You probably use cloud services that employees can access from anywhere. However, most organizations are not prepared for a large number of employees to collaborate and work remotely. Now may be the time to upgrade your capabilities.
Here are a few tips to consider as you enable a large group of employees to work remotely:
Test Remote Access: Employees who have not previously used remote access should test their ability to connect to all your cloud and in-house applications on their laptops, while still in the office. By doing this as soon as possible you can reduce the number of support calls on the first Work-from-Home day.
Device Security: If employees will be using their home devices to access cloud services and internal applications rather than corporate laptops or smartphones, it’s important to ensure that their home computers, laptops, and devices are secure before they log onto sensitive corporate systems. Once again, it would be best to do this in advance, with a subset of your staff each day, to spread out the support requests.
Training: To assure that those employees who have not previously worked remotely are familiar with the full suite of your collaboration tools, you may wish to set up a “reminder” training session for those who are interested.
System security: With more employees working from home, there is greater potential for any one person’s device or password to be compromised. The best approach to prevent this is to implement 2-factor authentication, starting with your email (such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps) and key CRM systems (such as salesforce.com or other systems).
Accessing in-house applications: If you haven’t previously set up remote access to applications or files such as Adobe Photoshop, QuickBooks, CAD software, or other applications that don’t run in the cloud, you may need ask your IT department to configure a remote access server for employees who use these applications.
While none of this is rocket science, it has the potential to be a lot of work in a short time-frame. It may be appropriate to call on external resources to help you expand your work-from-home capabilities quickly. If you need help finding someone, let us know.
Finally, remember – the above tips are useful for any instance when employees need to work remotely and should improve employee productivity long-term.
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