Advances in technology have made it possible for businesses to grow from strength to strength at a faster rate than a few decades ago. Today, as long as you have a clear idea, well formulated and possibly put down on a sheet of paper in form of a business plan, getting a start-up business running could be just a matter of days if not hours. Everything can be done online including registration, accounting (via cloud computing), and service delivery.
Due to recent technological developments, organizations are under pressure to allow more freedom to their employees. Specifically, the paradigm shift towards mobility and telecommuting have been a major challenge to businesses. Some have welcomed this development positively while others have failed to embrace change with ease. However, the organizations that remain conservative operationally have their own reasons and one of the major highlights is the complexity of their businesses.
Telecommuting has many benefits to businesses, but loopholes exist
Technology has played a major part in enabling businesses to operate cost efficiently. For instance, businesses embracing the use of cloud computing services and products are able to cut costs on space and staff. This is a very positive development especially for small businesses that remain tight on cash flows.
The possibility of delivering various services via cloud has prompted organizations to loosen their employee policies with regard to where they can work from. Therefore, many companies are now finding it easy to let employees work from home and report at work occasionally for various meetings and conferences. However, some still find it hard to accommodate such working policies, and they cite issues to do with data security and perhaps return on man hours as a major concern.
Some employers are of the opinion that telecommuting opens a loophole for employees to do other business during the time they are supposed to be working, and to some extent, end up increasing the cost per man hour. In other words, some employees might get paid for more hours than they ‘actually logged’ during a particular month.
Mobility pushing for a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) adoption
The introduction of laptops ushered in the BYOD age, and this has been widely embraced by several organizations. However, over the last few years, tablets, smartphones and phablets came into the work environment, and this has made it much ‘easier’ for organizations to embrace the BYOD culture.
While various innovative companies have set themselves out to address the gap in unified communications, the dream for success may not become a reality of organizations fail to embrace the BYOD culture. Unified communications provides a link between various devices like smartphones & tablets and various information systems in an organization thereby enabling them to execute various tasks using these devices.
Again, the main issue here are data security risks as companies believe that the use of such gadgets, which employees also have several applications running could provide an opening for hackers hence creating a major security threat.
Conclusion
Technology is playing a key role in the evolution of businesses operations and man. However, it remains to be seen how man can contribute towards ensuring controlled usage of such technologies in the business environment. It is a fight between employee freedom and the security and performance of organizations that embrace the use of these technologies. Telecommuting has a moral factor while BYOD is one of the few weaknesses of embracing various technologies.
Images: ”Cloud computing, technology connectivity concept/ Shutterstock.com“
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