With an office and workforce in France, we’ve been coping with the pandemic for a few weeks now. We just wish they were under better circumstances.
On March 9th, our office had a company-wide planning call. We started planning for remote work through the end of April. On-site visits were still a necessity for some clients, but our goal was to limit our teams’ exposure. As a cloud based company, this shift was easy. We already use:
- Slack – This is our primary communications tool and it covers messaging, voice calling and screen sharing.
- G Suite Hangouts Meet – We use this for large team meetings and client calls.
- GoToMeeting and Join.me – For clients on the platforms, it’s easier for us to adapt.
During the last seven days, we’ve set up over a hundred users to work from home (dozens of companies that were already cloud-based made the adjustment quickly). The tools for this were mostly baked into their G Suite and Office 365 accounts. No additional costs needed.
The most daunting issues have been: legacy servers in offices and quirky computers in homes. Luckily, the disaster recovery plans that we worked on with clients have covered the servers. The home PCs are a different matter. It introduces a lot of variables–old PCs, unprotected systems, poor wireless–that lack easy solutions.
What have we learned so far? Four takeaways for setting up home workers more quickly:
- Have employees without laptops contribute to your DR plan and make sure they have workable systems.
- Ensure that your DR plan includes equipment setup and enough time for IT to gain remote access.
- Have your communication tools in place ahead of time and well-documented (Slack, Teams, Meet).
- Start planning how you’ll migrate meetings for remote workers (you don’t want miss deadlines or critical meetings).
If you need some guidance, send us a message. We’d be happy to help.
