What does a remote working strategy cover?

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While we can take measures to slow the spread of the disease, the reality seems to be that remote working will last a while. Are you ready? If you need to have people working in self-isolation for an extended period, will your organisation still work as well as before?

1. Tools

Most businesses are already set up for some form of remote working. Most of us have remote access to email, and most businesses have a number of remote licenses for a subset of people to access key business systems.

While that covers ‘business as usual’, we’re now moving into business as abnormal. Can EVERYONE work remotely? Will phones be answered and calls transferred? Can you quickly deal with a customer enquiry? Can you still raise invoices, process the banking and reconcile debtors and creditors or do month end reports? Obviously, some actions ultimately are very physical and need people onsite, such as receiving or dispatching orders, but even then can they be minimised to reduce risk? Ultimately the fewer people working physically together will reduce risk, and to a large extent IT systems can help.

We need to work through every tool, every key business process and we need to ensure they can be actioned remotely, and activated securely. We’ve warned over and over again about the risks of cyber-criminals, and their opportunity to strike multiplies immensely when you introduce people working from home, especially on their own machinery – PCs that might not be protected by your business security tools. Does every access point require multi-factor authentication? Is every machine that processes your work ‘clean’ from key-loggers and malware – the things that KARE and KARE for Security protect your business assets from?

 

2. Skills

Having the tools makes a huge difference, but does everyone know how to use them? Everyone’s home environment is different, with different equipment, different pressures (partner / family / pets / noise) an of course some people are more adept than others, and some need more technical guidance. Have they tested access and practised now, while there is time to address any issues?

Unlike most IT providers, we have a team dedicated to helping our clients achieve cultural change.  They aren't IT people... they are people people.  They ensure that your staff can use the new tools to do things a different way - helping define new workflows to make your organisation more efficient and more effective.  In the end, if your teams aren't able to change the way they work and use remote working tools properly, productivity will collapse.

3. Culture

One of the benefits of people working together is culture; the casual conversations around the coffee machine, and the camaraderie through in-person meetings, and good-natured exchanges that happen as people rub shoulders. This informal interaction makes our workplaces attract and retain good people, it helps us identify support needs and mentor and coach colleagues as necessary. It helps us piece together a picture of what’s going on from fragments of information. Once people are working away for a couple of weeks, that’s in jeopardy. How do you maintain your culture when people aren’t together? We all know that sometimes an email doesn’t convey emotion or humour and misunderstandings can abound. So how do you keep everyone smiling when they would otherwise be frowning? How do you keep your team together when they are apart? With tools like Teams, and the appropriate protocols in place, we can help you maintain your culture in a remote working environment, among the distractions and challenges that go along with that.