Team Partners Telecommunications

The future of working from home

Posted on Aug 27, 2024

Many reading this will work at home. Most even. Which one wouldn’t have been likely to say maybe 30 years ago when taking a briefcase full of paperwork home to work on was something you might have seen those in management positions do. Come to think of it...remember briefcases? 

The likelihood  now, however, is that the majority of those reading this will work from home, as I am in writing this. It’s the new norm, and we’ve written about what this demands of our broadband connection a number of times in the past. What though of the future? As more of us become digital nomads, capable of working from anywhere, what will we be looking for in five and ten years’ time? 

1. Of course a high quality internet connection will always be the most basic and most necessary requirement. But there’s a lot more to it than this. There’s internet and there’s internet and simply having broadband will increasingly not be good enough as our work requires ever increasing data transmission and speed. People are already moving home to get a better connection. A friend chose to move to Spain recently, simply because of their digital infrastructure. Follow the 5G... 
2. Hot on the heels of a good connection will come what you can do with it. Zoom and Teams may be excellent, but they will never replace face to face connection. Would you agree that whilst you can meet people online, you’ll never get to know them? For all of that the ability to have online meetings with as many people as you need, to be able to share information and have off-screen chats at the same time, and to be involved with potentially several meetings at the same time, maybe remaining online with some 24/7...all will become part of our everyday. Now have maybe two or three of you working from home and holding online meetings at the same time and you’ll understand what will be expected of your broadband... 
3. Something we haven’t talked about before is Project Management Software. If you haven’t heard of the likes of Asana, Trello or  Monday.com before it may be worth just looking them up. In essence, each of these allow for projects to be run collaboratively, with information being shared amongst the participants and each able to share and add to the whole. From a management point of view, the use of these tools enables remote workers to be monitored and for progress to be seen in real time. We predict that tools such as these will become more versatile and therefore more widely used in the years to come. 
4. Comfort! How many of us have invested in ergonomically sensible  home office equipment? There’s always a temptation to use what we already have rather than investing in anything new, especially when we already have something that will “do”, and of course we all know that if we’re going to be spending hours working on our laptops, tablets or desktops we should look after our bodies and not compromise. We reckon that there’ll be a development in ‘crossover’ furniture, attractive modern seating and tables that work as well for work as they do for leisure, comfortable, protective and non-intrusive.  
5. And, maybe as important as broadband itself, cyber-security. We’ve written in the past about the security risk to businesses of working from home, and with the ever growing threat of disruption from overseas, well, it’s obvious that the future holds many risks. Tools such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), antivirus software, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) all play a role, with the use of VPNs, which encrypt data and hide the user’s IP address becoming more popular. Anti-virus software can monitor threats in real time and MFA can deter all but the most insistent predators. All are worth investing in!  

And...TP Tele can advise on all of these, so give us a call!