4 Areas to Consider When Transitioning Employees to Working From Home

For businesses that haven’t traditionally embraced remote employees, it may be difficult to get up to full speed with the current turn of events.  To make the inevitable transition less overwhelming, we assembled a handy checklist of actions to consider while adjusting to the new workplace reality.

Organization

• Access your staff members and/or roles that are able to work remotely, those that can’t work remotely, and those where remote work may be possible with some modifications.
• Conduct an employee survey to determine the availability of computers that can be used for working remotely, as well as availability to high-speed internet access.
• Create company guidelines covering remote employees, including inappropriate use of company assets and security guidelines.
• Develop and conduct work-at-home- training for using remote access, remote tools, and best practices.
• Select a video-conferencing platform for services, such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx, or Go To Meeting.
• Develop a communications plan to involve remote employees in the daily activities of the organization.

 Security

• Create and implement a company security policy that applies to remote employees, including actions such as locking computers when not in use.
• Implement two-factor authentication for highly-sensitive portals. 
• If needed, confirm all remote employees have access to and can use a business-grade VPN, and that you have enough licenses for all employees working remotely.

Staff

• Institute a transparency policy with your staff and communicate frequently. 
• Check in on your staff, daily if possible, to confirm they are comfortable with working from home. Find and address any problems they may be experiencing. 
• Make certain each staff member has reliable voice communications, even if this results in adding a business-quality voice over IP service. 
• Don’t attempt to micro-manage your staff. Remember their working conditions at home won’t be ideal, and they will need to work out their own work patterns and schedules. 
• Create a phone number and email address where staff members can communicate their concerns about the firm, working at home, or even the status of COVID-19.

 Infrastructure

• Ensure that you have ample bandwidth coming in to your company to handle all of the new remote traffic. 
• Make sure you have backups of your services so your staff is able to keep working in the event extra traffic causes your primary service to go down.

You may need to adjust or expand this list to match the specific needs of your firm and the conditions affecting your organization.  Use this list to get you started and to help guide you through the process.