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Create a productive work environment

Table of contents
IntroductionTechnology that caters to all ways of workingChanging the culture of the modern workplace, and how technology can helpHow network optimisation, cloud and security are changing the way businesses operate through technologyBuilding a network for the new decadeHow health and safety technology can get your employees safely back to the office

Rethinking health, wellness and safety in the workplace

COVID-19 was a prime example of a sudden, unforeseen challenge to employers’ and employees’ ability to do their jobs safely.

Across the globe, employers are investigating how to improve the health and wellbeing of employees in the long-term, while improving the agility and ability of their workplace to adapt to sudden changes.

As health and safety requirements change and evolve, businesses will need not only the right processes and policies to protect their workforce, but also the right technology to adapt to any circumstance.

So, what does this mean for you?

Reassuring your workforce

Health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace is a constant issue. But especially at times of uncertainty or crisis.

Employees want reassurance that procedures, policies and technologies are in place to make the workplace as safe as possible.

They want to feel confident that their health and wellbeing are prioritised. And that starts with the right tools.

Creating confidence with health and safety technology

From custom mobile applications and worker insights to AI assistants and heat detection cameras, technology is already making the workplace safer.

And we’ve all seen it in our daily lives.

Supermarkets around the world have adapted their operations and the in-store customer experience to limit the density of people in the store at one time, while also implementing measures to support staff.

Some supermarkets created automated traffic light systems to stop people from entering when stores reach capacity.

And public venues like gyms have started taking temperatures at the entrance before admitting visitors.
 
These measures were created as a short-term solution to an immediate problem. But they also have long-lasting benefits to employees and customers alike.
 
So now it’s time to do the same for your workplace. But what technology do you need?
 
Before we answer, download our Build a Future Ready Workplace guide to see how businesses are preparing for a healthier, more productive future. It’ll give you a bit of insight and prepare you for the next steps.
 

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Vodafone keeps your employees safely connected wherever they choose to work

Vodafone keeps your employees safely connected wherever they choose to work

As your employees work from different locations, make sure that they are connected when they want to be and are safe in the office.
The Connected Workday from Vodafone Business (02:16)

Digital transformation has been at the top of the business agenda for years. COVID-19 simply sped up the process.

While many businesses initially rushed to adapt to mass remote working, the transition proved fruitful for businesses and employees alike.

Employers saw the financial and productivity benefits of having people work from home, and employees remained as productive as ever (but with a better work/life balance).

But remote working isn’t for everyone and isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for the future of working and employer health and safety.

For you, this means creating an adaptable workplace that works for everyone, everywhere.

Using data to drive change

According to our Future Ready report, more businesses are investigating how they can support flexible and remote working practices in the long-term.

Bridging the gap between the office and home requires secure connections, mobile devices, and cloud-based applications. With these, employees can safely and productively work from anywhere, anytime.

But what about the office environment?

For the office environment, you need to know how employees use, navigate and interact with each other in that space. And this can be achieved through real-time worker insights.

Using digital workplace analytics, you can monitor the entire workplace — from social distancing to occupancy levels. You can combine this technology with wearable devices, desk-booking systems and cameras to get a complete view of health and safety in the office.

To maximise security, you can use the insights gleaned from data and trends to create new office policies, helping to meet the health and safety standards of both government and employees.

Find out how you can use worker insights, cloud connectivity and AI to get your employees back to work safely

Keeping employees informed

Communicating updates to workplace policies is crucial for gaining employee buy-in and ensuring successful implementations.

But it’s unrealistic to expect your HR team to handle this along with everything else.

When IBM launched their chatbot to manage new starters, the chatbot quickly found itself dealing with 700 enquiries a day. And that was before employees asked about returning to work and COVID-19.

In these instances, virtual agents — or AI assistant technology — can help reduce the burden on your HR team, while giving employees the latest information.

These 24/7 virtual assistants are a one-stop-shop for answers, whether they’re current remote working policies, health and safety requirements, or onboarding questions. You have complete control over what content to include and where to direct employees. This frees up your HR team, giving them more time to focus on adding value to projects.
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Make your HR more human with AI

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Identifying health risks quickly and privately

If an employee is unwell and comes to the office, you need to know as soon as possible to resolve the problem.

Using cameras equipped with thermal imaging technology you can remotely monitor your staff or visitors’ skin surface temperatures before they enter your office.

The information is discreetly delivered to a secure console — and because the cameras don’t use facial recognition, you protect the person’s privacy as well.

This technology uses automatic alerts, and no contact is required to capture the data, ensuring you and your employees maintain social distancing.

Find out how heat detection cameras are helping businesses to get back to work safely

Bringing global connectivity to the home

Your remote employees need reliable, high-speed access to key applications and information, but when they’re relying on connections at home, productivity suffers.

