Work from Home

work from home policies

Disruptive changes bring a need for work from home policies.

COVID-19 is forcing many businesses to embrace work from home policies. The technology needed to enable people to work from home has existed for years but working from home may be new for you and your employees. Here are some essentials you need to address to empower your remote workers.

What technology do you have or need?

Your employees may have business laptops and phones, or perhaps they were already working from home occasionally.  So, remote work will not be as much of a change. Your people already have many of the tools they need.

But this will challenge a business that wasn’t doing this before.  You’ll need new tools to adapt to the situation.

Precautions:

For the near term, you may need to ask employees to use their own personal computers and phones. That will require some ground rules and a fresh approach to getting work done.

Consider the following precautions to secure remote work activity:

  • Establish policies for securing devices that access or store company data.
  • Communicate reporting procedures for the loss / theft of a device.
  • Enable remote monitoring and management of all devices that access company data.
  • Avoid keeping company data on employee owned devices.
  • Ensure regular backups of company data.

Challenges of the Work from Home Environment:

At the office, you have the right tools and an established workflow. Now, everything is different, and you’re dealing with various hardware and networking solutions of differing quality. This can be a headache to get up and running, yet you need to keep business operations moving.

Employees will be accessing company resources from various locations. This means you must consider an unfamiliar threat landscape. Laptops can get stolen and unprotected company data could fall into the wrong hands. You’ll need to install remote management software to enable a complete wipe of lost or stolen laptops. Also, implement encryption, data backup, and screen-locking features to help keep data secure.

For phone service, you’ll need to make sure the right personnel are receiving calls made to your various inbound business phone numbers, and that calls appear to be coming from your office when outbound calls are made.

Setting Expectations:

It’s important to establish clear expectations from the outset:

  • How will employees report progress?
  • How can employees stay in touch with managers?
  • What are the expectations for team collaboration?
  • What software is available for group chat, video, or conference calling?
  • Who will be available to maintain proper coverage during business hours that your customers expect to be able to reach you?

Supporting the Requirements of a Distributed Workforce:

The current situation with COVID-19 poses other challenges to remote productivity.  But when your only alternative may be total shutdown, the choice is obvious.

We can help you set up your technology to enable remote work for your staff. We’ll make sure your hardware is capable, secure your company data, and be your remote IT help desk.

Contact us today at:

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