Enabling the Modern Workforce through UCC
Common problems of today’s workforce and IT teams allude to dreams of having all communications on a single platform while meeting budget and avoiding the logistical nightmare of tracking who is using what for which purpose. Let those dreams become your reality.
The question to seriously consider is whether your company is operating in a modern capacity—that is, satisfying and supporting your workforce to the best of its ability.
Unbreaking News: The Workplace has Changed
According to global consulting firm Deloitte in their Global Human Capital Trends Report 2016, “Sweeping global forces are reshaping the workplace, the workforce, and work itself”—forces anticipated to majorly shape the future of work by 2020.
One factor influencing the rise of a new communications paradigm: five generations will be working side-by-side in organizations, each with different expectations and different ways of communicating based on how they grew up with technology. Yep—new grandma and new college graduate could be sharing a cubicle wall. And the reality is that social media- and tech-savvy millennials—who, according to Forbes, will comprise more than 75 percent of the workforce by 2025—are in the driver’s seat. To truly engage these very diverse audiences, it’s critical to provide access to new (demanded by millennials), easy-to-use (necessary for all) tools.
As you’ve probably already realized, email is so yesterday. Social media will connect employees, customers, and partners for immediate communication. Advancements such as the shift to cloud, mobile, collaboration tools, and Internet of Things are changing how organizations operate, how employees interact, and how companies engage with their customers. Gartner predicts that to remain competitive, organizations must exploit this opportunity, and the time to do that is now.
Adopting the newest technology facilitates adaptation to workplace changes and directly impacts a business’s success and bottom line. As the end user now drives the majority of technology decisions in the workplace, companies need to seriously determine how to enable their employees by giving them the tools to communicate effectively, wherever and whenever they want on the device they choose.
And the upshot is that when cloud leaders work together to enhance usability and efficiency, everyone wins. Including your business. And that’s where born-in-the-cloud solutions—such as RingCentral—come in. So, now...
The Case for Cloud Communications and Collaboration
Cloud services help forward-thinking businesses compete, as business profits correlate with speed (time-to-capability), employee satisfaction, retention, and workflow integration (productivity). Cloud eliminates technology boundaries today and tomorrow. Do you realize how these technology trends impact your business?
Check out some statistics:
- 70% of organizations are either using or investigating cloud computing solutions (AMD)
- UCaaS/Hosted PBX market penetration is expected to grow by a factor of almost 6x across enterprise, midmarket, and SMB in the next five years (Broadsoft)
- Smartphones and tablets put power in the pockets of 1.4 billion global citizens in 2016 (Innovapptive)
- Communications and collaboration are merging, with Gartner predicting that “By 2020, over 90% of enterprise voice calls in the digital workplace will originate from collaboration applications, up from less than 30% today”
Many cloud providers’ shared mission is to deliver a seamless, user-friendly engagement model, so anyone can have secure, easy access to applications, documents, and productivity suites with a unified, streamlined experience. RingCentral’s mission and goal is the same—however, we’ve taken it one step further. We’ve created a truly unified communications and collaboration experience that removes barriers and supports an effective modern workforce to get their jobs done well—no, excellently.
Upon reflecting on the above, a few themes stand out that RingCentral has tackled very well. Among the many benefits of our cloud-based communications and collaboration solution, we allow today’s businesses to effectively compete by enabling the modern workforce in the realms of:
Productivity: UCaaS enables workers to connect without encountering the previous constraints provided by geographic location. RingCentral Glip allows teams to collaborate worldwide at any time from any device. Similarly, the RingCentral Meetings capability allows globally distributed teams and remote workers to connect on a personal level—it’s always most effective to be able to put a face to a name in order to build the types of collaborative and trusting relationships necessary for teams to succeed.
Agility: Integrations provide seamless workflows. Look at mission-critical tools like G Suite, Salesforce, Workday, Okta, and Box, and imagine the power of productivity when they are integrated with daily communications and process flows. It’s impressive.
So what’s the take-away? Modern communications and collaboration tools are the keystones to employee satisfaction, efficiency, productivity, and retention. And those are essential for a thriving business to be able to compete in this day and age.
How do I solve this? Ask your trusted IT advisor. Share your top challenges and what solutions you have found to meet the needs of the modern workforce. And the best advice I can offer...live in the now.
