While everyone is certainly hoping that the coronavirus won’t spread further globally, the reality is that businesses are already carefully considering any contingency plans to avoid major disruption to their operations, with many already telling their employees to work remotely due to the coronavirus. Remote work, or the practice of working for extended periods of time outside of a formal office, is steadily growing in popularity and is being enabled by a host of digital tools, from Web conferencing and email to mobile collaboration apps and virtual event platforms.
In our experience, most businesses are still in the early stages or not committed enough to invest in full-scale strategies and capabilities. So no matter who you are, there is usually significant room to improve the digital workforce experience when working outside the office.
So, to help organizations prepare for the surge in remote workers as the coronavirus story spreads around the world, we’ve created the comprehensive guide below. This guide will help organizations create the right conditions for remote work as well as those who may already have existing remote work programs but would like to significantly upgrade their efficiency to minimize the impact on their customers, employees, and suppliers.
In both cases, the strategies and tools that follow will immediately offer significant improvements to the remote work experience and deliver improved outcomes, such as higher productivity, more engagement, better work- life balance, and greater overall work quality.
Four strategies for remote work
There are four levels of strategy when it comes to enabling remote work and they should, generally, be approached in this order:
Strategy 1: Create a secure and effective foundation for remote digital access.
First and foremost, this means providing secure access to IT resources within the enterprise as well as to the Internet itself, typically through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This requires attention to every part, from accessing the Internet itself, to providing secure means of communication and interaction with corporate networks, data, communication channels, and applications. This is also the overall cost of managing and supporting the entire process.
- Internet access. Don’t assume that employees have adequate internet access at home or elsewhere. While many will, some won’t have reliable or fast service or only a mobile device. Do your research and find another way to collect data from employees included in your remote work strategy and identify where the gaps are. For some employees, be prepared to invest in mobile hotspots and related data plans, as well as provide grants to set up home internet access plans or upgrade existing access, which can be especially important for employees living in more rural areas.
Remote workers, especially at the beginning, often need to sync their files and data. How fast this goes will determine remote work productivity. More specifically, the types of applications used regularly, especially web and video conferencing, can determine bandwidth needs.
Finally, make sure you have a clearly articulated remote work policy along with a plan, communications schedule, budget, training, and support to ensure adequate internet access where the employee will be working remotely.
- Remote Work Devices. There are two big issues when it comes to devices. Either a) employees can use their own, which is a bigger security risk, but considerably cheaper and faster to deploy if their devices are capable of doing their job, or b) a company can provide the devices they need. Given that the prevalence of Shadow IT (employees using unwanted, unofficial apps to do their job) is generally higher than most enterprise IT departments are willing to admit – meaning that company data is already on many personal devices. Our advice is to seriously consider providing corporate devices, as it is the least expensive and fastest option for enabling a remote program should anything happen. Organizations can rent, lease or purchase devices depending on their needs.
What devices are needed? Probably a smartphone and a computer or tablet, as well as any internet-connected hardware. However, your specific business requirements will dictate what is needed. Additionally, when providing a superior remote work strategy, there are a number of accessories that can significantly enhance the experience, at minimal cost. These include:
- A webcam for web conferencing, if the employee's primary computing device doesn't have one. 720P is the minimum acceptable resolution for quality results, but this is usually standard on most cameras now.
- A high-quality headset or headset with a microphone. While employees almost always have headphones, you'd be surprised how many don't have good enough microphones on their headsets for phone or web conferencing.
- Secure remote access to business assets and online services. This is typically provided by a virtual private network (VPN) solution, which sits on the PC, laptop, or mobile device and creates an encrypted network connection, making it secure for the employee to access IT resources within the organization and elsewhere on the Internet or other networks. As noted above, usability is key here, as is reliability, because almost every other part of the remote work solution provided will use the VPN as the basic foundation it uses to securely access the Internet.
In general, an employee should never do any work for the organization without having a VPN enabled on their devices. This includes online services over the Internet. This is because a VPN ensures a higher level of safety and security between the remote employee and the service. In reality, your mileage will vary depending on when employees can use a VPN. Therefore, the VPN usage policy should be clear and unambiguous on what employees are allowed to do with the VPN and with it remotely.
