As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, businesses are working diligently to transition their employees to remote work to continue operations. Executive leadership within organizations should establish their remote infrastructure quickly to provide a seamless transition for employees and customers. Some best practices to help businesses transition to remote work include:
Setting up communication infrastructure:
Establishing a communication infrastructure should be the first and most important task the management team of an organization should focus on. In remote work, communication is the backbone of all operations; without the right processes and tools for communication, remote work will be very difficult and ineffective for day to day operations for most organizations. There are several requirements needed to set up a communication infrastructure. First, management should decide what medium of communication they should use for text, verbal and video communication.
Most organizations already use company emails, so it’s important for managers to ensure that their IT infrastructure like firewalls, spam filters, etc. is still intact. Forgetting to ensure that the IT infrastructure is still effective will make organizations very susceptible to cyber attacks. Once email communications have been secured, leadership within the organization should explore what methods they’d like to use for meetings. There are several cost-effective technologies like Zoom or Slack that are great for video conferencing and other verbal communications. Ensuring all members within the organization have access to these technologies should be a priority. Once these communication infrastructures have been set up, managers should discuss with teams about guidelines and best practices for their companies when communicating remotely.
Standards, Culture and Processes:
Since the majority of office work shifted online, it will take employees several days to adjust to working remotely on top of their work demands. It’s important to communicate early that it will take extra work to get adjusted to working remotely for the first few days to a week. Once everyone is settled in, managers and executives should set out clear standards for processes and schedules. This enables everyone in the organization to establish a work routine that works for them. The standards provided by management at your organization will help set up your remote work culture.
Your new remote work culture should entail your normal office culture with considerations to working remote. Establishing a culture is often ignored in the early stages of working remotely, but taking some time early on to establish guidelines will create standards. Some important considerations for your remote culture include:
- How does your team communicate with customers? Should customer communications optimize for speed over quality?
- How do members of your team communicate? Are phone calls better than email?
- What are the hours teams are expected to work? How should your organization accommodate for different time zones?
If you’d like to learn more about how to set up your IT infrastructure for remote work, talk to an expert here.
