By
February 14, 2020
Employee expectations are changing - but a lot of these new expectations are not unreasonable.
Yes, they’re expecting benefits like cool culture and work-life balance, but they’re also expecting flexible working conditions and a BYOD-friendly workspace. While that might sound like they’re asking of a monumental shift in the way your business is run, when you break it down, it’s really about paving the way for employees to put more intrinsic effort into a task and be more productive.
Poor internet connection can therefore significantly hinder the way your team works. And when employees aren’t properly enabled to do their job, they might just take their expertise elsewhere.
With the right foundation, you can give your employees the best working conditions to support the basic expectations that they have in order to stay satisfied with their jobs.
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The employee experience
Let’s take a closer look at what employees are expecting when they arrive at the office.
With the technology that can access the internet nearly anywhere it goes, employees are expecting some degree of work flexibility. That means they want the seamless ability to work remotely, hold a videoconference with clients without glitching and run business-critical applications (like multiple VOIP lines).
In addition to the laptops or smartphones that you provide to your team, most individuals will also bring in their own devices. That makes BOYD (bring your own device) policies critical to ensure the office ecosystem can support everyone’s activities. And, when clients come in for meetings, they should be able to use their devices without having to waste the first 10 minutes of a meeting with ‘technical issues’.
As you implement these new policies, it’s important to remember one simple thing: the more devices you bring on to the network, the slower it can get. That means you need to provide your office with the right support.
Reliable internet - it’s not a benefit, it’s a baseline
Legacy IT policies won’t cut the mustard anymore. They hold employees back from using their devices the way they want. That makes old policies archaic and damaging for recruitment and retention efforts.
Your new policy should be able to support your employees’ devices and all the activities they use those devices for - even if they are streaming the basketball game on their lunch break (#coolculture). Because the reality is being online is increasingly becoming a part of our lifestyle.
With all of those devices in action, your office needs to have enough bandwidth to obtain a truly flexible environment. So while one part of your team is holding a video conference in the boardroom, the rest of the office can stream music in the lounge - all without the annoyance of buffering.
Business-grade fibre broadband plans can make this possible. They offer the speed, consistency and reliability of regular fibre, but with additional service support and prioritized response in the event of any connection issues.
Chorus has also designed a high traffic class bandwidth feature for some business-grade fibre connections. This means data used for certain business activities are prioritised and get to travel on super-fast data highways to ensure high levels of responsiveness with real-time apps.
And if the security of your network is an imperative, a transparent VLAN will give larger and more complex businesses the flexibility and enhanced security for network connectivity. This means if they’re hosting business applications, or business needs multi-site private connection or broadcast control.
Above all though, when it comes employee experience it’s all about having a smooth and reliable internet access in the office and for remote working. Because if you want them to be always on (within reason of course!) you need to provide them with the always-on connectivity means to do that.