Ostratto - Blog | Ostratto , VOIP

4 old practices that won’t work after COVID

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 13:15:10 +0000

It’s not news that COVID-19 suddenly, unexpectedly, and dramatically turned the business world on its head. Business-as-usual changed all at once, without the benefit of robust planning we’re (hopefully) accustomed to in business. Those changes happened to keep employees safe while making sure work continued.

What’s also clear is that when the pandemic is under control and we find our “new normal,” it won’t look like what we had before. Businesses have adapted, employees have changed, and attitudes about working are different. We’ve found new ways to do business successfully, and in many areas, there’ll be no turning back.

Here are four old business practices that won’t work anymore post-COVID-19.

1. Employees working onsite only

Before COVID, the vast majority of businesses were uncomfortable with employees working remotely. In fact, 80% of US companies had no remote work program at all.

Employers pretty much suffered from inertia—after all, workers always came into the office to work. Without ever trying remote work, most leaders lacked the imagination to understand the potential of working from home. They worried that employees working away from the office wouldn’t be as productive. They claimed many jobs were “impossible to do remotely.”

Then COVID-19 came around, however, and jobs that were previously “impossible to do remotely” suddenly found their remote possibilities. What’s more, they achieved good results too. A study by Harvard Business School and New York University found that people who work remotely spend 48.5 more minutes per day than they did pre-virus. And this makes sense - when a long commute is off the table employees don't mind staying on to get jobs finished.

Other surveys found that:

44% of executives today feel employees have become more productive working remotely
41% of employees feel the same way

While many jobs require employees to work onsite, many others can support a remote workforce. Businesses will still need those work-from-home employees post-COVID-19, and they will be forced to continue supporting remote work.

2. Micromanaging as a management style

With many employees working remotely, management styles need to adjust. Monitoring employees that work in another location requires shifting your methods as well as your expectations.

It's not realistic to assume an employee is working based on how much time they spend at their desk. Even when you’re at the same location and can see an employee sitting across the room, you don’t know how productive they’re being.

Evaluate their performance, instead, based on the outcome. How is their work? Are they meeting their goals? What’s the quality of their work? These are the real measurements of productivity output that remote working highlights perfectly.

3. Using too many collaboration apps

It’s easy to see how it happened. CV-19 struck and companies quickly sent their employees home to safety. They hurriedly adopted remote work solutions for messaging, video, and calling—all the tools they needed to keep communication open so that work would continue to get done.

In rushing to choose new solutions, many businesses ended up with multiple overlapping apps. Having two or more apps that provide video calling, for instance, is not sustainable long term and can become confusing for the average user. App overload causes employee fatigue and wastes a significant amount of time.

Seventy percent of workers say having disparate work apps makes it challenging to get their work done. More than two-thirds report wasting up to an hour of work time per day just navigating between various apps. Sixty-eight percent of workers find themselves toggling between different apps up to 10 times in a single hour.

Too many apps can also mean running the risk of employees switching to other unauthorized tools that can pose a security risk. We've written about the risks of 'shadow IT' before.

Employees will only willingly utilise technology that’s easy to use, it’s more efficient to provide them with one platform they understand well and are comfortable with.

4. Keeping employees in the dark

It's key to remember that teams appreciate transparency, especially during uncertain times. They want to understand what’s going on with the business, management expectations, and their position. They want to be confident that the strong company culture they know isn’t changing.

No longer are employees in the office to hear news around the water cooler, chat casually with the boss, or celebrate wins in real time. But these are still valid communications needs, and employers must make sure they still happen in some form.

Communication and transparency are critical—even more so now with COVID-19.

Post-COVID tools to support remote work

When we (eventually) shift into a post-pandemic period, businesses will face a new work-life paradigm that looks nothing like before. From remote and hybrid work arrangements to new forms of communication, leaders will need to rethink those practices to stay competitive.

Having the right tools to support remote work will be one of the key differentiators. As work moves beyond the walls of the traditional office, employees everywhere will need technology that facilitates collaboration and drives teamwork. Tools like unified communications make collaboration effortless by combining team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform, allowing employees to choose how they want to collaborate and when.

By supporting tomorrow’s work-from-anywhere workplace—and shedding old, archaic practices that no longer make business sense—businesses will be ready to drive success far beyond the pandemic.

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Written in collaboration with RingCentral©.

What is VoIP?

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 20:22:16 +0000

We've recently covered why having a landline number is good for business and we did tout VoIP as being the way forward. VoIP is one of those technologies that you've maybe been hearing and reading about for many years now. It’s gotten to the point that you rarely see a discussion of how VoIP works or even what it is anymore. So let’s take a step back, walk through the basics, and answer the question: how does VoIP work and what can it do for your business?

