The year is 2019. A snowstorm has been forecasted in the area and every business in a 50-mile radius will be closed for at least a day or two. You, however, are an employee of a progressive company that understands the importance of productivity and efficiency over all else. Your boss informs you that your work needs to get done, no matter what happens outside – which means you’ll be working from home today!
With the advent of the Internet and cloud technologies, the requirement of office space to “get work done” has been drastically reduced. Work from home policies have been adopted by more and more companies as they realize that their employees are no longer bound to a physical location. Technology has enabled this shift, allowing businesses to communicate with clients or other workers without having everyone at the office all of the time – which is especially important when severe weather events occur.
Let’s look at 4 cloud technologies that have changed the face of work forever.
Email – sure, email has been around for a long time but it’s only been in the last decade or so that cloud-hosted email has evolved to the same scale and reliability as email hosted on-premise.
Document editing – Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides have brought real-time editing to the masses. No more waiting for others to finish their edits so you can start working on the document again!
Telecommuting – with a good internet connection, video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype make it feel like everyone is in the same room – even if they’re dozens or hundreds of miles away.
Cloud-hosted phone systems – no longer do you have to be at your desk to answer your desk phone. With a cloud-hosted phone system, you can answer your calls from anywhere with an internet connection.
Add these tools to your business’s arsenal and you’ll be able to weather any storm – literal or figurative! Adoption of remote work technologies over the past few years has made it so businesses can now operate remotely during a weather event, such as a snowstorm. This is a huge shift from just a few years ago when almost every business required its employees to work from an office.
The bottom line is that there are now many options for businesses to continue operating remotely in the event of bad weather. This means that business closures due to inclement weather are becoming less and less common. For employees, this also means that they may be required to lug around more and more equipment, such as laptops (and their peripherals,) power supplies, and even tablets (depending on the type of work you do) on a more routine basis.
While this is good for the business as a whole, it’s not necessarily great news for employees who rely on snow days to relax or take care of errands. Even worse? If you don’t have one of these remote work technologies, then your employer might require that you go into the office even if there’s dangerous weather outside. Make sure to talk to your supervisor to ensure you have everything you need to get stuff done from anywhere.
Is your organization prepared for inclement weather? Can you get things done from anywhere? If not, let us know and we can help you start the transition to the cloud.
