The Facts 

Now that the UK has left the EU, you might be wondering what that means for EU roaming and whether you need to brace yourself for extra charges. Without the EU rules in place, the surcharge-free roaming when you travel to EU and EEA countries is no longer guaranteed, and the charges would depend on agreements between UK operators and their counterparts in EU countries. 

At the start of 2020, I was at odds with having to define what ‘normal’ meant, or indeed what the ‘new normal’ would mean to the UK. In contrast, my colleagues at FluidOne were quick to adopt the new terminology, and have regularly reminded me of my issue to adapt to the new times. 

There is no doubt that the global pandemic has made it important to consider what we define as normal, especially as we look ahead to 2021. The global pandemic changed our perception of ‘normal’ and forced us to look at how we move on; whether we evolve or remain in survival mode. As lockdown restrictions continue to fluctuate across the UK, it’s hard to quantify if anything has, or ever will, return to our old view of normality. 

Over the last 9 months, I have been in various discussions with senior management from my supply chain and our customers where the underlying theme has naturally been uncertainty and facing the challenge of delivering consistent results. The hardest part of dealing with the pandemic is not knowing how far in the future a return to normality lies and whether the normality we return to will be the same as it once was. Is the ‘new normal’ here to stay?

The recurring theme in my discussions with customers has been the need to remain connected,  secure and have reliable availability. We have supported many industries during Covid-19, and the main challenge with most businesses has been mobilising their workforce without business continuity plans to support prolonged working away from the office. 

’ 

This year, businesses across the nation have navigated many challenges after mass emigrating to remote working. From timed-out virtual calls, sketchy connections and limited access to important databases, there have been many hurdles to overcome. Thankfully, our partnership with 8x8 launched the FluidOne 8x8 cloud UC solution aims to solve these problems and make remote working less challenging. 

On net via our award-winning fibre network, Platform One, the solution offers contact centre workforces diverse connectivity, no matter where they are, with the highest call quality experience in the market to promote collaboration, efficiency and ‘business as usual.’ 

To continually diversify our Platform One offering for our partners, we recently launched an exciting new partnership with 8x8, a cloud UC solution. To ensure you get the most out of this new service we have broken down in detail how this new cloud communications platform can help your customers be number one in their fields. 

Working from home used to be considered a privilege or even a benefit for workers, but as the recent Covid pandemic has shown us, sometimes organisations need everyone to work remotely as a matter of business continuity. It is in times of crises, created by a pandemic, technology outage or even a natural disaster that sometimes the only way to conduct business means everyone has to be working remotely.

Technological progression has been so rapid over the past few years that mobile devices and products that were first launched 10 (and in some cases, 5) years ago, seem incredibly outdated. It’s amazing to think that it was just 20 years ago that the first mobile phone with a digital camera was launched by Sharp, with a pretty unimpressive 0.11 megapixels. 10 years later, the first revolutionary Galaxy S was launched with 16GB of storage and a 5-megapixel camera, whilst the latest iPhone 11 has up to 512GB of storage, three 12-megapixel cameras, 4K video recording and a list of features that would take me hours to run through.

The Situation:

Over the past few months, Covid-19 has impacted us all in many different ways. Something we can all relate to is that it has changed the way that we work, with different locations and enforced home working, altering the way that we all access data.

I have been speaking to customers over the past few weeks about how they are planning for the new normal and have been hearing several common thoughts. These include reviewing the use of existing office space, adopting a much more accepting and flexible approach to working from home, a clear appetite for greater flexibility when it comes to new locations in the future and working to ensure that data is accessible securely for the people that need it.  

For some organisations these unprecedented circumstances have validated recently implemented cloud strategies, for others, it has accelerated plans to adopt more flexibility in their IT infrastructure and for many, it has made them sit up and consider what the future should look like. Regardless of which camp you sit in it does not hurt to reflect on the learnings of the past few months and build them into an ongoing strategy.

Practical tips from FluidOne

One of the most important things for all of us to do in these troubled times is to make sure that we are looking after our welfare and mental health. The daily news is often depressing, and lockdown rules can feel suffocating. However, it’s not all doom and gloom and it’s important for us all to take some comfort from the positives. We have seen mass singing from balconies, virtual group exercise classes, a weekly community applause for our health workers and have even found a new British hero in Captain Tom Moore.

Here at FluidOne, we understand that as employers it’s our duty to ensure that all of our people feel supported during this difficult time. As such, our leadership and people team have been building a series of proactive communications, virtual team building activities and requesting regular feedback from our employees so that we can make working from home as enjoyable as possible.

We wanted to share some of our experiences and give you some ideas to help you keep your own teams engaged. To ensure a perfect balance of activities, we have been focusing on the four happy hormones 😊

When I look back on my career there will be events and dates that have significance. The 16^th March 2020 was the day we suspended access to the FluidOne office because of the outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK and I’m sure that it will be remembered as the day that changed the way we work forever.