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The Workplace Has Changed and So Should Your Telephony

Explore three telephony strategies that can help you better meet new workplace demands

The workplace has changed tremendously during the past two years. The job expectations of the millions of people sent home to work have permanently shifted. Some people have taken early retirement or quit in a trend being called the Great Resignation. Others no longer want to work in the office every day – appreciative of the flexibility of being able to work from home for at least part of the week.

In fact, a May 2021 survey found that 39% of all US adults – and 49% of millennials and Generation Z – would consider quitting if their companies didn’t offer a remote work option. Companies are having to rethink their work-from-home policies and adopt hybrid work to attract and keep quality employees. Before the pandemic, 1 in 67 jobs (1.5%) offered the option of working remotely. In January 2022, it’s 1 in 7 (nearly 15%), according to the LinkedIn article “The Urbanist: The Post-Pandemic Workplace.”

“So maybe ‘The Great Resignation’ is more of ‘The Big Reset’, a compromise between those who work remotely and those who work in-person,” suggests urban designer Joseph Pobiner in the LinkedIn article. “If businesses take anything away from ‘The Great Resignation,’ it is that the battle to attract and retain talent may be their biggest challenge.”

The soaring number of remote workers also quickly increased the reliance on technology tools to connect employees to the office, each other, customers and partners. That’s proven valuable because labor challenges are forcing companies to do more with fewer employees – an October 2021 Gartner talent survey  found that 73% of CEOs believe a labor/skills shortage is the most likely external issue to disrupt their business in the next 12 months.

Technology – including telephony services – can also provide a major boost as companies strategize how to minimize complexity, save money on services and support employees from anywhere. With all these changes in how you do business and the number of employees working remotely, should the way you pay for telephony services change as well?

Let’s explore three telephony strategies that can help you better meet new workplace demands.

#1 – Buying licenses based on demand

Demand drives most purchases necessary to run a business. You wouldn’t buy enough coffee supplies for 100 people each month if most employees prefer tea and guests rarely visit the office. And you probably wouldn’t give every employee two monitors for the office if some usually work from home and others use a communal desk.

The same cost-saving strategy applies when buying services licenses for employees. Take licenses for telephony services. Your instinct might be to buy 200 calling licenses for 200 employees but do you really need that many?

Perhaps like many companies, yours now has a sizeable remote workforce. These employees may not come into the office often. They may work hours that fall outside of traditional office hours. An effective strategy we recommend is to purchase the number of licenses your employees would use during peak calling times rather than one license per employee.

Don’t pay for more licenses than you need. Instead, realize the cost savings of Netrix Buy-What-You-Need-Calling , a service offering that gives you the benefits of secure Teams Direct Routing (TDR) with the cost savings of paying for just the licenses you need.

#2 – Moving to the cloud

Cloud-based telephony options like unified communications as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) offer similar benefits to other cloud services. UCaaS solutions give employees telephony services like email, video conferencing, chat and instant messaging, collaboration and file sharing while CCaaS solutions are for customer conversations.

UCaaS helps companies boost productivity, reduce costs, improve the customer experience, give employees the right tools for their job, and improve employee retention, according to the Netrix blog post “5 Ways UCaaS Boosts Productivity and Efficiency.” UCaaS makes it easier for companies to support remote workers by giving them the flexibility of a single unified experience regardless of where they’re working.

You may be eager to gain the benefits of moving telephony to the cloud but be hesitant because of your existing on-premises PBX voice platform. This hesitancy could be for a few reasons:

  • Stuck in the middle of a contract with a carrier
  • Concerned about the hassle and risk of porting numbers
  • Invested in infrastructure like session border controllers and call servers that you’re not ready to deprecate
  • Committed to keeping carriers in different parts of the world
  • Uninterested in moving your voice platform to the cloud

Even if you’re tied to a carrier, Netrix’s Bring Your Own Carrier solution can smooth the process of moving telephony to the cloud either as a hybrid or full migration. Netrix TDR provides a Microsoft Teams calling platform in a consumption model. This can save money and headaches because Netrix manages the platform to prevent outages and security threats.

#3 – Partnering with an MSP

Technology solutions can ease company challenges. A managed services provider (MSP) with expertise in telephony can save the company the time of managing those solutions. That’s useful since 72% of tech workers said they were considering quitting their jobs in the next 12 months, according to a 2021 Talentlms survey of 1,200 US IT professionals.

An MSP can free your IT staff for daily tasks and ROI-generating projects and maximize the value you get from a solution. It’s an investment rather than an expense, according to the Netrix blog article  “The Perfect Storm: Managing IT through the Great Resignation.” A telephony MSP can provide 24/7/365 monitoring for fast incident resolution and downtime avoidance.

“We’ve grown so much this past year, we need our internal IT people to focus on special projects, not the care, feeding and maintenance of our IT,” a client told us. “They are just too valuable.”

Consider changing up your telephony delivery

With business challenges like fewer employees and a huge growth in the remote workforce, companies are considering how to best support customers. Consider telephony services when looking at strategies to increase productivity and efficiency with fewer employees. Buying licenses based on demand, moving to the cloud and partnering with an MSP can help you achieve this. Get details on Netrix telephony services.

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