Problems employees experience with technology may not get resolved as quickly as they would in the office, and this can make it difficult to work remotely. Simple technology queries an employee might just quickly ask a colleague in the office can go unanswered leading to frustration, wasted time Googling the answer and even errors, writes Daniel Sultana, Regional Director – APAC, Paessler.
There’s no doubt coronavirus has drastically changed the business landscape in 2020, with most businesses encouraging employees to work from home. The lockdown might now be easing off for many in Victoria and other states, but working-from-home is not something that will stop. So, the question is, how can we continue to make the remote-work experience more productive for employees?
- Not equipping your team with the right technology and productivity tools
First and foremost, one of the most important ways to help teams succeed while working remotely is to provide them with the right technology tools to help them stay connected and productive. Equipping teams with these technologies will allow managers and employees to all stay on the same page no matter where they are working from.
Like many other employees in organisations here, the move to home working has meant that system administrators are under increasing pressure, they are working longer hours than before to provide the support required to keep all of the apps employees use stable and working properly.
Homeworkers have now settled into a daily routine of web video meetings with their colleagues and clients and we have all had our fair share of disruption caused by our own or others’ poor internet connections at home.
The issue with many private home networks is that they are limited by things like suboptimal or poorly located routers or bad Wi-Fi. Replacing old equipment, repositioning it and connecting devices directly to the router via an ethernet cable can fix these problems, enabling employees to take part in video calls, download documents and share files easily.
We are now relying so heavily on conducting important business meetings over video conferencing platforms, monitoring the availability of those online services is now more important than ever. Google Meet, Skype, Babl, GoToMeeting and of course how can we forget Zoom that in just six months has become a verb!
As far as video conferencing tools go, the pandemic has now made Zoom ubiquitous and it’s allowing us all to remain connected in our work and personal lives. If you’re a system administrator, you’ve probably had a lot to do with Zoom since March as it is under enormous strain with unprecedented user demand and consequently is often down.
Every system administrator will know that they need to make sure that the Zoom service is up and running or they will cop a lot of flack. Knowing when Zoom is down is crucial, because it means that a company can make a temporary switch to another video platform, or at least inform its users that the service is down, so they don’t waste time trying to access it.
Zoom provides both a system status web page and helpful documentation on the Zoom API. System administrators can get the status of Zoom’s various services, but it is a mammoth task to retrieve and evaluate the status for each service from this API, so the best option is to install sensors that will monitor and provide availability information quickly.
- The availability of tech support
Problems employees experience with technology may not get resolved as quickly as they would in the office, and this can make it difficult to work remotely. Simple technology queries an employee might just quickly ask a colleague in the office can go unanswered leading to frustration, wasted time Googling the answer and even errors.
Like many other employees in organisations here, the move to home working has meant that system administrators are under increasing pressure, they are working longer hours than before to provide the support required to keep all of the apps employees use stable and working properly.
- The stability of the network
Millions of employees are now accessing their organisation’s network from several different locations. As a result, VPN connections and cloud services such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Zoom as I mentioned before, can quickly become strained.
So that organisations can operate as normal, the IT environment and all services must continue to be available and run as effectively as possible. Since some IT support teams are also working from home, they must be able to monitor the availability and performance of their networks remotely, often via mobile devices such as mobile phones, iPads or laptops.
One of the most important ways to help teams succeed while working remotely is to provide them with the right technology tools to help them stay connected and productive. Equipping teams with these technologies will allow managers and employees to all stay on the same page no matter where they are working from.
With the right network monitoring tool, system administrators can mitigate and prevent issues before they become more serious. They can see which devices, applications and web services are running trouble-free. It will provide access to network data from various time periods so they can analyse the functionality of all their components and find any issues.
The productivity silver lining
Every cloud has a silver lining and the improvements that have been forced on organisations to accelerate their digital transformation and move all of their systems to the cloud will help teams to remain more productive and connected after COVID-19 fears lessen and people are able to head back to work.
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