For all of us who went remote or will move shortly

When in need of a fast and optimal but still reliable and fine-drawn workflow relocation strategy the issue of safe remote work management arises

Is it really as time-consuming and risky as it might seem?

Let’s look through a limited number of figurative stoplights which serve as mere warnings refining your preparation for out-of-office work

What should you take into consideration?

remote employee productivity

employee morale

time tracking

How to help your team maintain motivation?

There are solutions that have a comprehensive instrumental palette allowing you to tune in to their activity assessing the overall progress and ensuring smooth ongoing interaction.

With proper controls in place equal participation in the task is ensured and contribution into the process as well as usage of the Internet is continuously evaluated.

Deployment of monitoring system on endpoints will help you and your employees to understand how much time is allocated to a certain part of job.

No need to rethink your practices and adapt the workflow to the offbeat situation, 20% of companies have some of such solutions installed and successfully launched within 1 hour, it takes 30% of organisations 3 hours to complete introduction of the software.

Apple was reportedly facing problems regarding some discrepancy between remote work configurations arrangements and corporate policies — some resources simply couldn’t be accessed even after configurations had already been considered and employees still needed to come to work despite quarantine. Altering the restrictions doesn’t let the company avoid issues completely as the transition to remote work is a challenge for the company’s performance mode.

Installation of the monitoring system implies equal control quality wherever your employees are located as the software can be put straight on endpoints.

You can move to remote work quickly and safely.

Force majeure situations, such as virus epidemic, make offline companies reconsider their modus operandi. So how to redesign your workflow and not to lose control over employees with regard to the current situation?

Almost any work can become remote. The current virus situation appeared to be a catalyst for proving this in reality. There are three main issues which are to be solved before moving people to work from home.

1. Establish quick connection between employees for creating and controlling tasks.

Companies which never practiced remote interaction with their employees can begin from small things. The most important is to keep specialists and managers connected, that is why you can agree on several official communication channels for professional cooperation. For example, correspondence concerning relevant tasks can be conducted in Skype and coordinating of sensitive documents — via corporate email.

CRM systems for modern companies are natural, and remote work is the motive for putting them in order and make employees be more disciplined when working with them. Services for webinars will come in handy when you need to do presentations for clients or inside training for employees, and TeamViewer will solve technical problems with the help of system administrators.

Make sure that all the specialists can access all the services and have all the required tools and conditions to maintain the quality of the workflow. For example, sales managers can benefit from opportunities to show presentation via a Skype call. Heads of departments can collect wishes and questions asked by their subordinates so that they could pass the transiting process fast and painlessly.

2. Keep up the discipline and maintain productivity

Employees who didn’t work from home before can take remote mode for “free mode”. When there are no colleagues and supervisors near it is easy to relax more than it is appropriate and surf the Internet or get distracted with household chores. It is sensible to install time tracking or employee monitoring software on the devices which are taken home in order to maintain general performance indicators at the same quality level and not let it drop till the end of the first day of remote work. This software comes bundled with modern DLP systems. In this case you can both track data transfer and monitor employee performance.

Another measure in addition to the specific software is to write reports making a list of everything what gets done within a day. Reports can be collected and sent to the address emails from which are received by several managers at once to boost control if needed.

3. Guarantee information security

It is difficult to arrange safe remote work without special software. VPN services should be included into your to-do list alongside standard security measures (antivirus, Windows Administrative Tools, firewalls) to protect your company from external threats, as employees will access corporate file folders and environments via home Wi-Fi or mobile Internet.

The monitoring solution can be chosen to deploy only on corporate devices which is advisory in order to protect your organisation from internal threats. That is why it is better to send workers home supplying them with corporate laptops.

There are two worrisome issues regarding monitoring software usage — technical and ethical. The technical one concerns data gathering and transferring from a remote PC to the software solution’s server. Such connection can be configured after on network hardware even if employees had to relocate all of a sudden.

The ethical moment regards the fact that many systems record speech captured in close proximity to the computer with the monitoring software installed on it. When this is happening in the office (in the workplace) the legitimacy is obvious. But when an employee takes the work home it would be decent to deactivate such control. For example, there are products which are configured in a way that if a computer is located outside the office (doesn’t see internal IT infrastructure) microphone recording turns off automatically.

Companies which don’t have an opportunity to allocate a corporate laptop to each employee can have it different: arrange work via a terminal server allowing access from private devices.