long-term remote work

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10 TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL LONG-TERM REMOTE WORK


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In the so called “new normal,” many businesses are planning to allow employees to work remotely long-term. In some cases, they will implement a hybrid arrangement where workers come into the office for part of the week and work from home on the other days. As such, organizations will need to manage a large portion of workers that will continue to work remotely either some of or all the time.

According to a report by Gartner, global spending on IT associated with remote work will reach $332.9 billion in 2021.1 This surge in IT expenditure can be attributed to the fact that businesses are planning for a shift to long-term remote work.

TechRepublic conducted a poll of its CIO Jury to find out how the members are handling remote work within their companies. The members were questioned whether they would be offering remote work as an option to some of their employees after the pandemic. There was a unanimous response, with all 12 of the jury members responding in the affirmative.2

However, embracing long-term remote work presents its own set of unique challenges. From streamlining IT operations and ensuring business continuity to keeping systems and networks secure and maintaining employee morale, there are several concerns associated with remote work that organizations must address. To help you successfully manage your remote workforce in the long run, we’ve rounded up a list of 10 smart and effective IT tips that you can implement.

Introduction

SUPPORT Remote Processes


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1. Invest in Technology to Support Remote Processes and Employees Given that remote work is here to stay long after the pandemic is over, it’s time for employers to invest in technologies that support engagement, performance evaluation and management of their remote workforce. Businesses must adopt technologies that can help them deal with unique remote work challenges.

Many large enterprises saw great value in conducting 100% virtual recruitment, hiring and onboarding of new employees while working remotely. Technology enabled companies to make smarter hiring decisions by breaking the barriers of in-person interviews and the limitation of hiring only local talent.

In addition, remote work also exposed a few new issues for HR teams to navigate. Concerns like employee engagement, employee productivity, legal considerations and so on kept HR teams on their toes, looking for ways to reshape their routine operations. HR departments must now focus on how they can remotely define the logistics of how they manage and enforce their policies, how they engage and evaluate their workforces and how they recruit. They must embrace new technologies that can help them conduct seamless operations in this new work environment.

While the option to work remotely has been, in many ways, a boon for employees, there have been instances where remote workers have struggled with productivity, simply due to a lack of appropriate technological assistance from their employer. As such, it is imperative for employers to provide all the tools and solutions necessary for their remote workforce to succeed and be productive every day.

The basic requirements for remote workers include having proper office furniture and equipment. For longer-term remote work, some employees will want to have standup desks, for example. They may also need larger computer monitors for their home offices. A proper setup also includes collaboration tools, such as Zoom, Teams, Slack, etc., which most businesses have already adopted in a big way during the course of 2020.

Ensure All Remote Employees Have the Tools They Need to Succeed and Be Productive

Deploy HR/Hiring Tech Tools for Ongoing Virtual HR/Hiring Processes


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2. Use a Unified Remote Monitoring and Management Solution

An effective way to facilitate seamless IT operations for your company while your employees continue to work from home in the long run is using an endpoint management solution to remotely monitor, manage and troubleshoot endpoints without disrupting the end user. This “remote support software” should provide your IT team with remote management capabilities such as:

View critical information related to an endpoint, such as processes, users, patch status, CPU and memory usage, and more Transfer files Access Windows registry to view and edit

Enabling authorized IT admins to securely access end-user devices at the click of a button, without having to know user or admin credentials. The ability to establish shared (i.e., with the end user) or private sessions with full-console access.

You need a stealth-mode, remote control tool that features an array of gadgets to help maximize service quality and IT efficiency while also allowing end users to keep working. This tool should allow you to:

This tool enables your IT team to remotely manage end-user computers regardless of their location and proactively resolve issues. It allows you to proactively manage end-user devices for issue resolution, compliance and reporting. The tool should also provide you with other features such as:

The Ability to Access Endpoints “Behind the Scenes”

Remote Control — Console Access

The pandemic accelerated the migration to the cloud that has been underway for several years. Many businesses are now “cloud first” when it comes to IT infrastructure and applications. This has become vital to running a business that is flexible and adaptable to new realities like hybrid work models.

Look for endpoint management solutions that support management of virtual environments (e.g. VMware and Hyper-V) and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS and Azure), such as having the ability to discover and display on-premises and cloud VMs on the network topology map. A next-gen endpoint management solution that provides the IT team with this visibility into cloud infrastructure is the key to IT management success in a cloud-first world.

Support Management of Virtualization and Cloud Services


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3. Automate Routine IT Management Tasks

Managing the new generation of endpoints and devices, such as virtual machines, cloud and IoT, is a challenging task, especially when you have lots of manual IT processes. The explosion in the number and types of devices is making it nearly impossible to keep up without automation. Remote work has further exacerbated the burden on IT teams.

You need an endpoint management solution that allows you to automate routine IT tasks, such as routine server maintenance and patch management, by executing agent scripts on each endpoint. Policy-based automation will not only reduce the burden on your IT team but also improve system uptime.

Look for an endpoint management solution that enables you to meet your diverse automation needs by providing access to a comprehensive repository of pre-built, ready-to-deploy automation scripts, monitor sets and other resources.

One major aspect of IT automation that all businesses must leverage is auto-remediation of IT incidents. Running agent procedures for auto-remediating IT incidents helps in resolving issues quickly, minimizing downtime and freeing up time for your IT staff to focus on more revenue-generating projects.

Include Auto-remediation of IT Incidents to Offload IT Staff


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4. Have a Reliable Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

5. Back up Your Saas Data

6. Continue to Focus on Cybersecurity

When planning for long-term remote work, the last thing you should be worrying about is the efficacy of your backup solution. You need to deploy a backup solution that provides reliable, enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). Features like instant recovery, ransomware detection and automated disaster recovery testing help minimize downtime and ensure business continuity in the face of adversity.

