Communication workarounds are a big problem, particularly in small to midsize enterprises (SMEs).

Recent workforce studies show that more than half of workers waste time shifting between uncoordinated tools, navigating an average of seven different platforms to finish routine tasks.

Many organizations are struggling with an overabundance of collaboration tools, a phenomenon known as “tool sprawl.” Instead of making teams faster, juggling too many single-purpose applications creates operational bottlenecks and cognitive fatigue.

Even though more companies and government agencies are issuing return-to-office mandates, many employees still work from home at least part of the time. Roughly 32.6 million Americans, or about 22 percent of the U.S. workforce, are working remotely. While this is less than the pandemic-era highs, it’s still a significant increase from pre-pandemic levels.

The “digital transformation” concept has been around for years, but AI has made it even more compelling. Generative AI promises to enable new levels of efficiency, productivity, customer service and innovation, but legacy technologies and business processes hold many organizations back.

Cloud and collaboration technologies have changed both the way we work and the workplace itself — and closer integration of these technologies will create new opportunities for innovation, efficiency and profitability. For smaller organizations, unified communications (UC) solutions provide the logical platform for seizing these opportunities.

In our last two posts, we discussed the telephony limitations of Microsoft Teams and how to resolve them through integration with the RingCentral telephony platform. In this post, we’ll take a look at your deployment options — and a new update that makes the process faster and easier than ever.

Hundreds of millions of users rely on Microsoft Teams to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, partners and customers. However, telephony limitations are perhaps the platform’s most pronounced shortcoming.

Voice calling was not a high priority when Teams was launched in 2016 — the platform was designed to support workplace collaboration with chat, video conferencing, file sharing and application integration features.

People are a company’s biggest expense. Wages, benefits, payroll taxes, training and equipment expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of total business costs. However, successful businesses understand that employees are also their most valuable asset.

After a couple of years of supporting remote workforces, most organizations felt quite prepared for the transition to a hybrid work model in which employees split their time between onsite and office work. However, many are finding that disjointed communication environments are making it more difficult than they imagined.

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.