It’s important to note that the VPN will be the most important link in your remote work chain, so ensure that your solution works on most target devices, works reliably (there’s a surprisingly wide range of effectiveness depending on where your employees are located, which can get complicated with global organizations using local internet services, with many IP addresses blocked for various reasons). Make sure you’ve tested all service providers, devices, and locations that will be used, at a minimum, and that you’ll get adequate performance. Some VPNs route traffic through central hubs located around the world, which often get overloaded during business hours. Additionally, consider strongly implementing two-factor authentication (2FA), rather than just user IDs and passwords, to significantly increase security. 2FA fobs (hardware devices that provide a PIN to further authenticate users) are cheap now. Employees can also use their mobile devices as a 2FA authentication.
The reality is that your IT department should have worked on many of these issues and will likely have a working remote access solution that uses VPN, including policy and support.
Finally, we would say that VPN is not necessarily the only solution for providing remote access, nor is it often enough, although it may be the most well-known. One issue is that VPNs can ultimately end up being a difficult solution to implement and manage. There are many alternatives, but remote desktops can often do the job if you don’t have the resources, skills or budget to operate a VPN where it needs to work. Solutions like Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops or Blackberry Digital Workplace or the ever-popular TeamViewer for smaller organizations offer solutions for high security but maximum ease of use that require much less effort on the part of the organization other than some initial provisioning and training. Again, test everything beforehand, including usability, and make sure everything will work properly.
Strategy 2: Provide access to productivity, line of business applications, and communication/collaboration tools.
Today's business revolves around teamwork using shared knowledge assets such as documents, files, reports, spreadsheets, rich media, and structured and unstructured data. These assets are created and used with applications that include common office suites such as Microsoft Office365 and Google G Suite, on-premises content/document management systems, corporate intranet, HR systems, CRM, ERP, and many other systems.
An average 100,000-person organization has between 1,500 and 3,000 applications across everything they do to run the business. Even a 100-person organization will have at least 100-200 applications they rely on, many of which will need to be used in remote work. Ensuring that all of this works well over remote access can be partially solved with remote desktop, as noted above. In general, they strongly prefer cloud solutions for their remote work, as installing native applications on compatible devices can be surprisingly difficult, while cloud solutions work with most common browsers and especially allow access to mobile applications.
Key Success Factor
Generally speaking, you can count on using business applications remotely to be in roughly the same situation as the employee is in the office. This is in stark contrast to the other side of the equation: communication and collaboration tools.
Due to its inherently isolated nature, remote work relies much more on digital communications and particularly on modern workforce collaboration tools, such as team chat (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, etc.), enterprise social networks (Igloo, LumApps, SAP Jam, etc.), unified communications/instant messaging solutions, as well as enterprise sockets such as email, phone, and web conferencing/meeting tools, such as GoToMeeting and Zoom.
Remote work itself can be quite difficult for people who are either not used to it or don’t like it. So it’s usually worth the extra effort to make remote work easier and more appealing to this group, as well as everyone else. With the coronavirus putting pressure on people who aren’t willing to work remotely to do so, it makes sense to consider several solutions that will make remote collaboration feel more like the office. Some potential innovative solutions to consider:
- Sococo – This online workspace provides chat, voice, and video that offers a virtual office overlay that is highly effective at making people feel like they are still in an office. Employees can visit shared meeting spaces, working as they would in a physical space.
- Mural – A visual collaboration tool that provides employees with shared objects similar to a whiteboard, Mural gives people more bandwidth and a more immediate connection to their teamwork. Teams can organize on an online canvas using lists, flowcharts, diagrams, frameworks, methods, and plans to help them stay well-aligned.
- Status Hero – How is everyone doing and what are they doing? These are the questions this tool answers by gathering employee status to create a picture of the team. Status is gathered by the app both by asking employees occasionally and by activities from other systems. It then broadcasts important events and notes goals that have been achieved, so people are aware of what is happening with their colleagues and teammates.
At the cutting edge of digital collaboration, there are telecommuting robots like Double Robotics that have been around for a few years now, and while they're somewhat expensive, they can help workers retain some of the benefits of being physically present in the office, allowing them to shift offices so they can visit or meet with colleagues who are still there.
On track to become more common than ever in 2020, augmented and virtual reality is quite cheap, especially on the virtual reality side with headsets like the Oculus Go ($149 today for a complete unit.
