Remote Work Best Practices to Help Your Business Thrive and Win

See How Remote Work for Your Employees Reduces Risk and Benefits Your Bottom Line

Businesses are rapidly rethinking workforce practices to achieve greater employee safety. Central to this is better support for remote work and greater use of cloud applications to meet and collaborate internally and with customers. As a result, Cisco Webex has dramatically increased from 7 billion to 20 billion monthly meeting minutes, from February 2020 to April of 2020. Cisco added 15 million new security users over the same period and signed up more than 3,300 new organizations in a single peak week.[i] Read our Future of Work Whitepaper

Need guidance on working remotely? Here are some great tips to get you started!

How to Achieve Remote Work Best Practices

Moving forward, businesses need a proactive approach to compete and thrive in this new age of collaboration. This means rethinking collaboration practices, both in and out of the office, accelerating access and adoption of cloud applications, and deploying workspaces and policies that promote employee health and wellness. See how Vivint Solar Goes All-In with Webex Collaboration

Watch how essential work happens anywhere with seamless workflows:

What are Current Remote Work Practices?

Working practices are at the center of an April SmartVault study on effective pandemic response. The survey of 1,100 professionals across 18 countries reported that firms who feel they “responded successfully” were more likely to be using cloud technology (62%). Conversely, firms that identified themselves as less successful in their response struggled with remote work and collaboration. Those same firms report that they are now investing in new technology “to enable remote work and communications with team members and clients.[i]” Learn more about Cisco’s Collaboration solutions

What is the Key to Future Working Practice Success?

Despite the importance of moving to cloud applications and enabling remote work, the key to future success is not strictly about working practices, but about motivating, engaging, and enabling staff and their teams. Read Getting to Know You – The Three-Dimensional Cognitive Workspace for the lack of true human connectivity and how cognitive collaboration helps deliver massively personalized, transformational experiences to the workplace.

A “return to work” study conducted in late April by Qualtrics suggests that 2 out of 3 people would feel uncomfortable returning to the workplace at the current time.[ii] A scared or confused staff cannot perform at their best.

Thriving in today’s new work environment requires a holistic approach that brings remote work and cloud applications together with clear business objectives and updated HR policies – all focused on meeting staff needs and greater employee well-being.

Read Cisco’s Future of Work Trends transforming the workplace and a blueprint for action

4 Top Tips to Give Your Business a Remote Work Advantage

It may sound simple, but many businesses often stop at the technology and fail to focus on implementation, how people respond, and whether the business impact is achieved. Four ways that take a holistic approach and give your business a remote work advantage are outlined as follows:

Use a more proactive remote work policy This limits the risk of illness in the office. When employees even start to feel sick, they need to leave the office and work from home. This policy more comfortable to execute and enforce when staff feels they can get as much done remotely as in the office. Such a plan should reduce actual sick leave and ensure better employee state-of-mind.
Enable greater work flexibility to enhance staff well-being, both in terms of where and when they can work. Many studies show that flexibility to work from home is highly attractive for recruiting and maintaining staff – helping firms keep their best team and reducing costly turnover.
Encourage staff to take advantage of the productivity benefits of remote work Specific tasks are better done in a home office with fewer distractions. Many employees benefit by converting commute time to productive time.
Save on office space as more staff regularly work away from the office Many businesses miss that a proactive remote work policy can help them save on office space or optimize their spaces with more collaboration and huddle areas. This approach saves monthly spending and can improve morale with better meeting areas and the sad sight of empty cubes.

To help navigate #RemoteWork and the future of work, we put together a 5-day series of one-hour sessions with industry experts, customers, and the Webex leadership team May 11-15, 2020.

View all the Future of Work Marathon Series sessions on-demand

In Closing

In summary, these remote work best practices offer business leaders and IT planners the opportunity to 1) reduce sick leave, 2) reduce employee turnover, 3) increase productivity, and 4) reduce office space costs. In a more detailed research report, I run by analyzing how these combine to generate a financial benefit of $2,500 / employee /year. Underlying these remote work best practices is the assertion that staff is provided equipment, applications, and security roughly equivalent to that in the office. This type of preparation is key in the McKinsey research this June of 2020, where 69% of remote workers say that they are as productive or more productive than before they worked remotely.[iii]

Cisco is Here to Help With Your Remote Work Strategy

Getting staff ready for remote work is where Cisco is in such a strong position to help – bringing a combination of communications gear and accessories, cloud-based calling and collaboration, support services, and channel partners to help businesses deploy solutions and quickly get them up and running.

Lastly, consider how different types of remote work suit different types of business and types of work being performed. There is no one-size-fits-all remote work strategy. Another important consideration is the overwhelming preference for a mix of in-office and remote work vs.100% remote work.