May 7, 2020

Organizations are faced with an enormous leadership challenge with the emergence and increasing proliferation of the COVID-19 illnesses. Companies need to rapidly pivot to a remote workforce to keep their employees safe, while also enabling them to continue doing their jobs effectively and maintaining connections with their colleagues.

Based on our experience working with companies to create digital workplaces we’ve compiled the 5 ways to support your leadership in meeting this challenge:

  • Designate who will own this initiative: Identify team members from across departments of the organization to facilitate and manage the changes that will need to take place – accounting for process, technical, cultural, and organizational changes. Your leaders and managers should work with their team members to create new processes and ways to use technology that allow employees to be productive, collaborative and connected.
  • Identify the right technologies to enable effective remote work: Utilize collaboration tools for communication, document access, and workflow (e.g., Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts) will greatly enhance your teams’ ability to function at a high level while working remotely. Acquisition and implementation of basic functionality can be implemented rapidly, and plan on creating incremental, guided enhancements to them as your remote capabilities expand. If you already have these tools in place, assess their usage and your team members ability to use them effectively.
  • Assess if your employees have the right hardware and tools to function remotely: Create a plan to assess and prioritize your organization’s needs, identify procurement sources, and determine which tools will be put in place, such as laptops, connectivity, and VPN access.
  • Make sure to have the right security and security awareness in place: Decide if you want to allow your employees to connect to your network over public Wi-Fi or secure VPN. Employ multi-factor authentication and other security protocols and make sure your employees know enough to practice good security habits.
  • Ensure adequate support desk capacity is in place to meet increased demand: Implement an easily accessible way for your employees to ask questions about the changes, expected behaviors, and usage of unfamiliar tools. It is important to plan on additional demand and increased staffing levels to support this change.

Click here to learn more about Neudesic’s accelerated four-week engagement to help your organization quickly provide your remote workers with access to key enterprise applications to maximize their productivity.