The driving forces behind business agility

As businesses grow and evolve, technology continues to drive the pace of change. Software solutions are improving our productivity and businesses are becoming more dynamic, taking new strategic decisions to future proof their business. What hasn’t changed, is communication being at the heart of this.

The way we work

It’s without a doubt that we’ve come a long way since the rigid 9-5 office hours. With the need to manage an increased workload with higher targets, employees have had to make a shift in the way they work to accommodate for the pressures of delivering on short deadlines and quick turnarounds, and it’s the smaller businesses that are leading the way.

With the need for flexibility not only for major projects but also in the way we work, businesses are becoming more agile with their work. No longer is it referred to as ‘the office’, we now see our workplace as anywhere with the right technology and high-speed Wi-Fi. Cafe’s have started appearing across the UK specifically tailored to remote workers, and co-working spaces have caused a major shift in how dynamic the workplace can be. And it’s companies such as WeWork that have completely changed the landscape of co-working spaces. No longer a quiet, white-walled office for the corporate sector, you can work in a shared space or in your own office, take advantage of meeting rooms, network with creatives and start ups, right through to doing yoga or having a beer with the agency on the other side of your door.

The way we communicate

Smaller businesses, with much less red tape and formal processes, have the ability to be much more dynamic and innovative to get their job done.  Employees are moving out of individual silos and becoming more project based, enabling them to become more efficient and effective in the way they work.

We’ve seen that people are taking fewer hour long meetings with a large amount of participants and moving towards more quickfire micro meetings with the key individuals to maximise their flexibility and speed up their decision making process.

And with teams more sparse than ever, there’s still the inherent need to communicate, but we’re becoming smarter with the way we communicate. Email and in-team meetings – traditionally being the core channels of communication, has been overtaken by the likes instant chat, web meetings and hosted voice for a more agile approach.  

What we invest in

Moving away from hardware like landlines and desktop computers, BYOD (bring your own device) has made its way into the workplace and businesses are heavily investing in software, to help future proof their company and becoming more mobile than ever.

Web Meetings

Still with the need to collaborate with colleagues and customers, we used to schedule a conference call over the phone, use a separate product for screen share, get a video conferencing tool for when we need to see each other in different locations and pay large sums of money to run big meetings and trainings over a webinar or webcast tool.

Nowadays, with agility being the priority for most businesses, decision makers are looking to consolidate those costs through a single software platform for all our communication needs.

Not just a meeting tool itself, but everything you need before, during and after your meeting. Everything that people traditionally did in person, but online instead. Being able to engage with your audience in meetings and still talk over instant chat, dial into your meeting or join via VoIP, share documents and collaborate better, businesses are starting to move towards much more unified means of communication.

Hosted Voice

Hosted Voice has become the leading choice for dynamic businesses. Being the most versatile solution for a mobile workforce, hosted voice is a cloud-based phone system that enables you to easily switch from landline to mobile or your PC softphone mid-call. That means if you’re in the office or working from home, you can keep the same number and be accessible through almost any device.

Manageable through an intuitive online portal, hosted voice (also known as cloud-pbx), helps businesses avoid the expensive upfront hardware costs and easily adapt to changing numbers of employees.

Particularly for businesses with a large amount of incoming and outgoing calls, cloud pbx helps even the smallest of start-ups to the larger enterprises look professional through features such as the auto attendant, call barge, call queue groups, hunts groups, twinning, call recording and CRM integration allowing screen pops and dialing from your screen. To find out more about these features, click here.

The future

As industries continue to move towards an all-in-one solution for business communication, we’ll start seeing more UC&C tools (Unified Communication and Collaboration), where can we use one platform as our means of communication through a single location.

And with workforces in-edibility becoming more mobile, we’ll start to see an even more dramatic shift in the way we work, towards more agile ways of working.