With your workforce increasingly dispersed, a dedicated ethernet connection, can provide the coverage and speed you and your employees need.

Building fixed and/or robust wireless networks

Managing bandwidth and creating flexible, accessible networks is one of the biggest challenges for businesses, especially for remote working. Not only are employees trying to stay connected with each other, but they are also trying to handle customer communications in new ways.

Whether it’s fixed voice and data connectivity that provides secure and reliable connections, or a network that can handle high traffic and wide-area data transfer, how you keep your employees and customers connected depends on your business’ individual needs.

For example, a Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) provides a virtual layer over an existing network. Using it, you can manage and prioritise network traffic, as well as allow employees to securely connect to business applications, whether they’re using MPLS, LTE or their home broadband.

If your business is more reliant on mobile connections, or have employees in the field, then a Mobile Private Network (MPN) will give you access to a dedicated business network, allowing your employees to stay connected over a 4G or 5G connection.

Delivering the right tools for the job

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Do your on-site engineers have rugged devices? Do your customer service representatives have the right applications on their mobile phones and/or laptops? Are your IT analysts able to manage the entire device estate from a single location? If not, you need device lifecycle management.

Device lifecycle management (DLM) allows you to procure, set up, deliver, manage and monitor the equipment provided to your mobile workforce, ensuring that everything is ready to use when it’s delivered. Right out of the box.

Configurations and updates can be managed centrally. Meaning you’re no longer reliant on employees to update their software manually.

Plus, if employees do experience a problem that can’t be resolved remotely (like if they break or lose a device) one can be shipped out to them quickly, complete with the same setup. And once a device reaches end-of-life, you’re alerted and prompted to procure new ones. It’s that simple.

If a device in your network is stolen, a DLM system gives you remote access to wipe the device before any data can be accessed.

Is device lifecycle management really worth it? Find out in this blog

Telecoms managements

Flexible, resilient and secure communications that can connect a global, remote workforce are the hallmark of a future business.

The right telecoms management solution can help you to easily adapt and expand your telecommunications network. Giving you control and easing the management needs of the entire environment.

If your business grows and new devices are introduced, you can adapt to changes and make more informed decisions concerning the future of your business’ communications strategy.

This is particularly important for businesses trying to balance a hybrid work model.

Find out how to create an optimised remote working solution for your workers at home
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Building the tech stack for your future-ready business

Want to find out how you can use chatbots and AI to scale and adapt your HR function? Download our guide.

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Businesses can’t afford to put employee training on hold or stop on their mission to create a better working culture no matter what challenges they face.

If anything, these things become more important in times of crisis or uncertainty.

For some, this means changing their culture around remote and flexible working. With that comes a need to focus on what’s important for employees.

For instance:

Do they have access to the training and development resources they need?

Are they getting the necessary level of support?

Do they have the right equipment? (Mobile devices, applications)

This is a big part of improving and changing the culture of a future-ready business.

Here are a few things to consider:

Increasing training for employees

When rolling out remote working solutions, or new health and safety policies, keep in mind the training your employees may need.

If you’re introducing new policies and procedures (like desk space booking, for example) do your employees understand how to do it and the reasons why you’re doing it?

Informal support for remote employee welfare

Employee welfare is always important, but if employees are working away from colleagues, some will begin to feel isolated and cut off.

For some, it can be a struggle to adapt.

Whether it’s setting up informal weekly chats, video meetings, or just calling people to talk, you need to set up the networks to ensure your employees remain connected.

Collaboration

The way we think about collaboration in the future will be more around ensuring employees can communicate with colleagues and customers from anywhere.

So you need to ensure you provide the latest cloud-based collaboration tools that allow them to work together easily while maintaining high levels of security.

For example, building unified communication networks that can consolidate your communications network so it can be managed and monitored from a central, secure location.

Mobility

Employees are now expected to be available to customers (and colleagues) wherever they’re working.

To be effective today, they need to be connected not only to each other, but to business applications and information in real-time so they can quickly deal with enquiries, or collaborate on projects.

This means employees now expect access to devices and real-time collaboration tools that allow them to be flexible and access the information they need, exactly when they need it.

Having the right mobile strategy in place is crucial.

Not only in terms of remote connectivity, but also in terms of providing suitable hardware to employees and ensuring they use it properly.

With an Enterprise Managed Mobility solution your business can manage and maintain the way employees use mobile devices.

Always making sure the tools, technology, processes and policies they use are up to date and allowing them to remain productive, wherever they’re working.

These technologies aren’t just limited to one or two industries - they’re providing benefits across all sectors, and across all sized businesses.