What is it?

VoIP is Voice Over Internet Protocol, or in more common terms: phone service over the Internet.

If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection you can get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from your local phone company. This opens up quite a few possibilities for your new or existing business and trust us, it's actually nowhere near as technical as it might sound and nowadays it's very cost-effective. A comprehensive discussion of the technical details of VoIP can get very complicated, so here’s an explanation for us non-techies.

VoIP takes a standard analog phone call - the type most homes and businesses still make today over the public phone network, and converts that analog call into digital packets. Then, rather than traveling over the standard phone network, those packets are transmitted across the internet to the other parties on the call. Voice packets of a VoIP calls travel over the internet just like any other type of digital data, such as an email message or a file being uploaded to your Google Drive.

Now, for the common user, a VoIP phone system is mostly indistinguishable from a usual phone system however they are in-fact fundamentally different in the way they operate 'behind-the-scenes'.

What does it do?

VoIP systems provide users an escape from being tied to a desk because their office phone numbers will no longer be limited to any particular phone. For example, most modern VoIP providers offer an app enabling users to make business calls on their desktop, laptop or mobile device using nothing but an internet connection, a microphone and speaker setup or headset, and the app itself. Calls you make or receive from anywhere, too, will use the same number. That ensures you present a professional image to clients or customers wherever you speak to them from.

A modern VoIP systems will grow as fast as your business can - this is referred to as scalability. With traditional telephony, expanding a business's system can be a major undertaking - cables to run potentially, more networking equipment required and new phone devices. Things can be much simpler with VoIP. A system can be expanded to include new workstations or phones with ease and new features can be added with a 'flick of a switch'.

In other words, a VoIP system can act as a full-scale cloud communications platform, allowing your team to easily manage calls and other communications features, including auto attendants with recorded greetings, advanced call routing and forwarding services, virtual voicemail, and even online faxing.

Businesses can drastically reduce costs in a variety of areas. Initial hardware and setup expenses are often much lower. Call charges, too, can be a lot lower. That’s in addition to the added accessibility and agility which a VoIP system provides.

Left: your callers, right: your devices. Thanks RingCentral!

How does it work?

Now bare with me here, it could get rocky. I'll cover the principles and then if there's any bits you aren't sure on just drop me a line and I can explain further.

With a regular phone call, a specific physical path is provided by a phone company. That path goes between yourself and the number that you call. That system also utilises the traditional telephony infrastructure, which means the network of phone lines crossing the country - usually provided by BT in our country.

With VoIP, calls are transmitted differently. The audio at your end of a call (your voice) is converted into digital packets. It's easiest to think of them as being like envelopes of data. In the same way as traditional envelopes contain what you've written.

The conversion of audio voice signals into digital packets is handled by what is known as 'codecs'. Codecs can be either hardware devices or software-based processes. They compress the voice signals and then encode them as digital data. To continue our analogy, they take what you say and pop it into the digital envelopes.

The data packets are then transmitted via IP. This can be either across a Local Area Network (LAN, like in your home or office) or online (over the world wide web). They're often transmitted via the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). Or, if not, via the Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol. The latter is simply an encrypted version of the former. This stage of the process is like a postman picking up your envelopes and taking them to the destination.

The data packets reach their destination almost instantly. They then need to be decoded and decompressed. This is handled by codecs. They take the digital data and convert it back to audio signals. The recipient of your call heard your voice as they would down a normal phone line. The codecs at their end of the transmission open the envelopes for them to read.

Away from the technicalities, the process of making a VoIP call doesn't have to be much different to a standard phone call. To make the calls, you can either use hardware or a software-based VoIP phone.

The former is very much like a traditional desk phone. It will look almost identical and can be used in all the same ways. That doesn't only mean making calls. Most VoIP phones also let you use voicemail, make internal calls, and call transfer tasks. If no one told you, you might not know you weren't using a regular phone.

Software-based VoIP phones are often called 'softphones'. They're apps or programs installed on a mobile device or computer. The interfaces of those apps or programs replace a traditional phone handset. They're often designed to look similar and can be used either via a touchscreen or keyboard. Calls through these phones typically use a headset and microphone.

A 'softphone' curtesy of RingCentral

Getting started with VoIP

So...that’s everything you need to know about VoIP (for now).

All of that may have been enough to convince you that VoIP is the way to go. If so, you’ll be wondering how to switch to the more modern system. Well here's another advantage - it’s super easy to do so. Your first step is always to contact a trustworthy provider who can talk you through the rest of the process. That's where we come in.

I hope it's been an interesting read and it hopefully wasn't too technical - again, if any of it was, just drop me a line and I can explain with some pretty pictures maybe.

Get Started with VOIP