RingCentral: Tips for Maintaining a Distributed Workforce

The world has changed and work has changed. Now, businesses must enable and support an increasingly distributed workforce.

And the need for a distributed workforce won’t end when offices finally reopen.

With a constant need to maintain work-life harmony, how do we reimagine the technologies and strategies we need to enable this new world of work? How do we match the need for security, scale and manageability with the right tools to support collaboration, productivity and culture, wherever your workforce may be?

During a Channel Partners Virtual presentation titled “The Future of Work is Anywhere,” Sept. 10, Anand Eswaran, RingCentral‘s president and COO, and William Moxley, its chief product officer and SVP, will address the issues around distributed workforce.

They’ll discuss how to embrace the future of work now, examine the latest strategies and demo the latest solutions transforming business.

RingCentral’s Anand Eswaran

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Eswaran provides a sneak peek of the information he plans to share with attendees.

Channel Partners: What are some of the issues that can arise while trying to support organizations’ need to work from anywhere?

Anand Eswaran: Back in March, the world embarked upon the biggest remote-work experiment ever, overnight. We leveled the playing field for everyone, whether it be career progression or day-to-day opportunities for workers.

Proximity bias disappeared. Now, everyone in a meeting has the same screen real estate, no matter what your experience, seniority or personality type. I bring this up because in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, the concerns were different. Many thought the biggest issues would be a decrease in productivity or a less engaged workforce.

But in most cases, that hasn’t happened; in fact, just the opposite. Instead, the issues have centered around things like:

• How do you keep IP safe when using disparate communications channels?
• How do you ensure privacy and security?
• Or, how do you protect a business when employees are unknowingly using unsecured networks?

The issue has become security. And for now, that’s where we’ve seen companies require the most support when moving their workforces online.

But, in the future, we are moving to a hybrid workforce — one where some employees are in an office while many continue to work from home. Chances are we’ll see new issues emerge, or old ones amplified to a larger scale. Chief among them, the same issue that remote workers have always faced: How do you maintain the same level of visibility that an in-office employee can achieve?

The level playing field is going to disappear once more, so we need to prepare. How? By deploying technologies that keep people connected, that help them progress in their careers wherever work may find them.

CP: Does technology play a big role in supporting a distributed workforce? If so, how?

AE: Absolutely. Businesses have always had employees at different locations and in different time zones around the globe. With that, there has always been a need to drive collaboration and productivity regardless of location. But with the current crisis, businesses have shifted entire workforces to remote work. So technology – particularly …