The public transport industrial strikes are upon us again. This time it’s Dublin Bus drivers who have planned three service stoppages over the next few weeks. Each strike will last 48 hours and disrupt up to 400,000 commuters each day in Ireland’s capital.
As you may have experienced during the Luas strikes, public transport disruption has a very real and quantifiable effect on how many employees make it into the office, and at what time they arrive. The impact these incidents have on your organisation’s productivity is considerable.
Implementing hosted PBX and unified communications solutions can help avoid this loss in productivity. Cloud phone systems enable your employees to work remotely either regularly or for specific occasions such as strikes.
The alternative communications setup from a home office can mirror what employees experience when they are in the office. As virtual phone numbers hosted in the cloud are not location dependant there are a number of ways to make individuals contactable when working from home.
Numbers can be redirected to their home devices specifically or simultaneous dialling between work and home phones can be set up. As long as there is an internet connection, employees could actually bring their desk phone home with them and have it function as normal without any configuration needed.
How can you make this happen?
Enable remote working
Allow staff to work from home – save them the stress of commuting on strike days and keep your business productive by allowing remote working. If you don’t allow remote working in your organisation, perhaps consider it for these out of the ordinary occasions only.
A cloud phone system provides intelligent call routing and allows you to manage your business account online. Once your employees have a broadband connection at home, their VoIP telephone will work as if they are in the office.
Internal transfers, ring groups and all other aspects of the service will work as normal. Alternatively, if employees don’t want to bring their phones home their work numbers can be redirected to home phones by logging in to their phone system account.
Your workers can even get faxes and voicemails to their emails. Rather than manually retrieving paper from a fax machine or listening to a voicemail by dialling a number, Blueface delivers both types of messages directly to your email in the form of a PDF and audio file respectively.
Depending on your IT setup in order for them to use other systems they may require VPN access to your business network. Your IT team can set this up quite easily.
Remote and mobile working is becoming increasingly popular within organisations and with employees. As far back as 2011, CBI data from the UK, showed that over 59% of firms had remote workers. There is no better time to join the other companies who are already implementing a remote work environment than now, After all we are facing more days of public transport disruptions.
