BUILDING CULTURE & COLLABORATION FOR THE NEXT NORMAL, CHAPTER 4:

Transitioning Out of Band-Aid Crisis Communications Technology

Check out more remote working resources and products or explore what hybrid working means for companies today >

Videos in this Series

Chapter 1: Working from Home & the Hybrid Worker Are Here to Stay >

Chapter 2: Managing Your Business Through the Phases of a Crisis >

Chapter 3: Building A Virtual Culture by Humanizing Work >

Chapter 4: Transitioning Out of Band-Aid Crisis >

Chapter 5: Preparing for Post-Pandemic Business >

Transcription:

Brent Leary
Let's go in. Oops, I want to go, take Mona to this band aid reaction technology strategy, cause uh you gotta like talk us through this thing.

Mona Abou Sayed
Yeah, of course. So I think when we, when we were in the reaction phase and mitigation in some areas. People just kind of went with whatever they could find. You saw a number of people jump on free trials and free extended trials from different companies, they may be consumer grade, they might have been the lowest cost. Some people resorted to leveraging their own personal devices and and and ultimately just join a technology to help enable people going working from home. As we kind of progress into this mitigation and reassurance phase and really planning for the future. It's going to be really important that you look at the whole system. What is it you're trying to provide in your organization? You need a secure, you need a secure enterprise grade solution? There are solutions for that, that's what that's what people are in business to do is to look at the end to end collaboration, so Mitel, shameless plug right, seamless communication, collaboration, we're thinking about how, how do you how do you quickly transition from all the collaboration needs that you have, whether it be within our own technology, or even connected and integrated with other technology, so it's really important for the future that you realize and recognize what you've put together might be, might be that Band Aid solution. What you know what, you know, in our world in my world when I think about bringing in you know video meetings. I think about real use cases, I may be on a chat with one of my employees, and then we realized that you know this is going to be a much easier conversation if we escalate this to a video call, by the click of a button, I can quickly get to a video call with my with my employee, because we've thought about thought entire use case end to end within our suite of products so it's really important to think about how connected that technology is going to be for the future or else you're not going to get the adoption you, you want to see in our future world like, like, like Laurie said, we're going to see more and more people working from home and you're going to, you're going to see a bigger push to, to help drive business events and communications with that collaboration technology. How it all comes in fits together is going to be key, you can’t shadow over that cube all the time now anymore. You know, even hiring practices I'm gonna I'm gonna have to assume now that I'm no longer limited by city limits, to hire. So how do I make sure that even, even if I decide to hire someone in Atlanta.

How are they going to you know, how they are going to collaborate within our organization easily? We're however, right tools in place.

Laurie McCabe
I just think that disjointed technology area is just key because in that reaction phase, everybody got home, some kind of free video conferencing service. But, video conferencing isn't work communication and collaboration stop and end. You have all these other things you need to bring into the loop, and maybe even integrate some of that with some of the key business applications that people are using. So I think if people move through the phases that you're talking about, we know SMBs, integration is one of their biggest challenges but also one of their biggest goal, and they're going to be looking more for how we can make this all work together, so we're not jumping from here to here and having to sign in and sign out, and go this URL that URL and you know our phone system and want to have all that integrate. People businesses are still using phones. So it does, it does work better when it works together no question.

Mona Abou Sayed
Workflow is key. I mean work doesn't get done like you said in silos the workflow is key. We have integrations in our world that allow you know a ticket coming into a ticketing system to pop into your chat window and in your chat window you could take that and disposition it to and assign it to somebody else that's how it work gets done. And thinking about those end to end use cases and you're missing out on opportunities to help people work more productively, nobody wants to be a slave to their email or a slave to whatever other communications we have and so when you look at how it all comes together. You've got workspaces, you've got people that that need to work together, and that there's the concept of a team working together, that have joint tasks, but you may also be messaging and SMS and have SMS with external or messaging with external third parties. You know, not within your four walls at the company telepathy, how does telepathy fit into it has it, how does video and how does file sharing. So, you know, bringing all of these components together and thinking about the use cases that power that power your business are going to be key to driving a seamless technology future.

Laurie McCabe
It doesn't drive everybody crazy because they can't remember their password to seven different things.

Brent Leary
Yeah, you're also seeing some of the big, you know, huge players, there's some talk about you know how Zoom is forcing some merger and acquisition opportunities for the big companies to integrate some of these technologies together so, interesting to see how that will play out.