What is meant by Business and Working Remotely?

Within the IT industry and especially for small businesses, we see the number of people working remotely or from home increase.

What we mean by working remotely can mean a few different things, we define it as a homeworker (whether full time from home or another office, or just working remotely one day a week). Remote working is a style of working that allows professionals to work away from their office, usually in a café or from home.  This flexibility allows the worker to experience a higher sense of freedom in their job, flexible working potentially and have a better work/live balance. Especially in the case of hires these days being millennials, wanting to work on any device they want to, and work anywhere they want to and also at any time they want to.. Small businesses have also noticed an in productivity from employees who can have a degree of flexibility in the way that they work.

Below we go into some detail on the areas we consult in and provide guidance on when a business wants to look at flexible, remote working, while keeping in mind security, accountability and the data of the business.

Video Conference Tools

Despite working remotely, from time to time your employee will need to hop on to a conference call. This could be with either yourself, or with other employees in your firm. There is an abundance of software options when it comes to video/voice calling. Some of the more popular choices include Zoom, Slack & Skype (transitioning now into Microsoft Teams)

Remote Screen Sharing

This is a critical piece of infrastructure or service. You will need to support your employees working remotely, and from time to time provide IT Support. TeamViewer (others include Slack (in its professional edition), Microsoft Teams) allows your employees to a virtual room or directly for these types of scenarios.. Its convenient, easy and enables your employees to remain productive.

Project Management

If your employee who is working remotely is part of a team, to make sure everyone is on the same page, project management is key. There are plenty of resources online that allow for all of your employees to update the rest of the team as to where they are up to and what’s left to do. This can be especially useful if you have multiple employees working from separate remote locations. Some of the more recommended project management solutions include Trello, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner.

Files & Folders

Your employees need access to the company files, folders and applications. For example ourselves, all of our data and applications are cloud based. From storing simple files through OneDrive, synchronising to SharePoint (and subsequently securely to other staff computers where access and authorisation is approved, and our entire suite of apps lends itself to a user working from anywhere at any time.

Passwords

Ensure you users keep any passwords or credentials safe and secure, check out our blog post on this here.

In Summary

Working remotely can be simple enough for many businesses, and traditionally its for users based in the office, and then have additional staff working from home, or the odd staff member once a week working away, for other businesses it can be a headache, providing secure computers to work from, then securing the traffic to and from the business whilst ensuring that the traffic is not being “sniffed” or compromised in any way. That’s what we are here for, to help and advise and we are always ready to provide some help where its necessary, even if its just to make sure that its all as secure as it is supposed to be.