Collaboration from Afar: How the Right Tools Can Help Businesses Stay Competitive with a Distributed Workforce
Businesses of all sizes face complex challenges including increasing competition, finding talent, shrinking budgets, and rising customer expectations. One way to stay agile while weathering challenging times is to have the flexibility of distributed workforces. When employees can connect and collaborate remotely, your business can continue to be competitive—or even gain a competitive advantage. Remote work policies can help you scale up or down as needed, hire talent who may not live near the office, provide a much-desired work benefit, and avoid disruptions in the case of emergencies.
As remote work becomes the new normal for many employees, even businesses with digital collaboration solutions already in place may find their systems lack the capabilities needed for truly seamless and more secure teamwork in or out of the office.
At least 65% of SMB and enterprise employees regularly attend meetings during the workday, Forrester Analytics reports. In fact, 41% of SMB employees and 45% of enterprise employees spend an average of two to four hours per day attending meetings.1
With so many employees spending so much time in meetings, it’s essential that those meetings be efficient and effective. If you have employees working from home, you must make sure digital meeting tools are simple, seamless, and more secure.
The Challenges of Digital Collaboration
When participants meet remotely without IT staff at the ready to help out, it’s crucial that technology just works. Connection and latency issues, needing to download new webconferencing software, or having mysterious audio or video issues can waste time, prevent remote attendees from fully engaging in the discussion, and appear unprofessional to customers and outside partners.
Additionally, employees may be using personal devices, which increases your business’s cybersecurity risks as team members share sensitive information in meetings.
Remote Work Calls for a New Approach to Collaboration
Robust digital collaboration solutions can support your team with the tools they need to innovate. And you don’t have to start from scratch: Intel Unite® is an open and extensible platform that works with your business’s existing collaboration technology, including Microsoft* Skype for Business and Zoom. IT teams can use the Intel Unite® solution to unify and leverage the complex inventory of devices, operating systems, and applications already in place. The result is a seamless collaboration experience for end users, wherever they are, and cost savings for your business.
In the office, employees can easily schedule, join, and start meetings and wirelessly share content across up to 100 devices without worrying about dongles, adapters, or cables. Outside of the office, once users are set up, they can enjoy the same intuitive interface and robust collaboration features such as the ability to annotate, share content in a wide range of formats, and simultaneously screen share. From conference rooms to huddle spaces to remote one-to-one meetings, users connect the same way every time, creating a consistent, easy-to-use experience, no matter where they are.
Easy setup, remote management, and built-in security features provide peace of mind for IT teams. Businesses can deploy the Intel Unite® solution on-premise or opt for Intel Unite® Cloud Service, which is a cloud-hosted PIN service. Remote administration capability supported by Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) and Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant (Intel® EMA) lets IT manage software and troubleshoot from anywhere. And when the crisis is behind us, businesses can continue to realize significant savings from reduced downtime, increased productivity, and lower hardware costs.
A New Way of Doing Business
As remote work becomes a new norm for many businesses, the need for flexible, easy-to-use solutions that simplify sharing, support collaboration, and enhance security will become increasingly important. Cost-effective collaboration tools that build on existing solutions and are easy to manage and scale can help keep your team connected, adding to your business’s resiliency even in challenging times.
Contact an Intel Unite® solution sales lead for more information on how to get remote meetings set up now.2 3