2 years ago, the unthinkable happened; the world stopped going to work and we were instructed to not leave the house. Businesses had to learn how to adapt to survive Covid-19 by introducing homeworking. Teams and Zoom calls became the norm, as well as making your workplace digital and accessible from home.
Now, I’ve started this blog like some futuristic novel but that’s what we faced in March 2020. The Government instructed us to work from home, so our workplaces had to change or furlough their staff.
Thinking about it, making sure your business can function and still make money, while your employees are looking after kids, home-schooling them because their schools are closed, as well as trying to not get sick sounds impossible. It's in my view a near miracle we managed. Bust this is when we realised how important the internet is to everyone, including businesses. I’ve reached out to a small business owner, Hugh Jefferson, and he has told me some of his experiences to share. Not just how easy it was to move to remote working but how he managed to transition back to the office.
“Lockdown was hard. We didn’t know what to do. With the Government advising us to stay at home it was difficult to manage. All our work is computer based as we upgraded our infrastructure a year previous. This meant our IT man managed to get our server online and create a VPN, but we needed to make sure that our employees could access it.”
So, Hugh was able to bring his business into a digital world quite easily. Using a VPN at his office, with a static IP on his business broadband line, his IT man was able to build a digital network meaning that people who were working from home had access to the work server which let them continue working during the lockdown. But what other problems did he face?
“Some of my employees had decent internet, another had a subpar connection and one of them didn’t even have internet. But after a week or 2, we had ironed out the issues and we started working to as full capacity as we could. BT was instrumental in our business succeeding thanks to the selection of products they offer.”
So, during the lockdown, work was easily transitioned to work from home. What happened when we received the news to return to our places of work?
“The worst thing about returning to the office was having to travel long distances before we even had to start working. That’s where hybrid working is perfect. We can now easily transition from a couple of days at home to three days in the office easily and being able to do that meant my employees bought into the return quickly.
If they have a child who is home sick from school, I’m confident that I’ll get a full day’s productivity even if my employee is working from home. The Covid-19 lockdown was hard for everyone, including myself. But every cloud has a silver lining, and now my business is more agile and robust because of the fact we can hybrid work.”
BT can help with all your hybrid queries. From 4G mobile routers, which can help you work from where you want, to Wi-Fi disks, which can extend your wi-fi network throughout your home or business. Have a look at our broadband options and see if there’s anything that could enhance your business.
Have you managed to make your business digital? Are you considering hybrid working? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll see how to help your business become digital.
PaulC1
