Working From Home

How Adopting Working From Home Can Benefit Everyone

Working from home can bring a multitude of benefits to both the employee and to the employers themselves.

• Better Work-Life Balance. When coupled with a flexible work schedule. This control over your work schedule can be invaluable when it comes to attending to the needs of your personal life.
• Less Commute Stress. The average one-way commuting time in the UK in 2019 was 59 minutes—that’s nearly an hour each day spent getting to and from work, and it really adds up.
• Location Independence. One of the considerable benefits of a working from home team, is having a wider source of potential applicants for roles, meaning you won’t be limited by location to find the best talent. This can be especially helpful for job seekers living in rural communities and small towns where there may not be many available local positions.
• Improved Inclusivity. It gives businesses the opportunity to embrace diversity and inclusion by hiring people from different socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural backgrounds and with different perspectives.
• Money Savings – Employees. People who work from home half time can save between £2,000 to £6,500 a year. Fuel, car maintenance, season tickets, parking fees, a professional wardrobe, lunches bought out, and more can all be reduced or eliminated.
• Money Savings – Employers. The savings aren’t just for employees. More and more companies allow employees to continue working from home post-pandemic. Businesses could save thousands per year for every employee who works from home at least some of the time due to things such as reduced property rentals and overheads.
• Positive Environmental Impact. With everyone working from home there is the opportunity for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by taking potentially thousands of cars off the road.
• Increased Productivity and Performance. With the lack of a commute, remote workers typically have more time and fewer distractions, which leads to increased productivity—a huge benefit of working from home for both employees and employers alike.

Working From Home Isn't as Simple as It Sounds

The Silver Cloud Business conducted a comprehensive survey following the lockdown and the things that make the biggest difference for people working from home are:

• A desktop computer or laptop powerful enough to do their function
• Access to office systems (data, applications, business telephone systems)
• A decent office chair
• A work desk
• High speed, lower contended internet connection

The Silver Cloud Business helped a lot of businesses in Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset accelerate working from home solutions at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, and whilst a lot of them were meant to be temporary, it highlighted the short comings of a lot of IT systems that were not geared up for the volume of usage that were needed when it most mattered. This showed that a lot of businesses were not as good at flexible working as they thought.

What this has also highlighted is that the world has changed radically and is not as stable a place as a thought. Flexible working, including the ability to work from home, effectively, is now key for most businesses especially in an unpredictable world.

How We Can Accelerate Your Working from Home Solution?

We can work with you to create an effective and efficient, collaborative working IT environment through Microsoft 365 including Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams as well as integrating your PBX calls to ensure that just because you are working apart doesn’t mean you can’t work together effectively. We can also advice on internet connections and computer networks as well as computer security while your team works remotely.