Remote and Hybrid Business Telephony for the Indefinite Future

More than two years after the largest U.S. companies sent their workers home to begin remote work, many companies now want them back. Remote workers, for the most part, aren’t enthusiastic about the prospect, so many companies are choosing not to play hardball and making demands to return to the office as a condition of employment. Turns out…workers really enjoy working from home. It saves them commuting time, gas money (with some parts of the country showing gas prices above $6 a gallon, this isn’t surprising) and helps them achieve work-life balance.

Cities are eager for workers to return. In places like New York City, the presence of commuting workers drives the local economy.

“That accountant from a bank that sits in an office, it’s not only him,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “It feeds our financial ecosystem. He goes to the cleaners to get his suits cleaned. He goes to the restaurant. He brings in a business traveler, which is 70 percent of our hotel occupancy. He buys a hot dog on our streets…”

It’s not only about convenience, however. While COVID-19 infections have been trailing off in the U.S., resurgences of infections, hospitalizations and deaths in Europe and other places thanks to the omicron sub-variant ba.2 have workers wary that a return to work will only result in another lockdown, and the suits will have been pressed and the briefcases brought out of the closet only for naught.

Experts recommend that companies continue to build out the infrastructure necessary for a remote and/or hybrid work environment.

“What this means for many larger enterprises and small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is finding a way to make your phone system a dispersed tool that connects all of your team members, customers and vendors, no matter where they are, to recreate your company as an ‘everywhere enterprise,’” according to Telecom Reseller.

A good business VoIP phone system can turn any mobile phone, laptop, tablet, or PC into a VoIP client employees can use anywhere. Calls made to their office extensions can be routed to their mobile devices, but callers only see the number they dialed, not the employees’ private numbers. Functions like voicemail, caller ID, conferencing and more migrate to the cloud.

No one knows what the future will bring, and history has shown that predicting how pandemics will behave simply doesn’t work. Now is the time to prepare your business for remote and hybrid business VoIP operations for the indefinite future. 

Edited by Luke Bellos