Federal telework-eligible employees aren’t taking full advantage of their offices’ capabilities due to the limited communication platforms available.
Flexible communication platforms help employees seamlessly engage with their coworkers and citizens, collaborate and access information whether they’re in the office, their homes, an offsite facility, a coffee shop, a waiting room or even their cars.
In fiscal year 2022, 52% of federal employees were allowed routine or situational telework; of those given the option, 87% chose to take it, according to an Office of Personnel Management report. Telework-eligible employees only spent 61.2% of their time in-office, in part because the experience there was lacking.
Hybrid work has the potential to make government more efficient and better serve the public, but only if it embraces cloud-based voice communications platforms such as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) — whichever makes sense for agencies’ respective missions.
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Choosing the Right UCaaS or CCaaS Platform Matters
Employees need to be able to effortlessly shift from remote to office work, whenever the job calls for it. Teams must be able to interact with remote employees in the office, and vice versa. Cloud-enabled voice is a crucial tool to support this dynamic.
Modern voice platforms aren’t just about desk phones and call centers, although both of those tools are important. Instead, this new generation of voice solutions are cloud-based communications infrastructure that can be scaled to meet the demand of the mission, regardless of the stress put on the system.
Cloud-based voice also offers redundancy, quality and security, building the framework for reliability that makes it easy for employees to work from anywhere and transition from home to office. This is especially important in a hybrid work scenario, when teams are coming together digitally from disparate locations.
The right UCaaS or CCaaS platform will equip hybrid work environments with unmatched reliability and flexibility. This comes in the form of immediate transitions to backup systems and at least two times the scalability for situations where citizen demand floods in to support unanticipated needs.
With workers in different locations and offices, security should be a top priority when choosing the right cloud-based voice solution. Features such as access and vulnerability management, incident response, fraud monitoring, audits and third-party testing are all necessary for consistent availability.
LEARN MORE: Optimize your collaboration environment.
A voice-driven hybrid work environment also means employees — many of whom entered the public sector with a desire to make the world a better place — can better collaborate to serve the mission and improve outcomes. But agencies have different needs, challenges and missions, requiring different tools for collaboration.
While one agency may be able to freely share data without restrictions, another might need to have a more secure flow of information. Some agencies serve a rural audience that doesn’t have reliable broadband access, while others can use chatbots because their constituents desire a modern, streamlined experience.
Some agencies even need to use tools such as faxes to share critical documents, including tax and registration forms, internally. To support this type of collaboration, agencies can move to a modernized, cloud-based fax platform that requires less physical hardware and is more secure, due to encrypted Transport Layer Security connections and password protection. Cloud-based fax can be accessed via computer, tablet or smartphone, using a unified number.
UP NEXT: The EPA is leading the government’s move to softphones.
