The Covid-19, Coronavirus pandemic is inevitably going to last for several months. If they are not already doing so, your employees will likely to be forced to work from home soon. Businesses need to recognise face to face communication will be occurring less and less in the coming months so understanding what Collaboration tools you need to facilitate that experience is crucial to your organisation’s success.

Here are 6 tips that will improve the way your employees work during the Coronavirus crisis:

Get your organisation comfortable with Webex teams and Webex conferencing to facilitate one to one, Team and Business to Business (B2B) communication. Cisco are currently running a scheme that allows any business or individual free use of their Webex platforms. This is a fantastic offer and can be set up within one day. Find out more about this offer.

Encourage employees to be content with using Mobile devices and Tablets so they are contactable from any device, anywhere and anytime. By giving employees the confidence and knowledge of how to work from various devices, you decrease the time they will take to get back to colleagues or clients. Therefore, productivity will inevitably increase.

If hardware needs to be installed at remote workers premises, consider Cisco’s Webex cloud platforms to cause the least disruption. Cisco’s market-leading video conferencing tools enable you to video meet in 4K and are designed for streamlined and rapid deployment. The Room Kit Mini is perfect for home installation and you can read about it here.

If on premise resources need to be accessed consider VPN-Less solutions such as Cisco Express-ways which requires only a VMware image installation and no bespoke hardware.

Take advantage of Cisco Calling Features such as SNR (Single Number Reach), (MVA) Mobile Voice Access and URI Dialling briefly explained below:

Map up to 5 devices to a single office number, all devices will ring in a sequential order based on your Office Number, so there is no need to give out your mobile number but rather only your DDI number.

If you are working from home and need to make international calls or just plainly need to dial as if you were sitting at your desk, just dial a predefined number that authenticates you and once authenticated, all calls will originate from your desk-phone.

Dial people using their email addresses, so you don’t have to check your corporate directory or work out what device’s telephone number you need to call your colleague on. All you need is their email address to call them.

Understand Cisco Collaboration platforms can operate with all other major vendors platforms such WebEx Teams and Microsoft Teams, WebEx Room Kits and Polycom endpoints etc. so just because a partner, vendor etc. is using a different system than you it doesn’t mean you can’t collaborate with them or you have to purchase the same platform.