Successful organizations have always depended upon groups of people working together to maximize efficiency and solve complex problems. Team dynamics help create structure, encourage creativity, foster innovation and drive productivity. Research by Frost & Sullivan suggests that as much as a third of a typical company’s productivity can be traced directly to team collaboration efforts.

Remote work had already achieved mainstream status before the coronavirus drove millions of us into work-from-home arrangements. Research conducted months before the COVID-19 pandemic found that remote work has increased by more than 150 percent over the past decade, with nearly three-quarters of global professionals reporting they telecommute at least one day a week.

Is your company hanging onto a legacy phone system in order to avoid the costs of an upgrade or a replacement? If so, you may not realize just how much that old phone system is really costing you.

If your phone system is more than 10 years old, your maintenance and infrastructure costs are likely increasing every year.

Online collaboration tools have been a lifeline for employees working remotely. Voice and video conferencing, instant messaging, chat and other tools enable workers to stay connected, share information, make decisions and serve customers.

But the rapid transition to remote work caused many organizations to implement collaboration tools in an ad hoc manner.

There is near-unanimous agreement among small to midsized businesses (SMBs) that collaboration tools are now essential to operations. In a recent Techaisle survey, 96 percent of SMBs ranked improved collaboration as their second-most important IT priority, just behind cloud.

Most historians agree that The Old Admiralty Office built in London in 1726 was the first example of a dedicated office building. For nearly three centuries since, most people have thought of work as both something they do and someplace they go.

That concept has been thoroughly upended in the last 12 months.

Although remote working was hardly new in 2020, the coronavirus forced many organizations to implement remote work strategies overnight. Technology and employee preferences were taking businesses in this direction anyway. The pandemic just accelerated the process.

Providing IT support for telecommuting employees has always been a tricky proposition, but it is particularly challenging now that COVID-19 stay-at-home orders have effectively forced entire companies into work-from-home arrangements.

Even before the current crisis created a surge in telecommuting, remote workers said IT support problems limited their productivity.

In our last post, we discussed the total cost of ownership (TCO) of collaboration tools. Lacking a coherent collaboration strategy, many organizations adopt multiple collaboration solutions from multiple vendors, and don’t have much of a grasp on how much it all costs.

The office has evolved from a designated workspace to a gathering place for team collaboration. People work from home, while on the road and at customer sites. Cross-functional teams include employees, consultants and business partners who could be anywhere in the world.