Keeping Up With The Demand For Flexible Working

Interestingly, Dixon makes the point that the modern road warriors are also made up of those direct casualties of the recession. “With unemployment on the rise, we’re also seeing no end of new customers using our services that are starting their own businesses, in the UK and US particularly,” he observed. “Again, flexible working facilities and programmes will mean they can have lower initial running costs.”

To meet this need, the Regus review programme consists of “80 percent upgrades and 20 percent entirely new centres,” he explained. “All the new ones will come equipped with the new technologies. We already have 1,000 centres in 70 countries, where we will retrofit technology upgrades. But things like the Polycom telepresence suites, for example, are new to some of them, where we’d offered video-conferencing facilities before.”

And when asked, what were the most important requirements that the review programme had to meet, Dixon responded: “Our focus starts with the end user. Our objective is to make sure the customer and end-user experience are seamless. The customer doesn’t want to manage multiple logins and passwords. They want one login, so they can get working as quickly as possible. That’s why we work through a portal, so set-up, billing, e-transactions, are all paperless.

Telepresence changes working

“Nowadays most business people have laptops or PDAs, but it’s tying that all together and working on fitting new technologies securely in with the latest versions of mobile phone, for instance. We’ve got to do the due diligence, so any new technology we use has basically been built to be future-proofed. The good news is that the technology is quickly commoditised, so it’s not really grown in cost since when the business started 20 years ago.”

Dixon said the Polycom telepresence technology was a good example of how the demands of flexible working had changed. “We have about 700 video-conferencing suites already, and it has proved a successful part of our business that’s certainly grown a lot since there’s been less business travel.

Telepresence offers more than just HD [high-definition], where you may want to have multi-person boardroom meeting across several different locations, where it’s as close to being there as you can actually get. But we’re not experts in everything, and that’s why we’ve worked with partners like Cable & Wireless and Polycom to handle things like bandwidth and networking, so you can schedule a telepresence meeting, plug in your laptop and go.”