If Telecommuting Becomes A Reality

The continuity of day-to-day operations is vital to your organization. Situations may arise when telecommuting becomes a temporary means of business stability. If that situation presents itself, employees will require certain necessities to fulfill their work responsibility from a remote location.

Please use these tips in an effort to optimize your temporary remote workforce:

Ensure your employees possess collaboration tools such as: Microsoft Teams/Office 365, Zoom Video Conferencing, Slack, Trello, GoToMeeting, etc.

• Communicate the preferred tool to respective teams
• Screen and document sharing, video and chat can be utilized to promote continuity

The continuity of day-to-day operations is vital to your organization. Situations may arise when telecommuting becomes a temporary means of business stability.

Make sure that all employees have a business or personal laptop or computer that can be utilized to perform their normal daily functions

• Will you need to install, configure, setup or test any software applications required?
• Do all of your employees have high-speed internet service at home?
• If not, can they use their cellphone as a hot spot or obtain a WiFi card through their cellular provider?

Ensure there secure connectivity to any on-premise servers (VPN or RDS)

• Does your organization possess enough licenses for the required software applications (Salesforce, QuickBooks, etc.) that rely on cloud-based services?

Establish how your organization will handle the normal telecommunication flow

• Forward the desk phones to employee cell phones if there is the capability
• Does your Telco software have a softphone client that runs on the employee computer?

Ensure that there is sufficient security in place

• Check group policies
• Ensure that user groups do not have full access
• Minimize the amount of administrator accounts
• Review firewall settings
• Close any open listening ports that are unnecessarily open

Discuss the importance of vigilance to all your employees

• Be aware of an increased amount of phishing attempts
• Advise employees to be vigilant when utilizing company equipment remotely (computers, mobile phones, tablets).

For more information on the necessary implementation and management of a remote workforce, contact Clearview Group's Director of IT Operations, Matt Cooke.