Is your business moving quickly towards a remote working model? Tackle the challenge head on with 5 steps to get you over the line in record time.
Provide the right tools
Firstly, ensure that staff have a means to do their job. Often this means a working laptop and an internet connection. Consider allowing staff to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to reduce the overheads on your business. If your staff do not require licensed software to be installed, this can be an easy decision to make.
If your staff need special software, consider offering a company configured device.
Another consideration is a mobile phone. This is not critical. If you need to call landlines, Skype and Zoom are well equipped in this area. Most calling can be done from a computer, and will actually result in higher quality audio for your audience.
Identify the required applications for your staff
A mobile workforce will need applications to get the job done. This could be Slack for collaboration, Salesforce for sales and lead management or a range of other applications. Our recommendation is to use applications which are cloud based, meaning full application capability is achieved directly via a browser. No special software and no difficult licensing models.
When you have a list of applications, you can move into the next step, identity and access management.
Implement an identity management solution
Managing your staff access to applications is a nightmare. Keeping the access valid, removing old access, and onboarding new staff is prone to human error.
An identity management tool allows you to set up application access behind a role (for example, “Sales”). You create a user in your identity management tool, then assign that user the “Sales” role if that is their job description. The tool will then provide access to all the sales applications for that staff member.
If the staff member changes jobs, it’s a few clicks in one spot to move them to a new position where their access is automatically updated.
Getting this right early will pay huge dividends in the immediate future as well as in the long run.
Collaborate frequently
Tools such as Zoom, Slack and Confluence are a great way to keep a team connected. Just because staff are physically separated, you can keep the business moving and potentially increase visibility across the board if collaboration tools are properly implemented and used.
At Assertiv, we use Slack for our day to day communication, as well as an active intranet for more formal communication. We then use supporting infrastructure such as email, phone and Zoom conferences to keep everyone in the loop.
With a distributed workforce, keeping everyone informed will go a long way to ensuring your team members are included and can contribute easily.
Be flexible and willing to compromise
Remote working, or WFH (work from home) teams play by a different set of rules to an on-site team. One of the major benefits of remote working is the ability to spread your tasks out over your day and sometimes evenings.
Time is saved on your commute to work, so employees may get stuck into tasks earlier in the day. This may free up time for picking up kids in the afternoon, doing some shopping, or booking in a tradie to fix that leak in the ceiling!
There is a two way level of trust that must be established. Make sure your staff are accountable for the work they do. Be flexible, and adopt a mindset of setting enough work out that will keep your staff busy. How they manage their time is up to them. Of course there are some caveats to these scenarios, but we found it applies to most situations.
There is a big push across many industries to employ a flexible working model, which involves a hybrid or fully remote component. For a business starting the journey it will take some planning, but keeping these points in mind will help accelerate you down a path of business continuity.
If you are interested in Identity and Access Management solutions, Assertiv has your back. Reach out and we will be happy to help.
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