In today's current financial and environmental climate, the need to reduce travel and green the office is becoming not only a recommended practice, but almost a responsibility and obligation. Knowledge Center contributor Dr. Mike Hollier explains how you can green your workplace by promoting remote working practices.
Going green is trendy these days, and more and more businesses are taking
the environment into account in regard to their buying and operating
decisions. Across the country, businesses are installing solar panels,
increasing the use of recycled materials and cutting back on product
consumption and travel-all in the hopes of reducing their carbon
footprints.
While these actions are of course admirable, for many the simple act of
getting to work still contributes immensely to their personal and office carbon
emissions. American commuters emit 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide every
year on their way to and from work. While that staggering number alone
should be enough to influence change, commuting also results in enormous
economic losses for businesses. Time spent in the traffic jams caused by
American commuters results in a loss of 3.7 billion hours of productivity every
year, which translates to a $63.1 billion annual loss for American businesses
due to wasted time and fuel.
Enable remote working practices
So, what can employers do to help remedy this money-sucking, carbon
dioxide-producing situation? Promoting and enabling remote working
practices is one obvious option to help curb the pollution and costs incurred
by millions of commuters. Companies are increasingly leaning toward remote
working policies in an effort to cap company costs, reduce employee commuting
costs, satisfy staff demands for flexibility and fulfill green
credentials. Yet, there still remain a number of technology-related
roadblocks that stand in the way of successful remote working, which depends on
complete employee satisfaction with the remote working experience.
Clearly, today's office and access networks are able to reliably deliver the
multiple applications and processes that we all need and use as part of our
working day. The access networks we have at home will, of course, allow
employees to work remotely. However, for the remote working employee, the
experience starts to fall apart when it comes to real-time voice and video-based
applications, such as IP telephony and video conferencing-both of which are
becoming more widespread and are proving harder to maintain on the corporate
network. Issues such as delay, noise, echo and picture blocking negatively
affect the quality of experience on telephony and video calls, thus
compromising the remote working experience.
Overcome challenges with remote workers
If workers can't effectively communicate with colleagues from their remote
working site as if they were local, the attraction and experience of remote
working is severely reduced-not only from the employees' perspectives but also
from the support perspective. No employer has the time or resources to
"fix" all the remote worker application quality issues. And from experience,
they know these problems generally take a long time to resolve on the corporate
network, as the tools deployed don't understand application-specific issues and
how to diagnose them.
The other significant problem that is emerging today comes from
the user perspective. Once remote workers suffer from quality problems,
they tend to lose confidence in the technology and will revert back to using
their cell phone or public switched telephone network (PSTN) phone line,
defeating the original objective of deploying this new collaborative and
efficient communications environment. Again, employers do not have the time or
resources to try to rebuild user confidence once lost.
Email
Print
