Your 10-Point Checklist For Switching To A Remote Work Model

Just because your staff is stuck at home, that doesn’t mean they can’t continue to get their work done. Do you have the right remote access technologies in place to keep them productive?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues day by day, it becomes more and more important for everyone to do their part in helping to limit its spread. Health authorities nation-wide are urging people to stay home as much as possible, whether that means limiting work hours or cancelling social plans.

But if your staff can’t come into the office, how can they be expected to get their work done? It all comes down to your IT.

Both you and your staff need the right tools in order to stay productive. If you’re fighting against unintuitive software, a bad connection, or anything else tech-related, they won’t be able to get much done from home. It won’t be long before your business’ productivity grinds to a halt.

Your 10-Point Checklist For Switching To A Remote Work Model

1. Prioritize Ease Of Use: Your staff members need to be able to do their work, and easily. If they’re fighting against unintuitive software, a bad connection, or anything else tech-related, their standard workday won’t be all that productive. It won’t be long before your business’ productivity grinds to a halt.
2. Confirm Reliable Connectivity: You need to poll your staff and find out who has a reliable Internet connection at home. If your staff lives in remote areas with poor connectivity, you may have to consider investing in cellular-data, or have a plan in place to deal with delays on their end. So long as they have a strong Internet connection, the rest of the work is on the IT services provider to deliver a responsive and user-friendly cloud platform with which the worker can access their business data.
3. Determine Which Roles Can Be Performed Remotely: Nowadays, most jobs can be done from home. However, take a moment to consider what jobs specifically can be managed while outside of the office and document them.
4. Determine Whether Your Employees Have The Necessary Hardware At Home: The right course of action is to have a conversation with each employee who will be working from home and have them send information regarding their computers, smartphones, and internet connection over to you.
5. Update Your Tech As Needed: If you need to upgrade any devices or services (such as mobile data plans or internet packages), start doing so as soon as possible. For internet connections, you may also choose to provide corporate-owned smartphones with data packages that can be tethered to computers.
6. Maintain Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity will be extra important as cybercriminals will undoubtedly use the pandemic to entice unknowing victims into clicking on links or downloading information. It’s best to use a virtual private network (VPN) for all employees to connect remotely in a secure fashion.
7. Manage Your Staff’s Productivity: You’ll also want to be able to track remote access and logins, allowing you to see when users are actively working.
8. Provide Remote Phone Capabilities: Cloud-based phone systems and collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Office 365, will play a crucial role in your business – allowing your team to work from home while still taking part in conference calls, video calls, file sharing and more.
9. Make Sure Your Staff Knows How To Use Remote Access Tools Safely: Make sure to provide some form of cybersecurity awareness and cloud productivity training to your staff members. Don’t assume they know how to do so on their own. Give them some helpful resources to understand how to handle their responsibilities and stay productive.
10. Confirm That IT Support Is Available: IT will be all the more important at this time, and as such, you’ll want to make sure you have the right support services in place. A help desk support team should be available to your employees in the event of technology issues, questions or concerns. Typically, most of their work will be done remotely – troubleshooting issues and answering questions.

What Technologies Should You Make Use Of?

There are a number of consumer and business-class solutions available to users depending on the size of the organization:

• Business Communications (Skype, VoIP, etc.): Can you monitor your employees’ phone traffic, allowing them to take calls from clients, and make calls on their business lines? You also need software that allows you to record calls in order to track the customers’ experience.
• Staff Collaboration (Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive & Teams): Do you have the right solutions in place to allow your team members to collaborate? You should be able to send and receive files, and share desktops in real-time.
• Security Software (VPN software to keep connections secure): This pandemic will be like open season for cybercriminals. When businesses start prioritizing remote access to data over the security of that data, they make an easy target for hackers. That’s why you need to take additional steps to secure remote access.

We know that you’d like to keep your business operating no matter what crisis the nation faces. We know that this situation has all of our businesses operating differently and feeling strain on our revenues, and in some cases, you may have had to lay off people.

With the right remote work capabilities, you can keep your staff productive and healthy. If you need help, get in touch with the Kyocera Intelligence team at [email protected].