The way that organisations work and collaborate is constantly evolving. Critical factors of technology and work culture shape new practices for how we improve productivity, each time iterating to lead to what is hopefully a more efficient way forward.
The past decade has seen widespread yet steady adoption of cloud-based Unified Communication (UC) products by organisations to better manage communication and collaboration across teams. Products like Slack and Zoom have become verbs while Microsoft’s Teams worked with customers to provide newfound capabilities to their familiar productivity suite 0ffice 365 that is nearly ubiquitous across industries.
And then came 2020.
As workplaces were forced to send their people remote, they quickly turned to UC solutions to help them collaborate from wherever they were.
There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud-based UC solutions to keep organisations in business. Imagine for a moment if this was COVID-91 instead of COVID-19.
Companies’ being forced to make the transition to remote work served as an injection of nitrous oxide for the UC space. In six short months — though everything in 2020 felt like an eternity — Microsoft reported that their daily Teams users shot up from 75 million to 115 million. Though the smaller player by far with 12 million daily users, Slack found itself highly valued when it was bought out by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 billion.
But moving past the numbers and the hype, there were more than a few reasons why organisations of all sizes quickly turned to adopt UC tools into their workflow.
How UC Tools Supported Remote Workers in a Pinch
When the pandemic hit, the move to remote was anything but orderly. Organisations were scrambling to get their people online and minimize the hit to their operations.
Cloud-based UC tools played a big role in helping them to achieve these goals. With their infrastructure hosted on the cloud, it was a relatively easy lift to get employees online and able to access the same resources that they could at the office from their home devices.
Once they were logged into their accounts, employees could easily use products like Microsoft Teams to see who was online, organise virtual meetings with colleagues, communicate with them over chats, and basically carry on uninterrupted from their normal day-to-day.
It wasn’t exactly like being in the office, but it was close enough and to be sure, the benefits outweighed the downsides. By turning to these collaborative platforms like Teams and Slack, organisations were able to ensure that their employees stayed safe at home while the virus spread rapidly. This allowed people to continue at their jobs without feeling like they were risking their health and safety.
