Love it or hate it, Remote working is the new normal. While the initial hesitation and reluctance the enterprises, as well as the employees, had with remote working have definitely subsided by now, remote working is not everyone’s cup of tea. Some employees seem to love it and feel more productive than ever whereas a few hate and can’t return to their workplace, have fruitful face-to-face meetings and get work done quickly in the corporate perimeter. Personal choices aside, the employee experience while remote working as well as its correlation to productivity depends heavily on IT management and support.

In this article, let us have a look at the top 5 best practices that the enterprise IT needs to adhere to for supporting remote work and making it a success.

1. Create a remote working policy

Now is the time to do it, if you don’t already have one. A remote working policy helps employees understand the protocols to be maintained during remote working. This can be everything from the needed availability of the employees, the availability of the IT teams, the network and device compliance requirements if the employees are using personal computers and permitted collaboration tools for information sharing.

Having a remote working policy essentially puts the ball in the employees’ court and implementing security and monitoring becomes fair and easy.

2. Provision devices with business resources

The worst frustration an employee faces while working on a chain of thoughts is the sudden realization of the lack of resources- it could be an app, access to a database or a tool or a business file or document. The IT teams need to be on their toes for continuously ensuring that the devices used for remote work are provisioned with business resources at all times. The apps can be silently installed in the background without the end-user intervention, are up-to-date and business resources are available whenever requested with quick turn-around time. Scheduling app installation and app updates is a best practice when the IT feels their plates to be too full.

3. Schedule updates when employees aren’t working

Nothing can be more annoying than a device running into an update in the middle of a work meeting or when an employee is finishing up an important task. With COPE and BYOD device environments, the employees can delay the OS updates and schedule as per their convenience. But with COBO or dedicated devices, the employees do not have access to the system settings and chances are that the devices run into auto-updates at random intervals.

To ensure this doesn’t create a hindrance for the employee productivity, the IT admins can schedule OS updates when the devices are not in use and can also schedule to reboot the devices occasionally to upkeep the device performance

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4. Perform regular security and compliance checks

Monitoring device vitals, data and storage usage, security warnings are imperative- remote working or otherwise. But in order to streamline the process of monitoring, especially for a large device inventory, IT teams can schedule and automate security checks and compliance alerts for devices, receive quick prompts and updates on the status and keep a close eye on the entire device inventory. Scheduling helps the IT teams to free up some time and there are no security lapses since the checks are performed automatically, at regular intervals.

5. Offer remote support

Unlike in an office environment, when a device or software runs into an error, the employees cannot request an alternative device while remote working. They have to make do with whatever is available and hence, reducing device downtime is a critical IT task if they don’t want to compromise on employee productivity.

Offering quick and good quality remote support is remote working 101 for IT teams. This can be done using remote mirroring and troubleshooting without having to fetch the device to a physical service center. In the era of lockdowns, this is more crucial than ever.

We all admit to having moved to remote working in haste, especially true for enterprises that did not ever bring in remote working as a policy. But here we are! With these IT best practices, however, remote working can be a piece of cake.