The COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to try remote working to ensure the safety of their employees. But, for most of these companies, shifting to a remote work setup has been a blessing in disguise.
In fact, according to a recent study, almost 85% of companies benefited from a technology-enabled remote working strategy. The focus here should be on “technology-enabled,” as that is what makes remote work feasible and efficient.
If you are running an IT company and provide managed IT services then you can't succeed without the use of the right technologies, remote work could pose a lot of challenges. Some of the areas where companies need to provide IT support to their remote employees are:
- Ensuring that everyone has access to hardware and software required to do their work optimally
- Maintaining and securing these devices and data in a remote environment
- Monitoring and tracking remote working employees’ timings and performance
- Troubleshooting IT-related issues remotely
In this post, you will learn about the six types of technologies you need to provide effective IT support to your remote employees for better productivity.
Ready to get started?
Here you go.
3 Technologies You Need to Provide Effective IT Support to Remote Employees
Remote working can help your company save a lot of money by eliminating the operational costs associated with physical offices. However, you need advanced technology solutions to enable a smooth and productive remote working environment for your employees. You need to provide robust IT support to your engaged employees with advanced remote technology that helps in managing remote employees effectively.
In this section, I’ll discuss six types of technologies that you should consider leveraging to provide IT support to your remote employees.
Curious to learn about these technologies?
Let’s get started.
1. Laptop and Other Necessary Equipment
One of the key IT challenges of working remotely is that not all employees have the same quality laptops and other hardware. Therefore, it is important that you provide your remote employees with the equipment they need to work optimally. This includes a good quality laptop and accessories like headphones.
If your employees handle confidential information, you may also want to provide anti-glare screen guards for their laptops. These allow people to work from anywhere while ensuring that no one can get a sneak peek into their work.
Also, make sure that each employee’s laptop is equipped with the necessary software that they need to do their job effectively. These can include analytics software, repositories, databases, and anything else they need for their day-to-day work.
Overall, equip your employees with the right set of tools to do their jobs instead of relying on them to arrange everything. This is the most basic level of IT support that any company should provide their remote employees with.
Keep updated with the latest computing technology trends to source the best-in-class technology for your business.
2. A Web Conferencing Solution
One important requirement for any team to work well together is to have regular meetings and brainstorming sessions. Remote work may pose a challenge in this regard, but you can easily overcome it by using a good video conferencing solution.
There are many web conferencing software available in the market, both paid and free. Many of these, like Zoom, offer a freemium plan where you can keep using it for free, but with limited features. You can read a detail review and comparison in this post by Attrock - the best digital marketing agency.
Choose between a free or a paid solution, depending on your company size and needs. However, make sure that your remote employees have a way to conduct video one-to-one remote meetings, as and when required.
Why is this important?
It’s important because it helps your team members to stay in touch and discuss matters in real-time, just like they would have if they were working from the office. Having no way to connect with everyone at the same time may cause disruptions in your work processes.
3. Team Communication and Collaboration Platforms
Adding to the previous point, you will also need a good internal communication platform to ensure effective team collaboration. A good team collaboration platform such as Microsoft Azure is not just important for remote workers but also for those working from the office.
After all, not all of your employees can keep running to their coworkers’ desks for every small thing. Having an internal communication platform is a must-have for all companies, especially those that have remote employees.
But, which platforms should you invest in?
For day-to-day communication and project management, Slack or similar tools can help. Slack is a simple yet powerful tool that your employees can use to communicate with each other, one-to-one and in groups.
You can also integrate it with project management tools to assign and keep track of tasks. You can even create different channels for different projects and departments.
Two good project management and collaboration tools are Trello and Airtable. A workflow automation tool like Zapier can help you optimize your project workflows.
For internal team communications and online meetings, you can use Skype for Business or other messaging tools available online.
You can also leverage the VoIP phone system for the internal communication, This system provides smooth communication across the different departments.
Conclusion
Adopt a technology-backed remote working strategy to improve the productivity of your remote employees and grow your business.
Leverage the tools and technologies mentioned above to build a proactive remote working environment. However, you should decide exactly which tools best suit your business requirements and budget.
You can always opt for free trials of the tools you choose to use, before switching to their paid versions. Do your research and invest in the best set of tools to provide the required IT support to your remote employees. All the best!
