It’s Time To Improve Your Remote Work Practices

It’s Time To Improve Your Remote Work Practices

You and your staff may have been operating remotely for weeks now – but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your processes. Check out our top tips for managing your remote workforce below.

We’re now a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, and your business has likely been operating remotely for some time now. However you and your employees may be working, it can almost certainly be improved.

Do you know what issues you may be overlooking, and how you can optimize your remote work processes?

Check out our latest video to learn more:

How To Improve Your Remote Work Capabilities

• Connectivity: The fact is that you can’t lay cable to connect your employees’ homes all the way to your office servers, they will need a viable Internet connection to access business data and applications.When is this an issue? If your staff members are located in rural or remote areas that still lack a strong Internet option. If that’s the case, then you’re urged to consider investing in mobile hotspots, or reimburse staff for the increased cost of relying on their personal cellular data connection.
• Home Devices: Users need access to the right technology at home in order to continue working like they normally would in the office. In this day and age, you could assume that your employees all have laptops or desktops at home, but that may not be the case. You’d be surprised how many people rely on a smartphone or tablet for all their personal computing needs.
• Necessary Storage Space: Have you made sure you have enough cloud storage and email storage space for your entire staff? They won’t be able to save files locally to their work computers anymore, which means your storage needs will go up.
• Access Rights: Do you know if there are any files that should not be accessed by staff remotely? If you operate in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance, you may want to section off certain sensitive data.
• Continuity Of Roles: While many jobs can be done from home, you should take a moment to consider what jobs specifically can be managed while outside of the office.
• Licensing: Have you made sure you have the right number of licenses for all of your staff members to work remotely? Some cloud platforms and applications will have a limit, which may not have mattered in the office, but could slow your business down in a fully-remote model.
• Video Meetings: As you well know by now, you need a way for your staff to meet, both together, and with clients. While an audio-only conference call can suffice, many prefer to use video meeting software like Microsoft Teams. This allows for a more personal and connected experience in meetings.
• Cloud-Based Phones: Whatever role the phone played in your office setting, you’ll want to continue that in this new remote environment as well. Ideally, you won’t be asking your staff to use their personal phones for work – it can be tedious to circulate everyone’s personal numbers, verify that they have client contact info, and calculate how you’ll reimburse their personal phone bills.That’s why you should look into cloud-hosted phone systems, which can maintain your business numbers and lines, and route incoming and outgoing calls through the cloud to your staff’s devices at home.

   

If you’re not sure how to address these concerns, don’t panic. You’re not on your own – the Philantech3 team is available to assist businesses like yours in planning and launching remote work capabilities.

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