The Datamax Thinking Blog

Is your organization prepared to embrace Gen Z's sixth sense (technology)? Is your technology infrastructure set up to accommodate how they communicate? How they collaborate? And how they prefer to conduct business every day? 

Each generation is defined by their own personal beliefs, public attitudes and work preferences, with the inevitable grievances and misunderstandings between the generational cohorts.

OK Boomer. OK Millennial.

Have you met Generation Z?

As business owners anticipate the degree of normalcy after COVID-19 disrupted the workplace in March, the findings of another revolutionary experiment are coming to light ... employees suddenly and unexpectedly working from home.

Innovation can often come to light under unforeseen circumstances.

Isaac Newton, ironically, stumbled onto the field of optics while self-isolating at home, amid a plague (sound familiar?).

When huddled with your laptop into the kitchen nook, or spread across the couch, the comfort of your home should never soften your cybersecurity awareness. Don't let the tidal wave come crashing down on you and your business. 

If you’ve joined the Work From Home tidal wave in the last month (16 million of you, according to Slack), your home is now an extension of your office.

Communication solutions such as video conferencing go a long way in bridging that collaborative gap between office and home. But they must be used strategically.

The Remote Reality: It's one that all organizations are coming to terms with in recent weeks. As the impact surrounding COVID-19 continues to set in, IT personnel are scrambling to set up "work from home" scenarios. Business executives are left with a variety of tough decisions about this suddenly scattered workforce. And employees?

How organizations accommodate and — more importantly, manage — this workforce trend moving forward is an important discussion to have with their trusted technology partner.

The topic of a remote workforce has become a hot one this week as news of the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve.

While the impact of the virus is yet to be determined, the COVID-19 outbreak serves as one poignant example of the need for agility, flexibility and cohesion in the way organizations communicate (via voice or data) and conduct business.

What happens when working remotely ceases to be a luxury … and starts to become a necessity?

With the series of events unfolding surrounding the Coronavirus, employers are making operational adjustments to comply with a quickly-evolving public narrative — one that may soon include a work-from-home strategy.  Given these circumstances, how do businesses maintain effective communication with customers? With their team? How do they preserve standard business operations if employees aren't at the office? 

Here’s a step-by-step approach to getting the most out of your new cloud communications system — with a fast roll-out and zero downtime.

Your communications system represents the lifeblood of your business. So switching to a new phone system can be a big challenge for a small or medium-sized company.

The first step on the road to success is removing risks by choosing a service provider with a proven track record. Look for a partner (not just a provider) with a robust network and many satisfied, better yet, raving business customers.

UCaaS is an “all-in-one” solution that accommodates a transformative workplace. It merges a full-feature phone system, team chat and messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, file collaboration, and more, and unifies them under one platform.

Cloud formations are developing fast. So much so, one could say it’s raining cloud application acronyms today.

“As a service” abbreviations pour on and on – you’ve heard of them: Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Hardware as a Service (HaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), to name a few.

It's an old, universal truth: effective communication is key to team and organizational success. Without adapting to more intuitive, better integrated communication and collaboration tools, organizations will continue to hit the same communication barriers again and again. 

There’s this joke about millennials. Give a millennial a smartphone and he’ll live for a day… any longer than that and he’ll become a mindless, soulless, social media zombie.

Yes, it’s an all-too-common dig — a boomer scoffing at the 20-something across the room with his face buried in his phone. But all jokes aside, the next generation of communication systems and devices is transforming the way we work. With millennials now making up the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, the definitions of both “workplace” and “workday” are becoming steadily more hazy.