Working from home for Novel coronavirus

Have you considered how #coronavirus might impact you, your #business or your customers. Are you in a position to have staff work from home? Have you thought how to plan for it. Heres a few quick thoughts...

Get informed. Look at your IT Systems establish the remote working options you have in place, which are staff using and how they are using them. Use Microsoft Forms in Office 365 (https://forms.office.com/) as a quick way to query staff, get a summary of the position.

Make sure staff are equipped suitably to work from home. If that means laptops. Pick a brand you know is reliable and can be serviced with an onsite warranty. Brands like Lenovo ThinkPad & ThinkBook are my go to for reliability.

Communication is critical:

Do staff need to connect into the office? Is your Infrastructure secure and capable of handling the resource required? Do Staff have tools allowing them to maintain their usual communication channels?

• VPN services can usually be enabled quite easily but its important to make sure the device and internet connection is capable of handling the number of remote connections.

• If staff work a great deal from telephones within the office, consider looking a Softphone option to replace desk phones. Great options are available from companies such as Counterpath (https://www.counterpath.com/).

• Communication is critical: When staff work remotely its important to keep in touch with them frequently, make it as easy as possible to keep in touch. Telephones are great but an instant messaging medium such as Microsoft Teams is a very efficient (https://products.office.com/en-ca/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software).

This post isn't aimed to be alarmist, just promote consideration of being prepared. If you don't directly manage your IT, speak to your IT Department or your IT Service provider for advice on possible contingency plans for remote work.