Combining culture and technology for a healthier workplace

Nowadays, technology goes hand-in-hand with employee health and wellbeing, providing the tools to empower the workforce.

Collaboration platforms and unified communications, for example, are helping employees stay connected and be more efficient. While the cloud makes it possible for employees to work from anywhere at any time, so they can better fit their work around their home life.

Technology has become critical to maintaining a good work culture, and we can already see how it is benefiting businesses around the globe.

Reducing anxiety and stress with better communication

Work-related stress, depression or anxiety counts for about 44% of work-related ill-health and more than half of working days lost to illness, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

Furthermore, according to mental health charity Mind, 60% of adults and two-thirds of young people said their mental health got worse during the early lockdowns of 2020.

With employees working remotely, the potential for them to feel disconnected or isolated from work is increasing. No matter where or when, a lack of information or communication can contribute to employee anxiety. And the current circumstances are making it no easier.

From a work perspective, we’ve already seen messaging platforms and intranets make it easier for internal communications, but remote working requires a culture change when it comes to communication.

Ultimately, more focus should be put on enabling employees to communicate and collaborate using the widest range of tools available so they can pick which suits them best.

Using Unified Communications, businesses can put the infrastructure in place to help.

Instead of limiting employees to using different platforms, they can connect all their voice, messaging, video and conference and use them all from a single location.

Also, while this helps to connect internal teams, it sets the stage for a fully remote and connected customer contact centre.

Maintaining culture in a growing remote team

Spanish based HomyHub is another example of how businesses can use technology to maintain a company culture within a remote, growing team.

As a growing company, they faced a challenge of maintaining their culture and ensuring a free sharing of ideas and knowledge amongst employees from anywhere in the world.

HomyHub’s solution was to provide Google G-Suite company-wide. This not only ensured employees could continue collaborating globally from a single, easy-to-use platform, but they could also have impromptu meetings and conversations with each other — just using different methods.

They’re also able to take advantage of roaming data, so employees can continue to access information on the go, wherever they are.

Providing tools for easy mobility

Again, our Future Ready Report has highlighted the importance and the challenge of providing employees with the right tools and technology.

It shouldn’t be underestimated the negative impact not having the right equipment can have on an employee.

There’s the initial stress of not being able to do their jobs because they don’t have what they need, but there’s the additional stress of new work piling up, and other work falling behind.

Of course, it’s not just about having access to the right tools. Especially today.

Now there’s also the need to create more reliable network availability, with the capacity to manage remote teams.

Essentially, this means creating reliable broadband connections in employees’ homes, or providing them with reliable 5G connections via mobile devices so they have easy access to data and systems.

Businesses could also put SD-WAN on top of a broadband connection to automatically manage data distribution over the network so it’s always sent down the most available route. This reduces delays and improves experiences for employees and customers.

Whether it’s ensuring employees can hold internal presentations without fear of losing connections, or contact centre staff dealing with customer enquiries quickly because they can access everything they need to with no delays.;

Creating a new culture with technology

While technology has allowed us to continue with most aspects of our lives and stay connected for the most part, we’re now also taking the time to look closer at the relationships we have not only with each other but also with our places of work.

Perhaps more than ever, because of the challenge we’ve faced together with COVID-19, we’re looking more closely at how we can add value to the human aspect of our work than we did before.
Yes, we’ve relied heavily on the use of technology to build the foundation and infrastructure from which businesses can move forward into the future.

But within that, we’re also looking at the culture and the human aspect of what the future of work looks like.

Human skills like resilience and empathy have proved just as important to the survival of many businesses as technology has.

Looking to the future, it’s time to figure out how we combine cultures with technology to better prepare for the challenges we’ll face in the future.