Computerware Blog
Travel has become a common occurrence for many employees and business professionals. Yet despite the travel, their responsibilities do not get put on halt. Whether it’s for a conference, a professional development workshop, or visiting a potential client or vendor, chances are you’ll bring technology with you. It’s up to you to ensure that it is kept safe from today’s rampant cyberthreats.
Lots of companies are going to remote or hybrid work strategies, making it a challenge to stay engaged with some or all of their employees. Working in the same location, it is much easier for a company to build some type of office culture. In this month’s newsletter, we’ll give you a few tips on how to build a company culture when you lean on remote teams.
Remote work is a more popular option than ever, considering how businesses have needed to adapt, but that isn’t to say that this option hasn’t experienced some challenges. One major drawback has been the impact that the situation at hand has had on the cumulative mental health of your team. There is some cognitive dissonance associated with working together while separating—largely because the casual conversations that generally come with working together have been lost.
Shadow IT, despite its melodramatic name, is nothing to be trifled with. Shadow IT is the term given to rogue technology and software being installed in your business without being reviewed or approved by IT. It has always given in-house operations difficulties, and remote work has made it an even bigger problem than before.
Each day, the news surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic gets closer and closer to home, and with new restrictions being levied each day, businesses are some of the hardest hit organizations. Today, we will discuss how file sync and sharing platforms can help your business immensely as this situation plays out.
With mobile devices being as popular as they are, so ingrained into modern culture, the fact of the matter is that your employees are going to have them in the workplace. They may even want to use them in a work capacity. This can provide a few benefits to a business, as long as it is managed properly. A carefully-crafted mobile device policy can help accomplish this.
As technology has advanced, we’ve reached the point where work can easily be accomplished outside of the office environment. In fact, just over half of all employees around the world work from home at least one day each week. This only makes sense, as there are a few very appealing benefits to remote work… including for the employer.
By taking advantage of a video conferencing solution like Skype, remote workers, their employers, and other co-workers can have some semblance of face time. Seeing a person's facial expressions and body language communicates a lot more than just audio and instant messaging. By adding a visual element to team communication, you can see how someone really feels about a project, and it will be easier to avoid the miscommunication of reading false emotions and opinions into e-mails.
Adding a webcam to the remote working experience is not a radical suggestion, although, to make webcams work best for remote workers, it may be in your best interest to use webcams in the radical way of always having them on. Keeping your Skype app open throughout the entire workday will take up extra computer resources, but it may be the missing link to making telecommuting work.
One way that an always-on webcam can help is to give employers a better sense that their employees are standing by. In order for the remote workplace to be successful, the employer has to have a high level of trust that their employees are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Earlier this year, the reputation of telecommuting took a hit as Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer discovered that several of her employees were abusing the privilege of working remotely by not being honest about their use of company time. If Mayer would have had the ability to check on every member of her remote team by glancing at Skype, then perhaps her team would be more motivated to be honest.
A webcam monitoring a remote session would also encourage employees to clean up and dress appropriately before logging on to their computer. Dressing up to do office work from home has been proven to be motivating, increase productivity, and it's a best practice, just in case the remote employee receives a message from work that requires an urgent trip to the office. Employees may be bummed out about losing the ability to work in their pajamas, but keep in mind that it's easy to angle the webcam so that only the waste up is viewable.
Working remotely will be unable to completely capture every communication intricacy that makes face-to-face interaction in the office valuable, but taking full advantage of Skype may be the next best thing. For assistance with setting up your network so that your employees can enjoy working from home, along with saving the expense of commuting and travel time, call Computerware at (703) 821-8200.
With our Desktop Virtualization solution, you can have employees remotely access your company's network from anywhere, and we can streamline videoconferencing for the entire office with our affordable VoIP solution. Call Computerware and talk to us about your company's specific communication needs so that we can build you the best telecommuting package for your remote team!