Hybrid work settled in years ago, but the telco spend it created never really got settled at all. Home internet stipends approved during 2020 and never reviewed. Mobile broadband dongles issued to staff who’ve since changed roles, or left. Data plans upgraded for a project that finished. A video subscription here, a softphone licence there. Individually small, scattered across expense reports and a dozen cost centres, and in most businesses, owned by nobody.

That’s the first thing worth saying about remote workforce connectivity: it’s not just an IT setup question, it’s a spend category now, and it has all the habits of one that’s never been governed. When we audit mobile fleets, the remote-work layer is reliably where the strangest artefacts live.

The productivity side is real too

None of that means skimping. A remote worker on a struggling home connection loses real hours: choppy meetings, file uploads that stall, VPN sessions that drop. Home internet that’s fine for streaming is frequently not fine for eight hours of video calls, and the member of staff usually won’t complain until it’s cost them a client interaction.

The fixes are established: business-grade plans for key staff, mobile broadband as backup for the roles that can’t afford an outage, and tools that work the same from a kitchen table as from the office. One consultancy we work with equipped its senior remote staff with dedicated 4G backup routers after tallying the billable hours lost to home internet outages; the gear paid for itself inside two months.

On tools, the direction of travel is clear: calling, meetings and chat inside the one platform staff already use, so a remote worker’s “desk phone” is their laptop and mobile, with no separate systems to maintain. Security follows the same logic. Distributed teams need multi-factor authentication everywhere, managed devices, and access controls designed for people who never touch the office network.

Provision deliberately, review on a cycle

The failure mode isn’t usually the technology. It’s that remote provisioning happens ad hoc (a request, an approval, a recurring cost) and then nothing is ever revisited. The stipend outlives the circumstances. The backup SIM outlives the employee. Multiply by a few years of staff turnover and the remote-work layer of your telco spend becomes a little museum of past arrangements.

Treat it like any other fleet instead: a register of who has what and why, plans matched to actual usage, and a review cycle that catches the leavers and the role changes. That’s standard mobile fleet governance extended to where people actually work now.

If nobody in your business could currently produce the list of remote-work connectivity you’re paying for, that’s a solid sign it’s time someone looked. A Telco Health Check covers the remote and mobile layer alongside everything else: what exists, what it costs, what’s still earning its keep, and what should have been cancelled when its owner handed back their laptop.