COVID-19 could permanently change working patterns as companies compelled to adopt remote working by the pandemic discover that their employees do not wish to return to the office after the closures are lifted.
Remote work or working from home can also aid stop the growth of this infectious disease, aiding companies to avoid missed productivity and safeguarding public health. For instance, the outbreak of COVID-19 induced many employers to transfer to a remote work model for all employees, probably in an effort to restrict the spread of the coronavirus.
The sudden rise in working from home is creating problems as well as opportunities: on the one hand, startups like Zoom and Slack and reputed giants including Microsoft and Google are presenting their tools for free, in the anticipation that people who begin employing them in a crisis may continue after normalcy returns.
On the other hand, a few systems are already creaking at the edges. Corporate networks, not used to getting most of their connections reaching over virtual private networks (VPNs), are witnessing strange quirks, while pressure is on internet service providers to raise bandwidth caps so that remote workers do not get separated from their employers midway through the month.
Fortify Digital Capabilities
Suggestions for “social distancing” have prompted organizations to extend their operations in the virtual, digital sphere. For most, this implies requesting their workforce to work from home. If you are readying for greater remote work, make sure that the organization has the technical capacity to back it. Bandwidth, authentication and access control mechanisms, VPN infrastructure ( VPN 2020 )
) and security tools all must have the ability to uphold peak traffic demands. Deliver VPN/remote access to third parties and contractors who are upholding critical services, and buy additional licenses for collaboration tools.
The sudden rise in online activity can have great implications of network robustness, system stability, and data security, particularly in regions of the world where telecom and systems infrastructure are not as nicely developed. Companies will require to act fast to ensure they possess the systems, and support staff, in position to assure smooth operation as the workforce and workplace develops.
If you’re planning to spread out your workforce remotely, ensure you have the protections set up to safeguard your data and networks. A specific concern is that cyber danger multiplies when the workforce is distributed suddenly. Although numerous companies may be established for remote work, far lesser have the correct cybersecurity protocols in place. Since the start of the crisis, phishing scams and other attacks have increased, targeting employees working from home and from any open network.
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How To Handle Now
With COVID-19, the time to act is now. Postponed decisions and late actions have instant and longer-term business continuity impacts. To minimize business disturbance and secure employees, organizations must adopt steps now – beginning within the following 24 hours – to begin creating an Elastic Digital Workplace. Accenture’s Elastic Digital Workplace solution allows a highly expandable workplace environment that permits you to rapidly scale and actively adapt to altering business needs depending on global and local conditions.
Within 24 hours – Analyze your present state:
Assess your present technology capacities and your potential to scale out internally, including your current communications scheme and support structure.
Within 72 hours – Recognize how you can exploit available technologies more effectively
Within 5 days – Build a leadership and culture knowledge and change plan:
Develop a change management plan, comprising leadership communications that motivate employees to take up key technologies that will support connections to their team members and leaders in this latest environment, internal meetings and also big-scale external events.
Within 2 weeks – Quickly modernize and scale your collaboration capacities along with your workforce engagement plans:
Identify how to extend your workplace to the periphery, including an emphasis on home networking, wider networking, security, upgrading other tools and capacities and aiding your people to understand and adopt new ways of tasking with each other.
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What’s On The Horizon
Whereas COVID-19 comprises the catalyst for instant implementation of an Elastic Digital Workplace, we expect that the crisis will inherently transform how we work and engage. Leaders should build an extensive Elastic Digital Workplace implementation plan, highlighting 6 main dimensions.
Big technology firms were among the first to make the transformation to remote working for their entire staff, based on pre-existing infrastructures like office chat groups, remote access to crucial tools, and the fact that considerable knowledge work can be conducted remotely.
In Seattle, the hub of numerous America’s early COVID-19 cases, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Google notified workers to stop coming into the office in late February. In early March, Twitter “strongly recommended” its entire employees worldwide to do the same, and thereafter made it compulsory.
Leadership in firms needs to perform quick action to organize their activity, using the following steps.
Empower Remote Workplaces To Quickly Adapt At Scale
As many staff as probable should be working remotely with all the essential equipment and tools they require to achieve so efficiently. To ensure your business can keep on and adjust to the altering crisis, you must rapidly and widely implement systems that substitute the ways in which staff interact and collaborate.
Set up or expand the utilization of decentralized communication and collaboration platforms run by staff, for staff. At BearingPoint, this has engaged shifting all relevant teams and projects to our Microsoft Teams digital environment – on the first day, almost 12,000 virtual meetings were conducted without issue.
B2B businesses should request struggling clients to see and utilize their digital platforms on a project-relevant basis. We have discovered that this promotes communication and can provide clients with the confidence and knowledge needed to install their individual digital environments.
While networks will require to be structured by a devoted team, continuing use needs vital decentralization – entire staff must be relied on to self-organize their remote workspaces so they can be attuned fast if needed.
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Support At Scale
When not ready, working remotely can impair communication, hindering business continuity and daily innovation. When management is overpowered by crisis management, the reply is peer-to-peer (P2P) support at scale, which can be quickly introduced through decentralized digital workspaces. If support systems are still not in place, they should become an urgent priority.
Within your business’ digital environment, install self-organized channels where entire staff can rapidly post requests for aid and offer help. With BearingPoint’s digital environment, nearly 5,000 employees can now gain from this approach.
Organizations are transforming, also. After many recognized companies that have taken the remote working ways – like Zapier, Doist, DuckDuckGo, Buffer, InVision, and numerous others – began to openly communicate the advantages of remote work, like a much greater talent pool and greater employee involvement and productivity among others, many different companies have decided to follow their example.
In reality, a solution like IntelliChief lets you process invoices instantly without any manual intervention once they have been entered into your system. And using IntelliChief Capture Enterprise, you can also automate the capture phase to bring invoices from a monitored email inbox immediately into IntelliChief for comparison. Only matches that don’t meet your tolerances are managed manually. The ultimate result. Lesser business breaks and a clear competitive gain over your rivals.
Intranet solutions have emerged as a major enabler in the next-generation workplace. Unlike traditional intranets that involve one-way interaction between management and employees, modern intranets are where work occurs.
The scale of intranet deployment rests on the size of your organization. You might have already deployed many of the features of an intranet:
- Instant messages in place of emails
- Cloud-related content sharing and editing
- Digital employee centre rather than paper documents
Instead of including multiple apps and platforms in your organization, you simply need to build a digital hub to ease processes and consolidate information. That’s the key value of an intranet – to join business strategy and the manner digital tools are being used.
An intranet grows transparency, productivity, and information accessibility. Possessing a sole source of truth is critical to check up on vital issues in true-time and mobilize information on the run. Most essentially, your team can associate without boundaries.
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Conclusion
Fast Company forecasts that remote work software, such as mobile work tools and virtual reality conferencing, will become the favoured form of communication – even on face-to-face meetings. AI will also probably play a key role in handling remote staff.
These improvements may put companies more at ease. The transition to handling a remote workforce might be challenging, but with the correct tech and hardworking employees, the process can be seamless.
