money Savings
Every business looks at cutting costs where it can, and what business doesn’t want to save money? By making the switch to Blueface, 8 out of 10 businesses save over 40%.
Time savings – One Provider – One Invoice
Save valuable time by getting one bill for your business landline and mobile with Blueface. You don’t have to worry about dealing with multiple service providers with unified communications from Blueface.
Call us on 015242000 or fill in the form below to discover all the benefits of unified communications.
References:
(1) www.nationaltransport.ie
(4) www.business2community.com
Featured image by Benedict Benedict.
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