Countering Pandemic, Remote Working Gets Wider Acceptance and May Be the New Norm

The ongoing outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19), first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan—the most populous city in Central China—evolved rapidly to be characterized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. Globally, organizations have been monitoring the COVID-19 situation closely and many have already implemented (or are readying to implement) business continuity plans (BCPs) to mitigate the impact of this virus. Quite early, most global multinational corporations (MNCs) enacted working from home wherever possible. In an effort to safeguard employee wellbeing, as well as protect business interests, companies have been busy updating their travel policies to align with the current situation and providing daily updates.

Either because of a forced locked down or as part of a BCP, many workers today need to be able to work from home. Organizations face challenges due to highly distributed virtual teams, and collaboration still needs to be a focus. As a result, the pace at which many organizations are being pushed to embrace remote work is accelerating, despite the fact that many of these organizations are not yet equipped to get the most productivity out of their remote workforce.

Easy-to-use and reliable collaboration—audio, video, and web conferencing; messaging; and content sharing—is the need of the hour. Modern video meetings, enhanced by intuitive next-generation devices and intelligent cloud, allow users to have simple-to-operate, high-quality audio, video, and one-click content collaboration at scale. The evolving trend of "cloud everything" and the clear benefits of subscription-based models makes adoption of Unified Communication as Service (UCaaS) rather painless.

It is heartening to see that many of the leading collaboration solutions providers quickly recognized the challenges brought forward by COVID-19 and have been proactive in aiding citizens, businesses, and governments by making their technology, especially cloud meetings and team collaboration capabilities, accessible to them. Global tech companis such as Zoom, LogMeIn, 8X8, Cisco, BlueJeans, Microsoft, Google, Avaya have made access to their cloud meeting/ video collaboration free to help organizations cope in times of need like this.

China has a good number of homegrown options for video conferencing vendors, in the form of Tencent WeChat Work and Meeting, Alibaba DingTalk, Huawei Welink, and Bytedance Feishu (also known as Lark outside of China). More responses from other cloud meetings and team collaboration providers are sure to come. The efforts and programs discussed here are only some that are happening as companies monitor and take steps to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.