What businesses did to maintain ‘business as usual’

A new poll of 1,000 workers reveals the most common tech and communication challenges that hard-working businesses have overcome due to COVID-19

86 per cent of workers at small and medium sized businesses have needed to overcome significant technology and communications challenges to maintain ‘business as normal’ since the lockdown was first announced despite the significant challenges posed by COVID-19, finds a new report for Onecom, the UK’s largest independent business telecommunications provider.

The study, which investigated the impact of the virus and home working on businesses, surveyed 1,000 workers at UK small and medium sized businesses who have worked from home since the lockdown was announced. Entitled ‘Onecom Reports: How 4 in 5 SMEs are Overcoming the Work From Home Challenge During COVID-19’, the report asked workers about the technology challenges they have successfully addressed in setting up remotely and maintaining ‘business as normal’ as far as possible due to COVID-19.

The survey reveals that facilitating group calls or finding relevant communications platforms for home working has been the most frequent challenge, with 50 per cent of SME workers having overcome this issue. Several other communications issues have been significant for SMEs when working from home, including setting employees up to make and receive calls from home (24 per cent), enabling email access from home (23 per cent), getting to grips with a plethora of different communications platforms (22 per cent) and broader communications issues resulting from a lack of face time (22 per cent). As a result, 31 per cent of workers in the study said that communications errors initially increased in their team since working from home.