According to recent Avaya research, businesses are focused on equipping their employees with new tools to enable remote working as for the foreseeable future, remote working will persist. The research also highlighted that when assessing the current employee home office setup, there are many opportunities to improve the remote workspace. Fortunately, we have just announced a redesign of the Avaya Vantage™ to meet the specific needs of the home office worker to enable them to better manage their time, their meetings, and their work.
An essential characteristic of a successful digital workplace is employee experience, and when the staff feels happy and engaged, their productivity improves. But, what’s often overlooked is the fact that engaged and empowered staff apply discretional effort in everything they do, boosting customer experiences, driving many business results. This means that employee experience has a significant impact on the customer experience, and this doesn’t change because employees are working remotely.
Reduce Time-Drain from Miscommunication
Our research indicates that home-based workers face specific challenges that can negatively impact their work experience. Let’s review what those challenges are:
Managing time: Our research indicates that as part of the shift to working from home, many employees are using their mobile phones as their primary communications device – which means they are not taking advantage of the time-saving features they have on their office business phones. The new Avaya Vantage™ helps remote employees to manage their time and to keep them in full control of their communications by giving them the same capabilities they had when they were in the office.
The Avaya Vantage experience has been designed specifically for the home office – providing easy, one-touch access to calls, voice mail, contacts, and meetings. The new built-in Communications Dashboard also enables one-touch access to control Avaya Onecloud™ UCaaS call control features. This makes using their business communications dramatically simple because Avaya Vantage isn’t an ordinary business pone.
Managing meetings: Avaya Vantage 3 takes the productivity of meetings to a whole new level. Avaya Spaces™ is fully supported by the Avaya Vantage 3. So Avaya Spaces rooms, tasks, files, meetings, and the ability to collaborate with co-workers and customers– are all right there on the dedicated device.
A High-Definition camera has been added (which is unusual for this device category), and the Avaya Vantage now also provides wide-band audio and has four microphones, all of which work together to maximize the collaboration experience both for users and other meeting participants.
Another Benefit is the new Avaya Vantage will connect to almost anything. Users can add a corded or cordless handset or their favorite wired or wireless headset, an external camera (they may want to put this on top of their laptop or display so they are always looking directly at meeting participants regardless of joining the meeting from the Vantage device), a keyboard or a mouse, and even connect to a larger display.
The innovation that I’m most excited about is the new “Screen Shifting” technology that I have found changes the meeting experience. When using the Avaya Vantage for a meeting and someone starts presenting content, the user can immediately send this content to a larger display. They also have the option to send the view of the meeting participants to the larger display or they can view both at the same time on the larger display. Sharing content is also very easy and users can launch the same meeting on their laptop with one touch from the Avaya Vantage.
Managing your work: The third productivity booster is to help remote workers to manage their work – here we are talking about adding additional “workspace” by off-loading communications from the laptop.
In the office, we would talk to people casually as they walked by or in or out of our offices – or perhaps at the watercooler. And how many times did you take your laptop with you into a conference room meeting so you could participate in the meeting and still meet that project deadline? Today we expect our laptop to provide all of this interaction and meetings – be they ad-hoc or scheduled. And we also expect to be able to use it to work on our projects.
Update Your Home Office
Adding the Avaya Vantage to the home office makes it much easier to multi-task. There is no need to “switch Windows” on the laptop to call someone, participate in meetings, go on and off mute, or share information. For example, I have to say my twin daughters are not all that keen to remember the rules and keep it low when they come over to show me their amazing artwork when I am in a meeting. In times like those, even finding the right button without having to switch multiple windows adds to make my work from home experience seamless.
But home office communications have transformed beyond just voice and video – to become collaboration workstreams. This is another area where the new Avaya Vantage elevates the employee experience, essentially functioning as a modern-day ticker tape device on your desktop, only instead of showing stock market information, it instantly shows you all of your latest workstream messages.
As always with the Avaya Vantage, users can “make it theirs”. They have instant access to everything the cloud has to offer – including personalization, apps, app stores, social and multimedia content.
So, to summarize, whether employees will be working from home full-time or just part-time, new technology enables a more sophisticated home office experience that can significantly increase their productivity and satisfaction. The newly redesigned Avaya Vantage can significantly help them to better manage their time, their meetings, and their work.
Read the full Avaya article by Jabeen Manzoor