For many, the introduction of remote or hybrid work practices was less of a choice and more of an existential need. Now, years after certain events caused this existential need, there are still pockets of friction that appear and make these approaches to work far more challenging than they can and should be.
Let’s explore a few of these pockets of friction and even more crucially, how to smooth them over.
Pocket One: Your Dispersed Employees Find Data Access Difficult
They say that a poor craftsman blames his tools… but what if those tools are inaccessible, as are the raw materials they're used on?
If all of your digital resources—your data and the software your employees use to do their jobs—are exclusively accessible to someone in the office, your remote workers simply won’t be able to be effective team members. This is why it is so important to have the tools in place that securely (more on this momentarily) allow your team to access their work resources from wherever they’re working.
Enter the cloud, and the collaborative tools that it supports. These digital platforms enable your employees to access and collaborate on their work from anywhere with an Internet connection, and in real time. By utilizing a managed cloud environment, we can help ensure that Paul can accomplish his goals from his desk at the office or from home as he cares for his daughter after she caught the flu during a playdate.
By helping you transition to a managed cloud environment, we can make your operations far more flexible and convenient.
Pocket Two: Your Employees’ Home Networks Are Less Secure than the Office’s
As we said before, it is important that your tools are not only available but also secure. The issue is that it is far easier for you to control the security of your business’ network than it is for you to control the security of your employees’ home networks, or the network of the cafe down the road that some team members take their laptops to for a working lunch.
That said, while these extraneous networks are out of your control, the endpoints (AKA, your team’s laptops or mobile devices) aren’t. We can help you set up these endpoints to abide by your security standards before they can access your data. Company-owned devices make this simple, and a Bring Your Own Device policy helps enforce these standards for anyone using a personal device for work. Either way, this allows you to maintain security wherever a device is being used, while also allowing the users to receive support as needed.
Pocket Three: You’re Concerned About Remote Employee Productivity
There are two primary reasons you may have these concerns. The first is a distrust in your team and their work ethic, and the second, far more likely reason is their ability to efficiently access their resources from their location. The first will require you to clearly lay out your expectations and hold your employees accountable to these standards. The second can be resolved by simply being prepared.
For example, if Todd finds his home Wi-Fi unreliable, encourage him to connect his work laptop directly to his router via an Ethernet cable to avoid relying on Wi-Fi altogether.
If Miranda is having trouble locating the files she needs, it suggests that these resources are not saved in the appropriate location and need to be better organized. Shared folders are key to this improved organization, as is some level of education to ensure your team knows how to find the appropriate files and organize new ones correctly.
If Laura finds that her tools are constantly crashing, keeping everyone’s software up to date can solve this problem and allow her to accomplish her tasks more promptly. Plus, these updates will frequently include critical security patches that resolve threats to which Laura’s device would otherwise be vulnerable.
Remote Work Can (and Should) Be Beneficial
Whether your team is working from the office, from home, or from wherever they happen to be, their productivity should not be hindered by technical issues. We can help ensure that it isn’t. Reach out to Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428 to start a conversation about your workplace strategy and how to incorporate a distributed workforce.
