How to Re-evaluate Unified Communications Tools in the Work-from-Home Era

As the pandemic shapes a new normal, value chains in almost every ecosystem are being disrupted by work-from-home, social distancing, and other mandated behaviors. As time goes by, the coronavirus pandemic appears to be changing elements of how people work and live.

In just one or two months, it is now difficult to work and live like before the epidemic. For example, working in an office, meeting in a crowded conference room, and taking the subway or bus to work as before.

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Of course, collaboration is just one consideration in responding to a crisis that has touched nearly every aspect of people’s work and personal lives. But for those who develop, implement or manage unified communications (UC) tools and services, there are specific implications to consider.

The redefined workplace may be permanent

One of the most significant changes is how the coronavirus pandemic has redefined the workplace. For those workspaces that remain open, they are generally operated by key members of the business. And where possible, most employees are now working from home. While working from home is not suitable for all businesses and employees, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Enterprises need to do what they can to keep business running, and the fundamental need to communicate and collaborate has not changed. If anything, these measures have become even more important as workers work from home, forcing any form of teamwork to become almost 100% virtual. But this is not how developers and architects envisioned unified communications (UC) technology.

Given the flexibility of the technology used for UC platforms, these new challenges need to be addressed. To better understand what needs to be done, here are three examples of how the coronavirus pandemic is reshaping UC technology.

1. Businesses need to support workers in a home environment

In most workplaces, IT teams play a key role in ensuring that every worker has business-grade connectivity, applications, and endpoints. This presence not only provides the foundation to keep productivity high, but it also means that IT expertise is available on-site for additional support, training, and upgrades.

Working from home removes all of these factors, allowing workers to manage and organize themselves amidst the daily distractions of home life. Unified communications (UC) platforms must now operate in a more fluid environment, but not every worker has a corporate-provided PC. This means that companies need to use a mix of workstations and laptops, a variety of operating systems, and even one or two homemade systems.

Many endpoints are old, which means network speeds are slow and may not be able to support real-time applications, especially video conferencing. The same is true for network connectivity, and it should be clear even from these basic examples that UC platforms will need to adapt to lower technical capability standards.

2. More focus needs to be placed on cloud platforms

Premises-based UC remains common for a variety of reasons, including the fact that most communications systems still follow that model. While cloud-based UC technology is gaining momentum, many UC products have so far stuck to their traditional foundations. The coronavirus pandemic could change that.

Working from home is not going away anytime soon, and it seems that enterprises are already considering working from home as a fundamental part of their development strategy after the epidemic. Unified Communications (UC) developers and architects need to meet the needs of the work-from-home market, making unified communications (UC) platforms easier than before to configure and use from a home setting. Cloud computing is an ideal deployment model to support this capability, and cloud computing will become a key value driver for enterprises considering how to deploy unified communications (UC) in a work-from-home environment.

3. Communication tools are voice-centric

In today's technology, it's easy to take the adoption of voice technology for granted, but working from home presents some specific challenges. For businesses that use workplace-based communication systems, it can be difficult to extend PBX-style functionality to a home-based setup.

For businesses that plan to have a large number of staff working from home, it is not economically feasible to have each staff member use IP phones, and many people are left with mobile phones and consumer-grade web clients as their only options for voice. For most businesses, this is unacceptable. Again, cloud computing is the right answer to this problem, especially when working from home is happening quickly and on a large scale.

The call to action for anyone in the UC ecosystem will be to recognize this fundamental challenge and ensure that UC tools are as voice-centric as possible. In many cases, this will mean providing intuitive softphone clients that are easy for workers to use. These clients can connect directly to their organization's communications system, giving workers the same functionality as a landline phone. It's easy to overlook voice technology when designing UC, but when the primary use case is working from home, the platform's usefulness is limited if voice is not front and center.