You’re mobile – that’s great – now you need to be efficient and productive

In the early evening of 26 March, just a few hours before lockdown, people were seen packing PC-sized boxes onto the back seats of their cars. Others tumbled laptops, printers and monitors into passenger seats before they hit the traffic-congested highways.

It was crazy. Many people were trying to figure out how they could carry on working and they only had a few days to do it – if that. So many were trying to wrap up urgent business, quickly secure orders for their customers, make last-minute deliveries.

You know what it was like. You were there. Few of us had any idea what we were doing, but South Africans are an entrepreneurial bunch. We made a plan.

A lot of our solutions weren’t pretty, but they worked. Working from home is so normal now the general discussion is around how much of it continues after lockdown. Even the memes are old news now.

What many people are figuring out now is the frantic solution they threw together is really rough around the edges. Many people are using solutions they’d never heard of before. One’s security was questioned to the point where “Zoombombing” is a phrase that turned up in a recent Google search.

Quick-fix technologies helped people in a pinch, but now their shortfalls are being exposed. We realise that we need more than just a face on a screen. In fact, there’s been a bit of a backlash against that.

We need solutions that can be remotely deployed, with uniform policies to secure us while we work. We need productivity features, too. Ease of use is crucial to help us be productive in meetings, engage people in constructive ways, with the capacity to be creative in teams and hold meetings that improve accountability by sticking to agendas, capturing notes, actioning items and circulating them to teams.

We spent much of our time in meetings before lockdown but anecdotal accounts say it’s now officially through the roof. There’s a backlash against online meetings, not because there are so many, but rather that they’re unproductive.

The immediacy of video is great where it matters, but we also want voice, messaging, whiteboards, safe and secure file sharing, with the ability to integrate necessary third-party tools. Many people use Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive so they need that integration to be tight to help them be efficient and effective. Many organisations also have VOIP and toll-free dial-in.

The less we have to think about how we’re driving the applications and trying to get the information out of one and into another, the better. We don’t want to feel as if we’re trying to hurdle the interface like we’re in the outside lane of a steeplechase. The interface should drive productive, efficient interaction and collaboration through simple, intuitive activities that help us achieve meaningful business outcomes.

The solution needs to be secured and it must be ethically superior.

This is how we improve productivity and responsiveness, morale, collaboration and even customer experiences. It’s how we reduce the risk of security breaches, loss of valuable information and reduce operating costs.

We’re beyond the days when we’re frantic to be able to work at all, just some kind of capability, anything. Now we’re focused on the bigger picture again since we’ve all settled down into the lockdown era. We need to drive continued profitability and remain productive so we can survive lockdown and what comes afterwards.

We use Cisco Webex to help organisations at various stages on their collaboration journeys both in how they use the technologies and how they deploy them. You get more functionality from the same application so your teams can be more effective and agile.

Speak to me about a free 30-day trial for up to 100 participants!

www.nexiopartners.co.za