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Toronto marketing specialist Elaina Falcone laughs when she thinks back to about a year ago when executives at her company started walking around the office having phone conversations on headsets, resembling drive-thru employees.cheap plastic picket fence
"I would be like, 'Can I take your order?' while walking by them," recalls Falcone, who works at Accessible Media Inc., a not-for-profit media company aimed at Canadians who are blind or partially sighted.
Such headsets are now omnipresent at the company and many others in Canada as more organizations get rid of their cumbersome desktop phones in favour of cloud-based and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-powered service on wireless devices.

The days of cranking one's neck to the side to hold a receiver in place, and using up precious desk space with a bulky phone and spiral cord, are quickly fading as businesses switch over to VoIP and cloud-based providers like RingCentral and Microsoft's Skype for Business.

Desk phones are going the way of the dodo as more employees work from home or remotely, and companies replace assigned workstations with shared offices known as agile workspaces, where anyone can sit anywhere.

Many employees use laptops and smartphones and want that mobility and flexibility, says Falcone, noting it felt redundant having a personal cellphone, a work one and a desk phone.According to an online survey of 400 small, medium and large companies released in July by IDC Canada, close to 90 per cent of Canadian firms have wireless phones and 49 per cent of their employees have substituted their landline phones entirely with wireless devices.

"It's almost like the last resort is a paperweight, tethered desk phone," says Lawrence Surtees, vice-president of communications research at IDC Canada, which does market research on information and communications technology.

Surtees say smaller businesses in Canada went wireless earlier than larger ones, which are now making the switchover due to cost, convenience, increasing trust in cloud computing, and an overall rise in cord-cutting in daily life.

Saving money is another key reason companies say they're making the switch.That's what happened when AMI added Skype for Business to its Microsoft Office 365 subscription, says Kevin Sharpen, who oversaw the project as manager of application development."We probably saved over 60 per cent of our phone costs," says Sharpen, adding employees were able to keep the same work number.