As the coronavirus spreads throughout the world, businesses are being faced with setting up policies and procedures to enable everyone to work from home (WFH). Doing this presents several challenges, some of them brought on by new demands on your IT department and some by demands of a new way of working that you may not have anticipated. A good reference point for the complexities involved is this Twitter thread about what Slack did to move to 100% WFH model. In this podcast, Paul and I draw upon their own decades-long experience as sole business owners. Among our advice:
- Think about printing, email and sharing files and the IT services that will be needed to support that activity. Be careful about SaaS services such as Dropbox; if users aren’t trained property they could expose your corporate data unintentionally.
- Make sure your infosec is up to par. A VPN isn’t just the only thing you need to worry about it. Is your home router secured with an appropriate password? Do you encrypt your network traffic across the Internet? Has your laptop been screened for malware? These and other questions need to be addressed before rolling out any work-from-home solution.
- Does your staff have the right tools? Just because everyone has a laptop doesn’t mean anything, particularly they’re used to having multiple monitors and great audio/video gear. You may have to purchase additional accessories to make your staff productive.
- Make sure your staff has a separate workspace that is isolated from the rest of the house. You want to minimize distractions and unplanned family “visits” during the workday.
- Get a good mic (I use the Blue Snowball, Paul uses a Logitech wireless). You should be able to get something decent for $50-$100.
- Standardize on a video conferencing supplier (we both like Zoom at the moment, although there are privacy issues you might want to consider) and make sure all your gear provides solid audio quality when you use it.
- Make sure your home bandwidth is sufficient. Pay attention to upload speeds, because these can impact your latency and video quality.
- Learn new video conferencing etiquette, review our previous podcast on some of our tips here.
- Set up a shared scheduling tool for everyone to use and standardize on a corporate instant messaging tool, too.
Listen to our 15 min. podcast now:
Due to a lot of my involvement with our local school system, an extensive user of Google web-based products, I have become accustomed to using Google’s calendar, which I can view, change, send meeting invitations to others and accept meeting invitations. Works quite well on my computers and Android phone.
In many ways, it makes little difference which shared calendar one uses, whether Google’s, Apple’s or Microsoft’s, but one must keep in mind that the three are in a turf war for world dominance, and knitting them together to coordinate all calendar info is extremely difficult, as one of my clients found out between his iPhone and his ultrabook. Sooner or later, someone will come along with a global calendar product, and I will not envy them having to play catch-up with changes by the big three and to keep everything running and in sync.