How Employers Can Prepare for a Future with Remote Work?

To be honest remote work isn’t the future – it is already here. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated its acceptance, and it is important that you company is prepared so that it doesn’t get left behind.

The good news is that preparing for remote work isn’t all that difficult – as long as you focus on the right areas.

Find the Right Tools

Part of what makes remote work feasible nowadays is the fact that there are lots of digital tools to help facilitate communication and collaboration. For example there is remote desktop software such as TeamViewer, team messaging and collaboration tools like Slack, cloud storage such as Google Drive, cloud-based virtual desktop solutions like V2 Cloud – and many others.

To determine the right tools for your remote workers, you first need to identify exactly what they’ll need to perform their roles. Then you need to look into what your company will need to manage them.

On that front, you may want to check out Controlio as it is a popular employee monitoring software for freelancers and remote workers. It can monitor a wide range of activities, including web and app usage, file transfers, emails, IM chats, social media, and more.

Not only can you access Controlio’s reports from anywhere due to the fact that it is cloud-based, but you can also have them delivered via email regularly. Additionally its features can help improve the security of remote work as per the best practices from Kaspersky as it can monitor employees more closely and capture keystrokes or screenshots if required.

Come Up with a Clear and Comprehensive Policy

Creating a policy for employees working remotely is the best first step to take. It should be clear and comprehensive, and cover every area linked to remote work, including attendance, communication, productivity, and more.

The policy should be detailed, and go into the specifics of each area. So if you’re planning on monitoring employees with Controlio to track their activity and gauge productivity – your policy should outline exactly how it will be done, what activities will be tracked, and how the data will be used to improve productivity.

In the case of Controlio it will calculate a productivity score of its own, and that can be a good place to start. Explain in your policy how this score will be used to compare productivity trends of individual and groups of employees.

Having a clear and comprehensive policy will establish a structure for your remote work, and help employees know what to expect and what they need to do.

Provide Training

Just as you need to prepare your company and its digital infrastructure for remote work, you need to prepare your employees to. The fact of the matter is that remote work does require a shift in thinking and the processes involved will be different too.

Once you’ve structured how your company intends to handle remote work, be sure to provide your employees with the relevant training. In that way they won’t end up going into it without any idea of what to expect, and can hit the ground running.

Typically some of the areas your training program will need to cover include how employees are expected to communicate, ways they will collaborate with their team members, how projects will be managed, and what to do if they encounter issues. It may be necessary to also conduct training for the specific tools that remote workers will be required to use.

Keep in mind that the training you provide should be dynamic and constantly updated as you introduce new tools or make any changes to your internal processes.

Conclusion

By following these steps you should be prepared to implement remote work and allow your employees to work from home while at the same time avoiding many of the common issues associated with it. That being said some issues may crop up from time to time, and you will need to pay close attention and try to handle them in a timely fashion

Being prepared for remote work in this way will ensure that your company remains competitive and is able to attract top-level talent from all across the country (or even the globe). As you can imagine that in turn could make a world of difference to your bottom line and ensure that your company’s future is secured.

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