During the early onset of lockdown, illation went through many of the same challenges as other companies worldwide. We had to embrace the digital revolution and the various challenges it posed with innovation and flexibility.

As an ICT provider, we were fortunate that a cloud-based approach was aligned with our service offering. As such, we assisted various organisations to swiftly adopt a work from home strategy with minimal disruption.

We soon learnt, however, that the extent of the pandemic and work from home stretched beyond simply offering cloud-based ICT solutions. Even with cloud-based platforms, employee collaboration, engagement and communication proved, at best, challenging.

Work-from-home challenges

The effort involved in keeping remote employees aligned caused significant bloat, where multiple online meetings and e-mail threads were required simply to keep all relevant parties informed and engaged. This, in turn, lead to a situation where more time was spent on keeping staff in the loop than on actual work.

Despite the challenges, work from home during the height of the pandemic wasn’t all bad. There were benefits, such as providing employees with more autonomy and flexibility. Traffic during peak hour was noticeably less and cutting out the daily commute provided sizeable savings during an already cost-sensitive time.

Even though work from home offered many benefits at first, challenges to get remote work right started to show in 2021. Employees lack engagement while working from home, causing them to feel trapped, lonely and restricted. The feeling of loneliness only gets worse when considering the overall pressure, anxiety and loss surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.

When lines between work time and home life are blurred, higher rates of employee burnout also pose an issue.

At illation, we saw both the good and bad sides of enabling remote work, so we decided to find a way to strike a balance between minimising the drawbacks, while increasing the benefits.

Illation’s response

To improve the work-from-home experience, we aimed to find a way to manage collaboration, engagement, transparency and accountability internally among team members. With effective communication among team members, external communication to customers became an extension of the efficient internal processes.

We needed to find a tool that allowed our remote workforces to effectively service our customers, collaborate on tasks and scale effectively. With an increased demand on customer service, combined with a tighter budget, we needed to find an all-in-one solution to lift all the burdens without purchasing another tool.

Illation partnered with monday.com to help manage this side of the “new normal” work environment. We’ve found it’s an ideal platform to manage teams remotely and keep employees engaged and connected.

Employees have easy access to track progress on projects without the need for multiple meetings and convoluted e-mail threads. Moreover, a comprehensive “work operating system” (Work OS) provides the engagement and visibility remote employees desperately yearn for.

We soon found that the benefit of using a Work OS stretches beyond remote workforces. The all-in-one platform provides substantial value to even hybrid and office-based teams.

The power of Work OS

With monday.com, we found a platform that allowed us to manage every team within the organisation, from sales, technical, business operations and marketing. As a solution, a Work OS provides a bird’s eye view on everything that’s happening and what different team members are focusing on.

The platform facilitates easy communication on a task-by-task basis, meaning all relevant team members can quickly and easily view the correspondence on a particular task.

Moreover, monday.com can be integrated with some of the leading tools worldwide at the click of a button. Many platforms promise this kind of versatility, but fail to deliver during implementation, as setup can be a challenge. With monday.com, integrating different tools for marketing, communication, CRM and productivity is simple. Managing and tracking tasks across all apps is also accessible on a single dashboard.

By using automations – which can be prebuilt or custom-generated – the need for repetitive manual tasks is eliminated.

Tracking every aspect of each project, from budget to timelines and documentation, becomes easy.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of Work OS for CX delivery, join our webinar in November, where we will discuss digital transformation in CX and how Work OS can boost service delivery.

About illation
Illation is a South African technology company specialising in crafting state-of-the-art customer experience journeys. We pride ourselves in being more than just a technology provider, as our team includes highly skilled business analysts able to assess the impact our solutions have on the operational level within businesses. We believe in adding real business value to our customers through technology. Our solution offering caters to customer engagement, contact centre, workforce management and collaboration, as well as unified communication and back-office solutions.

If you would like to learn more about illation, please do not hesitate to visit our website, or find us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.