Coronavirus: From the Office to Working From Home

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is greatly impacting the lives of organizations, employees and stakeholders. With the outbreak’s rising impact, more employees are migrating to remote, work-from-home practices as means of achieving “social distancing.” 

However, inevitable challenges are emerging with remote workdays. Obstacles include, but aren’t limited to, employee isolation, diminished productivity and poor team communication or collaboration. This post will discuss the obstacles that employees face during these unprecedented times, while emphasizing the need for advanced communication solutions during the pandemic. 

Social Isolation and Work-From-Home Distractions

Some may find it challenging to complete tasks without team or social unity. Employees feel isolated at home, separated from their organizational colleagues and friends. Social isolation may equate to lowered productivity, resulting in prolonged task completion. Additionally, without face-to-face supervision, employees become distracted, surfing the web for latest political news or shocking celebrity gossip. 

The bottom line is that the office is a motivational factor, creating a productive work environment consisting of interpersonal relationships and strict assignment deadlines. When abandoning the familiar office space, some individuals may become demotivated or feel uncomfortable working from home.

Lack of Individual Organization

Individuals tend to deviate from their workday agendas when working remote. For instance, some may decide to extend their sleeping hours to avoid workday start times. Others may extend their lunch breaks, allowing them to evade workday duties or reduce the time spent on work. Essentially, work-from-home employees become disorganized, abandoning workday agendas for new, daily routines consisting of extended breaks or other non work-related choices.

Communication and Collaboration Obstacles

Email and SMS aren’t reliable communication tools during the pandemic. Important messages are always missed or buried in one’s inbox, preventing individuals from addressing critical issues promptly. Worse yet, these tools don’t provide distinguishable audible alerts, and they delay information sharing between team members. Firms are replacing these inefficient communication tools with Slack instant messaging for remote workdays. 

Though Slack is a reliable instant messaging platform, it doesn’t provide distinguishable notifications for high-priority incidents or events. Similar to email and SMS, team members can’t determine or recognize the severity of a Slack message.

Solution to Communication and Collaboration Challenges

Remote teams require a critical alerting solution, complemented by popular ticketing platforms, such as ConnectWise Manage and ServiceNow. This is specifically true for managed service providers (MSPs) and incident response teams, which aim to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) to achieve maximum client satisfaction. 

By adopting a critical alerting solution, off-site response teams can:

• Transform intelligent tickets into automated, detailed mobile alerts (e.g., OnPage notifications)
• Collaborate and share files through secure, two-way HIPAA-compliant mobile messaging
• Escalate important alerts to scheduled on-call groups or individuals, ensuring that critical notifications are never missed
• Receive continuous audible, smartphone alerts for up to eight hours until acknowledged
• Add live call routing to their instance, allowing clients to dial one number to directly connect with an on-call engineer

Team members require effective technologies when working from the comfort of their homes. Regardless of location, the right solution ensures that team members stay connected during the pandemic. 

As discussed, a critical alerting solution is a must-have notification and messaging tool, built for crisis situations or urgent events. OnPage is an example of a rock-solid, reliable critical alerting solution. Its secure smartphone app enhances team communication and collaboration, enabling organizations to get the most out of their digital technology investments. OnPage meets the demands of remote employees, enhancing team connectivity or incident resolution performance during today’s global event.