It might seem obvious, but the question of on-premise vs. cloud still comes up all the time. When choosing a phone system for your business, the toss-up between an on-premise solution or a hosted solution (hosted VoIP, hosted PBX) can be somewhat confusing. However, today, there really is no contest. On-premise options are dwindling quickly. It is safe to say that the only viable option for nearly all organizations is some form of cloud-based telephone solution. So the better question might be what type of hosted voice solution? 

With a hosted PBX, introducing a whole new phone system to your company isn’t as scary as it sounds.

It’s remarkably quick and easy to set up, so there’s no downtime for your business or expensive installation costs. Moreover, you can be safe in the knowledge that you’ll receive the best service and support and that your business’ communications are in safe hands.

More and more companies are opting for hosted phone solutions and with good reason, so what are some of the benefits of hosted business VoIP?

• Lower setup costs – the PBX is virtual, the initial investment is minimal as there is no need for the costly hardware and installation that a traditional PBX requires.

• Elimination of maintenance costs – your PBX and all that is required to run it is hosted by the provider. There are no additional maintenance fees, no telco/carrier fees, so there is no need to hire someone in-house to manage and maintain it. All users need is a phone on the desk (in many case that isn’t even needed anymore!). 

• Consolidated Costs – with the right hosted solution, specifically UC or UCaaS, you can even combine and consolidate other solutions you’re using today, like online meeting or virtual meeting platforms and other messaging, texting, and even web chat platforms. 

• A scalable solution – a hosted PBX is easy to scale up or down with minimal work and costs.

• User-friendly – For admins and end-users alike, a virtual PBX is conveniently simple to use and manage. There’s very little training required and no need for specialized skills so you can start using your new phone system right away.

• Unbeatable mobility & global potential – with a hosted PBX, employees can work from anywhere. All they need is internet access. Additionally, multiple offices are simply and easily connected by the same system further lowering costs.

Unified Communications as a Service (or UCaaS) is a form of hosted or cloud-based telephony and is a virtual phone system hosted for you by a service provider.

Again, the question is no longer “on-premise vs. hosted”, but now becomes “what type of hosted voice solution”. They come in many flavors and varieties and they go by many industry categories: Unified Communications (UC), Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). These categories of UC are a little more specific and automatically include many more features, tools, integrations, and add in more communications channels like virtual meetings, messaging, mobility, and many more - in other words it unifies your communications. Other common names are Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, Hosted Voice, or even Cloud PBX, Cloud Voice and so on. These categories are a little more generic and may not necessarily include all that is a part of a UC, UCC, and/or UCaaS solution; simply being just a voice solution.

With so many Work From Home (WFH), remote work, remote staff… required today, things like virtual meeting or online meeting platforms are a necessity. Most UCaaS solutions already have those online meeting platforms built into the system and may even have agreements and tight integrations with the most popular platforms like Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams. Therefore, it is already bundled together there is no need to pay extra money for several different and disparate solutions. It’s all included and it all works together seamlessly. Every user can have their own complete set of communications tools. 

Now the question is: which vendor? 

There are literally hundreds of UC, UCaaS, Hosted… vendors (and let’s not even get started on Contact Center or CCaaS options!). The “funny” part is most of those UC vendors are reselling, rebranding, and repackaging what the top few providers already offer. Some of them may add-in enhancements, most of them often strip features away. Sorting through it all is a monumental challenge. If you think you need help, we are here for you

By: Jeremy Boudinet, Nextiva

Do you work from a cubicle? An open office plan? When working at the office, you don’t have a choice in your work environment or office setting. You might have a noisy coworker, or sit under the air conditioner, which could impact your productivity.

Where does most workplace conflict originate? From poor communication or a lack of clear expectations. Never assume your employees know what you expect. Remote work means different things to different people. It’s important to create guidelines around working hours, communication expectations and more. Here are a few things to consider as you develop policies for your virtual team.

