If your company is still struggling with the right formula to support work-from-home flexibility beyond the strictures of a global pandemic, take a leaf out of Atlassian’s playbook. For this high-performing Australian business, remote working continues to be a firm fixture.
As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in April, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-chief executive Scott Farquhar has only been in the office three times over the past year. “His absence from the project management software giant’s famously worker-friendly George Street headquarters in Sydney is not just a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but rather signals a broader shift in the way the $80 billion tech giant is planning to operate. In short, Atlassian is going all in on working from home.”
The company’s “Team Anywhere” policy enables its global crew of 5,700 employees to work from any location in a country where it has a corporate entity – providing they have the legal right to work and where the time zone they are in is broadly aligned with their team members.
At the same time, the company has no plans to abandon its physical offices just yet. The article goes on to say, “Atlassian will still maintain its physical offices and is proceeding with plans to build a massive new Sydney headquarters. But the company will ‘pause’ efforts to acquire more space beyond its existing commitments. It will also consider creating smaller co-working hubs closer to where employees live. The company is estimating it will have around 50 per cent office attendance based on surveys of employee sentiment.”
Maximising technology investments to support remote working
If you’re thinking seriously about adopting a WFH model and making flexible work practices your new modus operandi, you’ll need to maximise your remote employees’ productivity long-term. So, it’s important to support employees with right technology and tools to help them be productive.
With your people working from home, it’s critical to review security policies and make sure they only have access to the critical data and systems they need to do their work. And adopting cloud technologies such as software-as-a-service apps like UCaaS (or unified communications as a service) gives you an all-in-one communications and collaboration platform in the cloud. In one move, you eliminate demand for various disparate pieces of software and communication platforms and you get to keep everything in one central place – minimising IT complexity and maintenance.
Use UCaaS to deliver WFH flexibility
With UCaaS, employees can securely connect to the corporate network and access all their preferred communication channels without juggling multiple applications. This means they can access tools that put them in touch with their colleagues from anywhere (with an internet connection) and use video and chat functions, simultaneous screen sharing, sidebar conversations and more, to communicate and collaborate with colleagues as if working in the same space, face to face.
While UCaaS offers a long list of benefits for any company, if the prospect of migrating to a new communications system sounds daunting, why not take advantage of UCaaS as a managed service? imei’s managed services team can take responsibility for implementing and managing this technology for you. This includes ensuring you have access to the latest communications technologies, scaling the number of features up or down depending on your business needs, and quickly implementing security patches.
Take the next step
By taking advantage of UCaaS managed services from imei, there’s nothing to stop you quickly adopting advanced communication systems and enhancing the way your business operates with employees working productively from home. To learn more about the benefits of our fully managed service for UCaaS, please get in touch with our team.
