A survey of business leaders at the Global Leadership Summit in London revealed that 34% of leaders believe half their company’s full-time workforce would be working remotely by 2020.
It’s often said that ‘communication is key’ to managing remote workers, but as the ‘work from anywhere’ trend is on the rise, with cloud based software, laptops and mobile devices being preferred to installing ‘business lines at home’, how do businesses ensure their staff are able to stay in touch, especially if they live or work in more remote locations?
Ensuring remote working staff have mobile phone coverage is not straightforward. Sure, you can look at network maps – but every network has coverage gaps, so how can a business guarantee that the majority of remote workers will have coverage when they need it? The challenges increase with the number of employees and the size of the company, however remote working will only ‘work’ if employers have the right communications strategy in place.
The issue is more complex when you realise that remote workers may not be working in the same location every day. For example, engineers who cover a remote area and no longer come into the office may not be based in the same location (or even the same town) every day – if their network has a weak signal where they happen to be working, and they can’t call when they need to, the ramifications are bad for business.
Unfortunately there is a good chance of your mobile phone network having poor coverage at least some of the time. 21% of the UK has partial ‘not spots’ which includes 10% of A roads and 16% of B roads. This is most acutely felt in rural areas, such as mid and West Wales, where coverage by each individual network is patchy at best.
Business telecoms specialist ITCS is a longstanding partner of all the major networks in the UK, but a new partnership between them and Gamma Telecom will allow ITCS customers to benefit from ALL UK mobile networks for the first time.
Gamma’s MultiNet bolt-on will allow connections made on Gamma’s new 4G service to ‘hop’ seamlessly from one carrier network to the next strongest one, wherever there is a signal in the UK. In practice that means remote workers will not be restricted by their mobile network – if you can’t get a call on your network, the SIM seamlessly switches to a different carrier. This reduces the chances of staff being out of coverage at critical times.
Rhiannon Edmunds, ITCS Telecoms Specialist says even though this is a new service for ITCS, customer demand is already high:
“Our customers are excited, because they can’t afford for remote staff to be out of contact. The new multi-SIM service is designed to empower business mobile users by removing the hindrance of poor coverage – and it comes from a network with a reputation for first class customer service. We’re already seeing interest and we expect take up to be high.”
ITCS offer a range of business mobile deals with tariffs including Pay-as-you-go, single user plans, shared user plans and unlimited plans, and their specialist team will work with you to tailor a flexible package to suit your business needs. For more information, please call the ITCS Business Telecoms team.