Is your business equipped with the necessary tooling to adopt remote working strategies? Remote workers have an incredible amount of benefits to contribute to your business’ operations. Remote work is not possible without a well-thought-out strategy and IT insfrastructure to support it. Today, we’ll review what business needs in order to capitalize on remote workers.
Communication & Collaboration Solutions
Remote workers would be useless without the ability to communicate with them. What good is an employee working on a task if they are not able to send what they are working on to you? Maintaining open lines of communication between you and your employees is crucial in maintaining an effective remote workforce. Employees should be utilizing tools such as email, chat platforms, video conferencing, Office 365 and VoIP.
Employees also should have collaboration solutions within reach. Employees who are able to share files or work “side-by-side” despite being hundreds if not thousands of miles apart, will benefit your business greater than an employee who is unable to collaborate with his team.
Project Management Tools
Direction is important with any project. Keeping your staff up to speed and pointing them in the right direction doesn’t have to be difficult just because they are a remote worker. In fact, if utilizing a chat platform, employees often are able to stay on task more effectively. When a project manager requests an objective to be completed, employees can use their message as a checklist.
Looming deadlines, along with a fluid schedule are triggers to work-related stress. Utilizing a reliable project management solution can make remote workers feel as though they are on a team, all working towards business success.
Cybersecurity
If protecting your business from cyberattacks is important to you, then your remote workers should be well equipped before they access even a byte of data. Remote workers should be utilizing multi-factor authentication measures, and all software needs to be, and remain, up-to-date.
A password management system would be classified as cybersecurity, especially when remote access is involved. These systems help prevent your data from getting into the wrong hands.
Time-Tracking Software
An important part of remote work is time entries. Without them, it is difficult to tell if your employees are actively doing their job. Let’s take a look at a hypothetical situation from a careless business owner.
Billy, founder of Uncomfortable Chairs Inc. hired a remote employee to do his accounting. The employee promised productivity and efficiency but hasn’t been delivering. One day Billy decides to remotely access his station to examine what is going on. It turns out that his employee goes idle for hours at a time, regularly. This would have been easily noticed with reliable time-tracking software.
Implementing time-tracking software can simplify tasks such as payroll, allowing you to spend the saved time on other business matters.
MyTek has experts who can help your business simplify remote work technologies, as well as make your remote practices much more secure. To learn more about setting up your IT infrastructure for remote workers and what business technology you need, reach out to us at 623-312-2440.