An appliance-based DRaaS solution can be integrated into your endpoint management tool, allowing you to manage backups from the same console. Meet the backup demands of the business while using a workflow that is familiar and leverages your existing investment. This will ensure your business remains secure from any unexpected incidents of data loss or downtime.

Data loss is one of the major concerns of businesses planning to embrace long-term remote work. Many organizations continue to use a number of different Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite and Salesforce, to enable a more mobile and distributed workforce. With this shift to SaaS applications comes the need to have a backup solution that will protect your online data against potential cyberattacks.

You need a backup solution that offers enterprise-class capabilities to back up and restore online SaaS app data that is exposed to the threats of ransomware and malware attacks, human error, malicious behavior and sync errors. With the right backup solution, you can quickly find and restore lost data while reducing recovery time, boosting user productivity and minimizing business interruptions.

Creating a high-security IT environment is critical for running a successful and sustainable business amid the sophisticated cyberthreats of today. You need a comprehensive endpoint management solution that provides cyber protection and enables your IT team to manage your core IT security functions from a single console.

Look for an endpoint management solution that offers software patch management (including OS and third-party patching) and AV/AM deployment and management as well as backup and disaster recovery management. The solution should also offer provisions for patching off-network devices even over low-bandwidth networks — a feature that is indispensable for securing the endpoint devices of your remote workers.


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7. Monitor and Manage VPNs

8. Provide End-User Self-Service for IT Issues

Another important aspect of successful long-term remote work is making it easy for your remote employees to access their office computers and perform various self-service tasks. With the right endpoint management solution in place, you can create scripts to set up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that provide secure access to your office environment for remote workers. Not only that, it makes VPN access easy for end users.

Once VPN clients have been installed on all of your remote endpoints, you can monitor those clients in your endpoint management tool to make sure they are up and running. Auto-remediate the issue by redeploying the VPN client via policy-guided scripts if the client goes down.

Your Unified Endpoint Management solution can provide end user self service capabilities that allow them to resolve some of their own IT issues. For example, you can set up scripts (agent procedures) that they can run to resolve certain common problems. User roles and scopes should be used to restrict the functions that most end users can access.

9. Manage Burnout

Burnout is a serious issue, especially for employees that are not accustomed to working from home. As businesses plan to adopt long-term remote work, it is imperative that they address the issue of employee burnout. Research indicates that creating boundaries between our personal and professional lives is crucial for our mental well-being.

However, remote workers are often unable to separate work from leisure. When this happens, the lines between professional and personal lives blur to such an extent that employees begin to feel like they are working 24x7x365.


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One way to address the issue of employee burnout is to set clear goals and priorities for each of them. Make sure that your employees are aware of the fact that they have a list of tasks that they are expected to perform within a specific timeline and that they have plenty time to unwind as well.

Check in on your employees at regular intervals and encourage them to communicate with you in case they find themselves struggling with overwork or burnout. Create an inclusive remote work culture by lending your ear to all your employees and allowing appropriate and fair accommodations wherever needed.

Focus on empathy and employee well-being by being open to discussions about interests, workloads, aspirations, mental health and building closer more meaningful connections with your employees.

General Work-From-Home Burnout

When it comes to dealing with IT staff burnout, you need to address the situation by providing them with tools and solutions that can help offload some of their manual labor and free up time for them to pursue activities of personal interest.

Deploy an IT solution that provides a good user experience (UX) and makes it easier for your technicians to navigate through and use on a daily basis. An efficient endpoint management solution can help streamline IT management, make it super easy for technicians to access relevant information at their fingertips, save time spent on switching between applications and basically make life a lot easier for your IT team.

IT Staff Burnout


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10. Keep Things Fun for Remote Teams

Employee engagement is the key to ensuring that your remote workforce does not lose vision of who you are as an organization and what motivated them to be a part of it in the first place. Although it does have its set of perks, remote work can often end up being boring and mundane and cause your employees to lose the motivation to operate at peak productivity.

As such, many organizations have developed employee engagement programs to help their employees stay in tune with their colleagues and enjoy what they do. You can organize fun activities, such as virtual team happy hours, virtual breakfasts, social gatherings and the like, to help your remote workforce unwind and stay motivated by breaking the monotony of an “all work and no play” routine.

In order to adopt a remote-friendly work culture in the long term, you need to implement the aforementioned strategies and prepare your IT environment for the challenges it presents. To know more about how Kaseya VSA can help make long-term remote work a success for your business, request a demo now.

©2021 Kaseya Limited. All rights reserved. Kaseya and the Kaseya logo are among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by or licensed to Kaseya Limited. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

Kaseya® is the leading provider of complete IT infrastructure management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT organizations. Through its open platform and customer-centric approach, Kaseya delivers best in breed technologies that allow organizations to efficiently manage, secure, automate and backup IT. Kaseya IT Complete is the most comprehensive, integrated IT management platform comprised of industry leading solutions from Kaseya, Unitrends, Rapidfire Tools, Spanning Cloud Apps, IT Glue and ID Agent. The platform empowers businesses to: command all of IT centrally; easily manage remote and distributed environments; simplify backup and disaster recovery; safeguard against cybersecurity attacks; effectively manage compliance and network assets; streamline IT documentation; and automate across IT management functions. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Kaseya is privately held with a presence in over 20 countries. To learn more, visit www.kaseya.com.

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Sources1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/cio-jury-100-of-employers-will-continue-to-offer-remote-work-after-the-pandemic/

2. Ibid

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