Top Tips For Launching Remote Capabilities For Your Staff

Your staff will have to work from home to the extent of the coronavirus pandemic. Do you have the right technologies in place to keep them productive, secure, and connected?

As businesses across the country and around the world are finding out, technology plays a crucial role in business continuity. Whether a company can keep operating, deliver services to clients and maintain productivity all comes down to the technology they have in place.

This is especially true right now, amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has kept Staff members out of the office and stuck at home. Only those businesses with remote access technologies in place will be able to maintain their continuity.

Your Checklist For Launching Remote Work Capabilities

• Connectivity: As you can’t realistically lay cable to connect your employees’ homes to your office servers, they will need a viable Internet connection to access business data and applications.  This only becomes an issue if your staff members are located in rural or remote areas that still lack a reliable 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: Your employees require the right technology in their homes to continue working like they usually 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: Are you 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: Have you determined where any files should not be accessed by staff remotely? If you operate in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance, you may want to section off specific sensitive data.
• Continuity Of Roles: While Most 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 invested in the necessary 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: You’ll want to invest in 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: If you and your team are used to communicating over the phone at the office, you’ll likely want to maintain that standard as you switch to a work-from-home model. Ideally, you won’t be asking your staff to use their phones for work. In essence, it can be tedious to circulate everyone’s numbers, verify that they have client contact info, and calculate how you’ll reimburse their 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 answer these questions, don’t panic. You’re not on your own – the 360 Smart Networks team is available to assist businesses like yours in planning and Launching Remote work capabilities.

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