The world has become swept up in all things Coronavirus. Also know as COVID-19, this global pandemic has affected every industry, making is difficult to conduct business as normal. In response, various big brands – from Twitter and Facebook to Google and Amazon – have ramped up their remote work policies allowing their employees to work from home in an effort to limit any disturbance to their daily operations and, more importantly, to stop the spread of the virus.
But remote work is not without its issues. Especially for IT and HR department who have to manage these new ways of working in order to ensure that all employees are productive even thought they aren’t in the office. For HR, this means setting up policies and outlining the guidelines that staff should follow as they start working from different locations. For your IT teams, the responsibility is to make sure that the right tools, technologies and systems are in place to track performance, monitor output and allow people to work without disruption.
Below, we outline a few key points to consider:
Cloud: A cornerstone technology for remote work, cloud technology makes it possible for employees to conduct regular business operations and communicate with their colleagues and clients regardless of their geographical location. For HR departments and business managers, SaaS management platforms provide greater visibility, making it easier to monitor and measure employee productivity.
Security: As soon as employees leave the confines of the organisation, they are exposed to greater risks. Any organisation considering mobile work needs to start out by having a conversation around security.. But just because something is kept “in-house” doesn’t mean that it is more secure. In fact, a report by Alert Logic found that on-premises networks tend to suffer more incidents than cloud service provider networks. As such, in addition to reducing costs and boosting operational efficiency, cloud also improves network security.
Policy: Is BYOD (bring your own device) the right approach for your business? Or maybe a COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled) approach is the most suitable approach to remote work? Finding the right policy is an essential step on any business’ journey towards remote work. These policies are designed to give employees enough flexibility while maintaining a level of control over productivity network usage.
Resources: A mobile workforce will only maintain or increase their productivity if they are supplied with the right tools and solutions that support collaboration and allow them to work like they would if they were in the office. To get this right, it is critical to assess the needs of the different members of your workforce and ensure that these employees have access to everything they require to get their jobs done. As part of this, businesses need to provide their teams with the training they need to stay motivated and work as efficiently as possible. Organisations also need to invest in productivity apps and time management systems to support the process.
Costs: While remote work is typically associated with reduced operating costs – smaller offices, reduced electricity usage and less hardware, companies need to be mindful of the time and resources required to set up and manage remote working. These indirect costs need to be tackled to ensure they do not impact the efficiency of the business. Utilising a technology expense management (TEM) solution can help businesses support their IT and HR departments to mobilise and manage mobile employees, resulting in indirect cost savings. Greater visibility into the technology environment will also enable a company to make better costing decisions based on usage per user, department and the company as a whole.
If you’re struggling to manage new ways of work during these difficult times, we’ve been helping businesses to achieve structure within their mobile workforce for years. Our cloud-based technology expense and lifecycle management (TEM) platform, OneView, automates the management of your technology environment. To find out more fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.