Here are a few use cases

Finance

In the financial sector, secure cloud hosting is allowing providers to protect sensitive and commercially crucial customer information.

Financial services companies (particularly new financial technology brands) are reliant on efficient and secure cloud-based systems to keep data private and provide good customer service.

Take Bravura, for example, a leading fintech provider. We built them a flexible and secure cloud-based hosting solution that underpinned their innovative business model. You can find out more here.

Software delevopment

For software development, secure cloud hosting and robust network capabilities are allowing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies to build bigger, better and more secure solutions for their customers.

This is crucial as businesses look for better solutions to help them deal with changes to how they work.

Especially when it comes to security. SaaS developers need to know that they can deploy their software securely, with no risk to their customers.

This is a challenge we worked with software pioneer Planxis with when they required higher levels of security in their products.

Marine technology

Siren Marine is a marine technology solution provider who worked with us on a remote monitoring device that connects to existing sensors on boats that can monitor and track the boat, providing real-time data access from anywhere in the world.

The solution is helping users to monitor vital information in real-time like temperature, anchor drag and position monitoring using geofence tracking.

This is creating higher levels of marine safety as it allows for instant alerts to be sent in the case of events like the unauthorised entry of a vessel, engine tampering, or water leakage, allowing faster emergency response and rescue.

Retail

Keeping the economy moving has become a balancing act of opening stores so they can do business, all while balancing that with keeping employees and customers as safe as possible.

Many are using a combination of smart parking, access control, heat detection cameras and device management to maximise safety and security.

Other retail businesses, like Mango, are using virtual technology to not only improve the customer experience but enable a safer shopping experience.

Manufacturing

In the manufacturing sector, IoT and cloud connectivity are allowing engineers to manage the supply chain remotely. Sensors connected to machinery feed information — in real time — to centralised platforms, and using that information engineers can proactively maintain equipment to minimise downtime.

Find out how IoT and cloud connectivity can help reopen retail outlets safely

Find out how manufacturers can streamline their processes and keep employees safe using IoT and the cloud

Looking at future challenges, it's clear to see why preparation and technology are so important: our Future Ready Report 2020 found that almost a third of companies (30%) that met the criteria of being “future-ready businesses” reported increased profits compared to last year, despite COVID-19.

Other highlights include:

More than half (52%) said they expected profits to recover in the medium term

Almost half (44%) said they were seeing the benefits of innovations they put in place pre-COVID-19, which had helped them better deal with the events of this year

So, what do the networks for the next decade look like?

Networks for the next decade will be driven by innovation as companies — which have been moving slowly in a positive direction — speed up their adoption of new technology. This is technology driven by AI and automation.

These networks will not only be capable of managing business applications and communications but will also monitor and improve them in real time (based on data), increasing performance and negating problems before they occur.

Employees will also need reliable, secure access to mobile and cloud-based applications — including those in the office — as they may be working with colleagues or customers working remotely. They need unified communication networks that provide reliable connections and instant access to key data and customer information.

Finally, we’ll see intelligent networks that have security built-in as standard. With data and information passing over wireless networks, often via multiple devices and different internet connections, monitoring and controlling the flow of data is essential for security. This could require higher levels of access control.

For example, the network could use proactive threat hunting that’s driven by machine learning, allowing it to identify and prevent threats against it in real time. Cyber security training for employees is also a must, whether it’s training to protect them against targeted phishing attacks or using password managers. All of this is going to need a reliable, end-to-end managed network that takes the stress of management off you, so you can focus more on your business.

What remote working technologies do you need to invest in? Our blog has the answers

Creating confidence with health and safety technology

If your business is ready to start getting employees back to the office (or are starting to plan for a safe return) you need confidence in the solutions, and the management you’ll deploy.

Vodafone Business’ digital health and safety solutions include everything from heat detection cameras and workplace monitoring, to AI assistants and worker insights to create a complete health and safety solution — one that keeps your business running and your employees safe.

We can work with you to understand your business’ individual challenges and needs and help you reduce the risk across your work environment.

Whether you’re trying to get people safely back to the office, prepare for the reopening of your retail space, or get a construction site back up and running, we’ve got digital health and safety solutions that can be deployed across any industry. We also offer tailored solutions and a range of flexible networks and systems.

If you need custom mobile applications built and deployed, need to create an analytics platform to get better data from worker insights or are looking to introduce AI assistants to keep employees informed, we’ve got solutions that can help.

At Vodafone Business, we can give you a complete physical network, which can be rolled out on a global scale to connect your entire workforce in a secure, safe and reliable way.

Whatever the future of your business looks like, get in touch and let’s see how we can help you prepare for it.

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Industry leadership

Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Managed IoT Connectivity Services. See the report

Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Network Services. See the report

Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Managed Mobility Services. See the report