But technology is only part of the remote work equation. The other side is the skills of the employees. So they definitely need to be properly trained to make all of the above work.
Strategy 3: Develop skills remotely. The reality is that working remotely is very different. There is a lack of hallway chatter, camaraderie, and engaging conversations/collaborations with other colleagues.
Over the years, a sense of the core skills that remote workers need, especially in the digital space, has emerged. Here are some of the most well-known:
- Work Out Loud – In this process, popularized by the book of the same name, employees narrate their work in digital tools. This helps us support each other, stay connected, align, and collaborate with an agile process. This is called one of the most vital skills of modern digital collaboration and is especially important for remote workers, so that colleagues stay connected and engaged, bringing back some of the positive aspects of a physical workplace through regular streams of conversational activity.
- Work Coordination – Many collaboration tools are quite generic and not tailored to help ensure a coordinated business process across a large distributed team. The process of coordinating work uses a central hub, currently relying on specialized software tools, to efficiently ensure marketing, sales, and operations. But it is the process of working in such a decentralized, yet highly coordinated manner that is a new way of working. Employees will develop the ability to identify opportunities to structure work in this way and will know how to create much more coordinated and digitally supported processes using the tools and technologies available.
- Using the right way to collaborate. Now that we have literally dozens of types of collaboration tools, employees in this situation often choose the best option possible. Email is often the worst tool for collaboration, for example, but often the first tool to reach for. Or an employee might use Slack for a situation that is better suited to a mass collaboration platform like an enterprise social network or a task coordination tool.
Strategy4: Cultivate a remote work culture. remote work culture and mindset.
Beyond the individual, it helps prepare the broader organization to create an environment that is more effective for remote work. Especially since digital tools are so central to facilitating remote work, it is important to understand how much they are shifting the art of the possible, not just in individual digital skills and habits, but how these digital tools are changing and improving the culture of the organization itself. Or more precisely, what is digitally possible and how organizations think.
However, when a rapid change occurs, such as the move to remote work in a short period of time due to the coronavirus, the cultural shift needs an acceleration process. Here are some changes in culture and mindset that the more open and participatory nature of digital tools enables, especially in a remote work environment:
- Open participation and inclusion. Digital processes and business operations in the latest generation of digital tools are much more inclusive, more than what is called the “anyone can participate” model. This is crucial for the “embrace” that is lost by employees who are out of the office and are not sure where they belong. However, not everyone is ready to digitally present stakeholders and not just watch, but to actually participate. Open source software and crowdsourcing have become mainstream and have shown that this model not only works but is surprisingly powerful. However, organizations are not always ready for this kind of hierarchy.
- Digital learning and aesthetics. Employees should be given extra time to study and learn the tools and skills of remote work. From a cultural perspective, it should be anticipated that learning will be continuous and frequent. Some organizations also have a remote work support team that works with remote workers, provides assistance upon request, and uses analytical tools to find employees who need help and guidance. Creating and showcasing a supportive environment for achieving speed in remote work should be a top short-term objective and medium-term investment. This includes aesthetics, or the time dedicated to organizing life, ideas, and knowledge around the new operational realities involved in remote work.
- Network Leadership. It is now easier and more effective to lead and engage a leader (any kind of leader, such as executive, expert, process owner, etc.) in digital channels than in any other way. While individual leadership will remain important, it will be eclipsed by what is now possible with modern digital channels. Leaders can exert great influence within an organization, establish culture, and communicate broadly with great effectiveness to drive organizational goals forward. The Company’s Board of Directors noted in a landmark report that the network leader is one of the most important new skills that modern executives must adopt, but it is also the one that is least taught or supported. Teaching this course is essential not only to make remote work successful for remote executives but to create the most sophisticated digital culture that properly enables and supports remote work and the new capabilities it enables.
Summary: How to work digitally due to coronavirus
As we often say, you can't change the technologies people use without also helping them change their skills and habits in the process.
Instead, as the coronavirus may make us – at least temporarily – much more isolated than ever, we may have a significant opportunity to create an exciting new digital remote work environment with more human touch than we’ve had before. We urge you to try innovative new tools, build important skills, shift your culture digitally, and prepare for whatever lies beyond the coronavirus and the current distractions it brings us. Let’s use the new remote work effort to start building a truly better and more effective organization.
