Adding mobile technology to a Unified Communications strategy could allow the average business to recover $5,500 per employee per annum in lost productivity.
Webtorials has collected survey responses from 200 people employed at companies which have over 500 employees, most of which are located in the United States. The survey, which was commissioned by the SIP communications company Sonus Networks, has some results that will interest business owners.
Only one-quarter of the businesses surveyed stated that the saturation of Mobile UC in their workforce was intermediate, while another quarter said they were just starting to deploy the new technology. Another twenty-one percent said they had limited deployment of Mobile UC.
With this technology only effectively deployed in around one-third of the businesses surveyed by Webtorials, there is a lot of room for improvement. The technology allows employees to communicate with each other on different mobile devices, such as tablets and smart phones, and can therefore boost employee productivity significantly.
The report also stated that the shortfall in the widespread adoption of offsite UC capability could promote the development of a "productivity gap" between remote workers and onsite workers. This leads to a loss of around 2.5 hours per week per employee, a significant waste in productivity. Mobile UC allows enterprises to recover around $5,500 per annum in lost productivity.
The use of smartphones and tablets at work is now widespread. According to the survey, two-thirds of knowledge workers in enterprise use their mobile devices at least one-quarter of the time.
Steve Taylor, editor-in-chief of Webtorials, highlights the importance of this new technology, stating that mobility and flexibility is the key to the UC conundrum, especially for large enterprises. "Enterprises must push their Unified Communications capabilities beyond the office walls if they wish to get the maximum return on investment from their technology investments and the employees who use them."
Wes Durow, the vice president of global marketing at Sonus, added: "Enabling mobility across the enterprise should be the first consideration as companies plan their UC deployments and that means having a robust, open-standard, SIP-based communications architecture in place that can support employees no matter where they are or what device they use."
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