• Working hours—When do you expect employees to log on and begin their day? Do you want them to design their schedules to fit a traditional consecutive 8-hour day? Do they need to be available for early morning or late evening phone calls to accommodate other time zones? When should they take a break for lunch? Are you less concerned about the hours worked and more concerned about results? Decide what works best for your business, customers, and teams, and let everyone know!
  
• Communication response times—How quickly would you like employees to respond to customer emails? Colleagues? What about IMs? Text messages? For reference, a Google Consumer Study revealed more than 80% of customers expect a reply to email within 24 hours. 37% expect a response within an hour. And according to FastCompany, more than 70% of people expect a response from coworkers within four hours.
  
• Time-off requests—When the crisis is over, one of the hottest topics at water coolers around the globe will be vacation plans. Most employees in an office are aware of their teammates’ holiday plans. Those sorts of conversations don’t always happen between remote employees and their peers, so it’s important to establish a process for documenting time-off. It’s also helpful to have a shared team vacation calendar, so everyone is in the loop. Make sure your remote workers understand your time-off policies and how to log their days off.
  
• Meetings—Managers need to establish a regular meeting cadence with remote employees. When building remote employee engagement, the adage “out of sight, out of mind” won’t work. Set up a time to meet one-on-one and stick to it. It’s tempting to cancel one-on-one meetings when workloads pile up. Don’t. Those opportunities to connect are essential! They allow you to build trust and establish a relationship with team members you don’t see face to face every day. Relationships are a vital ingredient to team success. Use the time together to check in on progress and offer performance feedback.
  

• Set an agenda and limit it to 2-3 items. Share the agenda at least 24 hours in advance so attendees can come prepared
  
• Limit the invitees. Consider the agenda. Who are the decision-makers that will be essential to include?
  
• Start on time and end on time
  
• When hosting virtual meetings, use video and screen share when possible. These features help foster interaction and keep attendees focused
  
• Institute a no cell phone rule
  
• If possible, reduce one-hour meetings to 45-minutes. This gives attendees time to debrief, organize their notes, and make it to the next meeting on time
  
• Consider whether you really need to hold a meeting at all. Status updates, for example, are often better suited for email or collaboration tools. Save meetings for conversations that can’t take place productively via other channels
  
• Ex: brainstorming, decision making
  
• Be sure to take good notes! As the meeting organizer, you should always send out a summary/recap. Be sure to include action items, next steps, and deadlines

• Are you offering a catered lunch in the office? Treat your virtual employees to lunch that day, too. Send a gift card to a food delivery service available in their area.
  
• Make lunch and learn sessions available via video conference so that remote workers can participate, too.
  
• Are you having an office holiday party? Make every effort to invite and provide arrangements for remote team members to attend, too.
  
• Are you closing early for the summer picnic? Encourage remote workers to log off early and enjoy some outside time.

The bottom line? Don’t save all the fun activities for your brick and mortar locations. There are tons of creative ways to engage all your team members, regardless of where they work.

8×8 is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software-as-a-Service provider of voice, video, chat, contact center and enterprise-class API solutions powered by one global cloud communications platform. We’re empowering workforces worldwide to create connections that increase the speed and efficiency of collaboration. An 8-time Leader in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant and the only UCaaS Leader also in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, we’ve built a cloud communications platform that delivers reliability to customers while loyally rewarding partners.

Educate. 

Equip. 

Connect. 

Communicate. 

Work-From-Home declarations from the CDC and other local and federal government agencies may become new temporary law. Not only will it wind up being the new normal, but it might just be the safest way to protect your staff and the vulnerable from illness. Doing it right will be critical to business continuity and the bottom line. So how can your business prepare to transition your workforce into a work-from-home (WFH) team that can continue to perform at a high level?

1. High-Speed Internet at home; Tips & Tricks

The first thing on the list is good high-speed internet at home for each employee. Do a quick survey of all staff for more details... 

