In an effort to prevent the spreading of COVID-19, many organizations are sending their employees to work from home. Thankfully, with current technology, working from home is an entirely viable option. With the right processes in place, your business can continue to operate as if nothing ever happened.
So, here are a few tips that can help employees with the transition and ensure that your business functions go on uninterrupted.
1. Share Contact Lists
Communication is a crucial component of success in any organization. When everyone is working in a central location, employees can walk across the office to find whoever they are looking for. However, working from home changes all of this. Do your employees know how to get ahold of IT, HR, and other departments through email or phone?
To solve this, put together a guide that contains employees, vendors, and points of contacts’ phone numbers and emails for quick access. It will make it much easier for individuals to communicate even while working from their homes.
2. Keep in Touch
While working remotely, employees may start to feel isolated, distracted, or even out of the loop of the organization. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep in touch with your team and make sure everyone stays updated on projects and tasks.
This can be as easy as a weekly video conference or call. In this meeting, let everyone share what they are working on and note successes. This will help your employees stay on top of their work, stay connected with their team, and stay in sync.
You can also spend some time on your weekly update chatting about non-work related topics. Keeping relationships strong will help everyone feel more motivated, more loyal, and less distanced. Think of it as a virtual coffee break!
3. Implement the Right Technology
Enabling your employees to transition to remote work without losing any business continuity often relies on having the right technologies in place. You’ll want to leverage collaborative tools that allow your workforce to communicate, organize and share files, and easily collaborate on tasks and projects.
You’ll also want to configure your file-sharing tools with the proper architecture and administrative access to avoid mishaps in people seeing things they shouldn’t. You don’t want everyone in your organization to have access to every file and piece of data.
As far as collaboration and productivity tools go, there are many excellent options on the market. One suite of tools we recommend is Office 365. Office 365 gives you access to a whole host of tools and features to make working remotely a breeze.
One of our favorite tools for this purpose is Microsoft Teams. Teams is a resource that allows you to chat, video conference, and share files. And right now, Microsoft has a program that gives you six months of Teams for free! Contact Executech today, and we can help get Teams set up so that your employees can use this tool at home immediately.
4. Manage Your Devices
As employees are using company-owned devices at their homes, make sure you are keeping inventory. You’ll want to know which employees have which devices. Along with that, know what data is being stored and where.
You’ll also want to manage the software on your devices. Ensure that each device is equipped with the latest updates and that you can push software updates remotely instead of relying on your employees to do it themselves.
5. Be Proactive with IT Security
Last but not least, you’ll want to put in place some at-home security policies for your employees to follow. This can include password requirements, setting up a secure VPN, installing anti-virus, and implementing a mobile device management (MDM) solution that will allow you to wipe or lock a device remotely if lost or stolen.
In Conclusion
In the end, adapting to working remotely doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems. Your business can continue to run uninterrupted as long as you have the right procedures in place. These guidelines will help enable your employees to do everything they need to do while working from home. And, if you need any help setting up or managing your technology, Executech engineers are certified and familiar with various solutions to help your remote workforce.
