The Home Office of the Future
On this edition of The Business Brunch, join Paul Ballinger from STL Communications, Kellie Peters from Databasix and Neill Lawson-Smith from CIS, as they discuss the pros and cons of working from home and what the expectations are from customers.
As we all know, working from home has been a rollercoaster of emotions and hasn’t been as straightforward as we might have once believed. We are all experiencing things differently and have been on our own journeys throughout the past year, but it’s now time that we need to start reassessing the situation and ensuring we have everything in place that we need for a life of, at least some, working from home. Our guests covered three key areas in this discussion: security, connectivity and customer communication.
“Being responsive to customers is key.”
Kellie Peters
Kellie spoke about how “being responsive to customers is key.” She highlighted that now customers are wanting quicker replies and a high level of customer service, people are starting to not take the “due to covid we can’t answer your phone call” as an answer. Paul also stated that “we used to live at home and now we are living at work” this is unfortunately the reality for the majority of the population and is also why it’s so important that your home office is the best it can be and allows you to help divide family and work life.
“We used to live at home and now we are living at work”
Paul Ballinger
What’s your plan if something goes wrong? Neill made a valid point that homes are not built for working in full time unless you are willing or able to invest in the correct technology such as faster Wifi, printers or computers. Neill mentioned that as businesses “it’s important to sit down and find the weak points with regards to working from home.” Once you can identify these issues, it will make it much easier to then take the necessary steps to help improve your set up.
“it’s important to sit down and find the weak points with regards to working from home.”
Neill Lawson-Smith
On the other hand, Paul addressed that “working virtually has helped speed things up.” Meetings that would normally last one or two hours can now be “done and dusted” within 30 minutes. Paul expressed that this has really helped with productivity and allowed his team to almost double the amount of work completed in a week.
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