• Ask about their WiFi. Can they control and prioritize specific devices? Do they have a wired connection in their home office space? 
• Ask about smart-home devices (Ring, Nest, etc). These devices tend to eat up bandwidth.
• Ask staff to run a speedtest at home—simply, search on Google, “internet speed test”, then click “run speed test”. 
• A good rule-of-thumb is at least 10Mbps/active user, that’s both download and upload speed. Upload speeds become much more important at home when considering business applications, especially voice and video. If your at home talking on your business phone app, that's upload. If your caller says you sound "choppy" it is most likely your upload speed is lacking. 
  
• Keep in mind: the spouse and the kids will be home for a while too. Their spouse may be in the same boat and the kids may also need bandwidth for school. Prioritization and control of the bandwidth will be important.
• Further keep in mind that everyone else in your employee's entire neighborhood is likely doing the same thing; working-from-home. This can be especially challenging for most broadband cable networks, all of which are shared.
• Consider an additional reimbursement so staff can boost their internet speed. 
• If necessary, consider adding 4G Mobile hotspots for some employees to take home. They can be added to your corporate wireless carrier account. Satellite and other Wireless ISP solutions are available for remote staff without traditional broadband options at home.

2.   Move to a Cloud-based Phone System

You’ll want to migrate to a cloud-based phone system and leverage the benefits of unified communications that will give all users:

• Virtual/online meetings: audio, video, screenshare
• Desktop and/or Mobile app: make/take calls from anywhere as if in the office
• Virtual Faxing
• Business SMS texting
• Collaboration/Team Chat/Messaging: reduce annoying email chains, keep things simpler
• CRM and other important integrations

Another note: If your business isn't ready to move to a cloud phone system, consider a Live-Answer Virtual Receptionist service. Call Cloud 9 to help you find the right one for your business.

3.   Move to a Cloud-based Contact Center

Does your business have an in-office call center, contact center, or helpdesk? A cloud contact center solution allows agents to effectively and efficiently work from anywhere. Supervisors have all the same tools (if not more) and complete visibility to help support agents and other staff. Also see all of the benefits of number 2 above. A

4.   Migrate to Cloud Workspaces

The right Workspace as a Service (WaaS) solution allows your business to continue and maintain hyper-control over security, access, software, data, file sharing and other IT rules and policies without the need for cumbersome and annoyingly sensitive VPNs.

Move all staff workstations and literally your entire business LAN / WAN to the cloud. An entire business environment can be spun up in days, New users can be spun up in minutes. Staff can access the new “cloud” LAN and their Windows-based cloud workstation from any device, anywhere: PC, Mac, Chromebook, even a tablet or smartphone.

• Windows 10 Pro included
• Full Active Directory integration
• Workstation-level helpdesk included
• Drag-and-drop, “App-Store” style admin portal
• All s/w applications preloaded/provisioned; end-user workstation ready for use in minutes
• Multi-Factor Authentication available
• Shared Storage/File sharing, up to 10TB
• High-compute / high-GPU workstations available

 5.   Remote File Sharing

When working from home, staff must be able to access, share, store, and collaborate on important files.
Popular solutions include:

• Microsoft Office365: OneDrive, SharePoint
• Google G Suite: Google Drive
• Box.com, Dropbox.com
• Team Chat/Messaging apps, found with many top cloud communications solutions, also have simple and easy to use file-sharing capabilities.

6.   Identify & Provide Necessary Equipment

Make sure your employees have the tools, devices, and equipment they need to perform at their best. 

• Mobile phone, mobile app, or softphone
• Desktop or laptop PC
• Chromebook (in cases of WaaS/DaaS solution above)
• USB or Bluetooth headset
• Simple/easy USB speakerphone
• And, never underestimate the power of a white-noise machine.
  Especially for all the work-from-home parents!
  

Read the original article from RingCentral here.