If your organization is experiencing communication challenges while operating in a remote work environment, it can be difficult for your employees to maximize their productivity while performing daily work tasks.
A decrease in productivity will hinder your organization’s ability to maximize its results and adversely affect its relationships with customers including a potential loss in revenue.
It is important that your employees can reliably communicate with their constituents to ensure better efficiency and productivity.
Coeo knows how important reliable communication is to an organization and has delivered communication services to thousands of customers to improve their organization’s ability to communicate effectively.
We want you to understand the communication challenges that exist in a remote work environment and how to solve them so your organization communicates effectively regardless of where your employees are working.
By the end of this article, you will know the communication challenges in a remote work environment and a few ways to solve them.
Communication challenges in a remote work environment
Many communication challenges are caused by and are unique to a remote work environment. Some of these challenges include:
Miscommunication
When your organization is working remotely, it can be difficult for employees to communicate with each other effectively.
Unlike face-to-face communication, communication through chat, text, or email can lead to miscommunication if the message is misinterpreted.
Unless voice communication is used effectively, employees may be less productive or efficient resulting in projects not being completed well or on time.
Additionally, it can be difficult for employees to convey their intended tone with other co-workers in a remote work setting by communicating via chat, text, or email.
A lack of face-to-face communication creates a variety of communication challenges for organizations.
Because of this, the use of video chat is important in a remote work setting to ensure better communication.
Poor-performing technology
If your employees are working remotely, it is important that your organization has reliable technology to ensure effective communication.
High-quality technology built for the remote workforce is required for employees to communicate well in a remote work environment.
Conversely, if the technology is not built to address the challenges of remote work, it can be difficult for employees to communicate effectively.
Some examples of poor-performing technology that can hinder effective communication include:
Poor network connection
Organizations operating in a remote work environment rely heavily on telecommunications solutions to communicate with co-workers and customers.
If your organization has poor network connectivity, your employees will likely experience call drops or breakups, frozen video on video calls, or messages and emails that are never delivered or take longer than usual to deliver or receive.
This is detrimental to an organization with employees working remotely who rely heavily on a variety of technology for the majority of their communication.
If your organization doesn’t communicate well because of poor network connectivity, your employees may be unable to maximize their productivity.
Out-of-date phone service
Another example of poor-performing technology is out-of-date or poor-performing phone service. If your phone service is out-of-date, it may perform poorly which can lead to call breakups and drops.
Since your legacy phone system may require replacement hardware to improve its performance, it may cost thousands of dollars to replace or repair the system due to the lack of available parts on the market.
Rather than spending thousands of dollars on hardware to upgrade your traditional phone service, you may be better off transitioning to a cloud-based phone solution to improve your phone service.
Technology incompatibility
Call breakups and drops may also be a result of multiple software solutions being integrated into your network that are not compatible with each other.
If your organization has multiple software solutions integrated into its network that are not compatible with each other, it can trigger bugs that cause calls to drop.
In addition, devices such as phones, routers, switches, or computers eventually become outdated and new software may not be compatible with them.
Making sure to regularly update your software and hardware to ensure the software solutions you want to integrate into your network are compatible is important to ensure reliable communication.
Ways to solve communication challenges in a remote work environment
productivity of employees working remotely. Fortunately, there are a few ways to solve these communication challenges which include:
Rely on video calls to communicate
Because communicating through chat, email, or text can lead to miscommunication among employees, it is important to rely on video chat to communicate.
For effective communication, it is important to use video chat especially when discussing topics that affect multiple people.
Improve your telecommunications solutions
If your organization relies on poor or outdated telecommunications services, it will be difficult for your employees to communicate with one another in a remote work environment.
In an attempt to resolve these communication challenges, it’s recommended that organizations integrate cloud-based, technology to address these challenges. Some cloud-based alternatives include::
SD-WAN
If your phone system uses the internet to make and receive calls, it is critical that your organization has a reliable network connection.
Since internet performance typically drives the performance of your phone solution, it is important to check your internet connection when calls are breaking up or dropping.
If your organization has a poor-performing internet connection, it may be a good idea to improve your network connectivity with an SD-WAN solution.
If you would like to learn more about SD-WAN, you can check out our SD-WAN Buyer’s Guide:
SIP Trunking
If the connection to your network is stable and reliable, there may be an issue with your phone system. SIP Trunking allows you to bring your standard PBX phone system to the cloud.
This allows your phone system to make and receive phone calls over the internet. In addition to SIP Trunking being a less expensive solution, SIP also provides more flexibility and scalability.
UCaaS
If your organization is having trouble leveraging tools such as instant messages and video calls, a UCaaS solution may help improve your boarder communication.
A UCaaS solution combines multiple communication tools such as voice calling, video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), and content sharing into a single, streamlined solution.
This ensures better communication among employees while also improving user experience and productivity.
If you would like to learn more about UCaaS, check out our UCaaS Buyer's Guide:
Next steps to improving remote work communication
Now you understand the communication challenges that exist in a remote work environment as well as some of the ways to solve these challenges.
This will help your organization address the communication issues your employees may be experiencing.
No one wants to experience communication issues in the workplace and employees working remotely may be impacted by these issues to an even greater extent.
It is important to understand the communication challenges that can arise in a remote work environment and how to solve them so your organization can improve productivity and efficiency.
Coeo has improved the communication challenges of thousands of customers working in a remote work environment and knows how important reliable communication is to an organization.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about communication challenges in the workplace or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you know the communication challenges that remote workers may experience, read this article to learn how UCaaS can help with communication problems and other challenges.
