How To Plan & Implement A Successful Remote Work Strategy For Your Employees....A Survival Guide For Business Owners
Today the coronavirus epidemic continues to prompt new travel restrictions and emergency declarations around the world, with massive lockdowns affecting millions of people. Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies are probably going to become the new normal. Not only could it become temporary law, it's the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level?
Ingredient 1: Usable Broadband / High-Speed Internet
The first thing you need to do as a business owner is survey your employees to see what kind of broadband they are using at home. In order to run business voice and video calls they're going to need plenty of throughput. A good standard that should provide enough horsepower is 50 Mb down, 5 Mb upload speed. If your employees aren't getting those kind of speeds, you may consider offering to subsidize the difference to upgrade them from their current plan to 50 Mb x 5 Mb. There are some cable, best-effort fiber, and 4G internet providers that will allow your executives and other employees to get a business-class service delivered to their residence.If you'd like to review your options, we have access to our patented GeoQuote tool (shown above) that will tell us, in under 30 seconds, what providers (and prices) are available at your employees' locations.
Ingredient 2: Move Your Phone System to the Cloud
You've known about UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) for some time, and now may be the time to finally make that jump. In the past, many on-premise phone system users cited quality issues related to running essential traffic over the internet as a reason to NOT move to the cloud. Those issues have more than been addressed through SD-WAN technology, which fixes packet loss and other factors that degrade voice and video quality.Here are the key features of UCaaS that will enable your work-at-home employees by leveraging the benefits of unified communications in the cloud:
We have two up-and-coming technologies that address these features and move them all to the cloud, while maintaining centralized control over access permissions.
- Workspace as a Service - on of our newest suppliers, StratusWorx, offers a platform (shown in the graphic above) that allows you to run ALL of your fully-licenced software programs in the cloud, all while giving you full control over who has remote access. This would allow you to fully virtualize your office while maintaining your current level of production.
- Desktop as a Service - this service (shown below) allows you to virtualize your employee's individual desktop computers, putting the actual computing in the cloud, and allowing your employees to "see" it through a light-weight app that mimics the PC's workspace.
Ingredient 4: Remote File Share
When you send your workers home, it's imperative that they be able to share, collaborate on, and store files in the cloud. The most popular cloud file storage providers are:- Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive
- Google G-Suite - Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Box.com
Time Frame: How Fast Can You Make the Pivot?
The good news is, we and our network of Trusted Service Providers can get these new services set up for you quickly. The thing that takes the longest time is the transfer of your current phone numbers, which requires paperwork to get your existing provider to release them to the new one. We typically see this taking around a month to transfer properly. Everything else can be done in weeks and in some cases, days.Looking on the bright side, once this virus has been contained (and it will), you'll have the most advanced cloud-based technology working for you well into the foreseeable future, making your workforce dynamic, adaptable, and mobile.
If you'd like assistance in putting a work-at-home technology plan in place, simply ask us online at FreedomFire Communications and we'll take it from there. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.
In the meantime, stay safe, work smart, and know that we are proud to play a small part in helping contain the Coronavirus outbreak and to protect our most vulnerable from this terrible virus through practical work-at-home strategies. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by this outbreak.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Coronavirus, COVID-19, CRM, High Speed Internet, Mobile App, Remote Work, Remote Work Strategy, Remote Work Technology, SDWAN, UCaaS, Video Conferencing, Working Remotely
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