Coronavirus: how to enable your team to work from home

It’s no secret that the coronavirus (COVID-19) is challenging the way we all do business. Companies around the globe have rolled out mandatory remote work and are forced to send workers home to prevent the spread of the virus and keep their employees safe.

This is creating a new swath of telecommuters, many of whom have never worked from home for an extensive period of time.

Just like you wouldn’t have your team working in the office without the right equipment, you’ll want to ensure that their home workspace is well suited to get their job done as well.

Whether you have a team of newbies or WFH veterans, here are the essentials to enable your team to work from anywhere.

Location flexibility is one of the perks telecommuters love about working remotely. However, access from outside the physical walls and firewall protections of the office can invite numerous connectivity, confidentiality, and information security challenges.

The truth is, your employees will do whatever is easiest to get the information they need to get their jobs done, and this greatly increases risk. They simply want to turn on their computer or mobile device and begin to work. This means most of them will just go directly to the internet to access cloud applications like Salesforce, AWS, and others for their day-to-day work.

When an employee is at the office, they are working behind layers of preventive security controls. While not perfect, it is harder to make a security mistake while at the office. However, when computers leave the perimeter and people work remote, new risks arise for the company and additional policies are essential.

Ensuring your people can simply stay connected is another key factor to remote productivity and something that is sometimes overlooked. A reliable internet connection is important because it means that those who work remotely are able to meet deadlines without having to worry about disconnections and frustrations.

At the center of a remote working workplace is a core set of tools that your teams need to work in to collaborate and do their jobs. Using the right tools, like Office 365 and Teams, allows your team to stay connected to one another and their projects – regardless of their physical location.

Pick a core set of tools and ensure your teams know how to connect to and use them from home. Try to avoid multiple tools for the same purpose, and ensure that as many of these tools can be signed into with a single account from home. Avoid any tools that are tied to a specific office or location.

It’s important to note that it’s just as important that these tools are properly supported and managed as well. This ensures that your business is maximizing its investments.

The temptation to stick with the familiar can be very real. A critical component of remote work is to ensure that users remain productive while maintaining the necessary level of security and control over user access to corporate resources.

Virtual apps and desktops, like VDI and Hosted Shared Desktops, enable seamless workforce productivity, giving employees the flexibility to work from anywhere, all while keeping your apps and information secure.

With these tools, your team can have access to their personalized desktop environment or workspace. This means they can work at home, at the office, from a hotel or anywhere else, and from whatever device, and have access to their data and applications.

For remote working especially, an effective and reliable system of communication is necessary. Hosted Voice (VoIP) gives your employees access to a reliable way to communicate in real-time. VoIP systems make telecommuting viable.

It allows remote workers to connect to one another in real time, at any time. Communication lines aren’t limited to audio; video calls bring remote workers face to face with one another. They can send files back and forth at the speed of a click, leave comments, or edit each other’s work with ease.

Business contingency plans are put in place by many businesses, but few saw this type of impact coming. When asking employees to work from home, organizations have to take many things into consideration to keep their employees secure and productive. Will all your employees be able to access all your applications remotely? Can your IT team provide support from home? What’s the impact of your security posture? What will user performance look like? Done the right way, your teams will be able to adjust smoothly.

Keep your business running and employees productive.

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