We have been thrust into a brave new world. Many businesses are jumping into this new work environment head first and ready to go. Others are being dragged into remote workforce kicking and screaming.
Since all of this happened so quickly, it’s understandable if many companies were unprepared for the transition, and are still playing catch up with their work from home plans. There are a few key things your business needs in order to provide a functional, secure remote workspace.
Provide necessary access
Outdated office tools create a sort of support debt that IT and information security teams often struggle to pay down. If the interface is unintuitive or the password recovery features not identity-based, employees are more likely to seek our help. While we are happy to help, and typically can resolve these types of issues quickly, it’s better if the issues never come up at all for better employee experience. Also, if there’s a great diversity in the types of tools and devices employees use, our team can spend even more time resolving the issue. This sort of debt compounds. While many teams spend too much time on it, one in seven spends as much of a third of their time on such issues, reports Pulse Q&A.
The solution is proactive support from your IT support company, like briteCITY. We can make sure your remote access tools are up to date and secure so you can spend less time figuring them out. When you do get in a bind, we are here to help you quickly and efficiently.
Increase collaboration
The collaboration challenge is a problem of matchmaking: Do the right people have access to the right assets and people at the right time? When they don’t—when the first ten minutes of every web conference is lost to troubleshooting—you suffer a double cost. Your people lose valuable time, but they also grow frustrated, which reduces their effectiveness throughout the day. Small disruptions multiplied across an organization have real and tangible costs.
The solution here is collaboration tools like Office 365, which includes Microsoft Teams. Teams is a great way to make sure everyone is able to connect easily and share the files and notes necessary to truly get innovative.
Foster a safe work environment
A key cause of hostile work environments is a lack of communication oversight. The mere knowledge that workplace communications are stored in an archive can dissuade bad behavior. But when the legal and HR teams have access to those communications, they have a better pulse on the business. They’re better able to preempt hostility or abuse and draw on evidence when issues arise.
Archiving history can help mitigate any issues that arise quickly, with a record in place to ensure that you have the data necessary to combat or provide proof during any types of litigation.
Mitigate security risks
Businesses are moving to the cloud even faster than they realize—non-IT individuals are self-provisioning software (known as “shadow IT”) that create tool sprawl and risk. IT and information security teams can’t protect what they don’t know about, and often the tools aren’t uniformly secure. In a study by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, 32% of breaches were caused by human error. Every breach is a compounding tax on IT, on that individual’s time, and on the business as a whole, in the form of lost revenue, lost trust, and lost customers. Remediation is time-consuming, expensive, and can be unnecessary with properly secured tools.
Enabling 2FA on all tools and making sure that all employees are using the same, company approved cloud based services is incredibly important. You don’t want some employees using Box, while others are using Dropbox and more yet are using OneDrive. Keep your tools streamlined and secure them with best practices like 2FA.
Guard against disruption
There’s a reason that when Microsoft finally stopped supporting Windows 7, 31% of U.S. Federal Agencies were still using it. Big institutions develop a reluctance to evolve and adapt. But the longer they wait, the more disruptive negligence can be. For instance, when a big provider of workplace productivity solutions like Microsoft makes an announcement that it’s sunsetting a product, you’ve often waited far too long, and your employees have been suffering from ineffective tools for quite some time and yet perplexingly, they’ll be reluctant
to switch. The devilish interface you know is typically preferred over the one you don’t. You can think of this as maintaining the “roads and bridges” to your office productivity apps. Frequent updates and cloud-based software that updates itself automatically can stave off collapse and keep people working at their most productive.
Using proven tools like Office 365 can help eliminate downtime. Using a random CRM from a company working out of their basement might just be asking for trouble. Tools that are business standards will be extremely helpful when trying to make sure your downtime is minimal.