From school districts to court systems, thousands of Zoom users across the country were affected by a platform outage last week.
According to The New York Times,
“The partial outage, which lasted almost four hours, took place just as working and school hours began on the East Coast and affected the wide variety of people who now rely on Zoom as a lifeline. Businesses could not make video calls to clients, courthouses could not conduct hearings, and city and county governments had to postpone meetings.”
Zoom didn’t fully explain the cause of the issue but reported that users were unable to authenticate the Zoom website, couldn’t start and join Zoom meetings, nor were they able to sign up for paid accounts or upgrade or manage their Zoom services during the outage.
Unplanned outages in technology platforms like this can cause real headaches for hybrid in-room and remote teams, stalling workflows and preventing important meetings from taking place.
One of the biggest Work From Anywhere pain points highlighted in T1V’s Work From Anywhere Diaries - a chronicle of work life for WFA individuals, where they discuss challenges in WFH - is the inability to fully connect with team members, resulting in stunted workflow communication.
The Harvard Business Review recently published a piece answering the critical question: How do you keep people who work from home motivated?
During crises like COVID-19, workers often focus on tactical work - like answering tickets, checking the box on the usual processes - rather than adapting and looking at the bigger workflow picture.
Using survey research from more than 20,000 workers around the globe from more than 50 major companies, they evaluated the relationship between motivation and working remotely. The results found three negative motivators and three positive motivators.
Negative motivators leading to reduced work performance:
- Emotional pressure
- Economic pressure
- Inertia for work (low amount of work)
Positive motivators that lead to increased work performance:
- Play (problem-solving with a colleague)
- Purpose
- Potential (access to colleagues that teach and develop them)
The takeaway?
“If you want your teams to be engaged in their work, you have to make their work engaging.”
The key to engaging employees is through connection.
Dependable, easy to use technologies like ThinkHub can bridge the gap for distributed teams across global locations.
Taking things one step further, ThinkHub MultiSite takes the ThinkHub experience and extends it across multiple locations, connecting up to 10 sites for real-time collaboration sessions.
ThinkHub MultiSite connects distributed teams for what feels like a completely in-room, in-person experience. All shared content is synced, including web URLs, GSuite and Office365 documents, hardline video inputs, shared device screens, and more. It can also support all of your file-based content like PDFs, images, and videos.
ThinkHub MultiSite is featured in all of T1V’s Work From Anywhere Bundles, created to bridge the gap between in-room and remote work experiences and support a hybrid work model, where people split time between their home and the office.
Check out our Work From Anywhere Bundle options:
For more information on how ThinkHub MultiSite can empower distributed teams and individual participants to be active, contributing, and productive team members, download the One Sheet today.