Unified Communications delivered over the cloud provide a number of benefits to businesses that allow them to escape geographic restrictions. For example, they make it easier for businesses to expand to new locations, eliminate the need for a centralized physical office location, allow employees to work remotely, and give organizations the ability to hire outside of their local radius. While these are all important, the last point is particularly deserving of closer study.There are obvious advantages to cloud solutions enabling a remote workforce when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity. However, outside of such hopefully rare events, UC over cloud also increases the talent pool by letting employers hire nationally or globally. This gives businesses access to a wider range of employees, so they can pick the best person for the job, not just the closest. Additionally, support for remote workers can help with reducing turnover for existing employees. Instead of losing employees in whom you have invested time and resources to train when they move, you can retain them by allowing them to work from wherever their new location happens to be.
While not all personality types are suited to working remotely from home instead of an office environment, many employees do report greater productivity when telecommuting. Not only are there less distractions for employees who work at home rather than in a busy office, but these employees also take fewer breaks and less time off overall. The flexibility of telecommuting allows employees to have a better work-life balance, allowing them to get more done in a day in both their professional and personal lives.
Technological advances in UC via the cloud mean that it is easier than ever to enable remote employees in a wide range of roles. While there are some roles that seem more suited for working remotely, such as customer service agents or sales staff out in the field, there are many other positions that can use UC services to stay connected outside of the office environment. Thanks to capabilities such as presence, a single phone number across multiple devices, softphones and mobile apps, and video conferencing, UC allows almost any member of an organization to work from anywhere.
With the growth of cloud and Unified Communications solutions, businesses are no longer limited to filling positions with local candidates only. Rather than require everyone to come into one physical office location, businesses can employ people across the country or around the world to build the absolute best team possible.
