Your Tech Checklist for Setting up a Remote Workforce

Audit your tech stack: Evaluate the technology you have for your own team and the technology that you offer to your clients. What do you have that would be helpful to work-from-home teams and enable their success? What might be missing that you’ll need to add to support this new way of working?

Consider capacity planning: Audit the technology that different departments need. What is in place, and what does the company need to ensure people can work from home? General connectivity, communication sets and technology sets are all pieces of this puzzle. Look at your VPN capacity, as well as your licensing for videoconferencing and other technologies that are essential to keeping the business up and running. In addition, evaluate backups for those technologies should you need them. You need the right software capacity and bandwidth to make working from home possible.

Test if you have time: We realize that for some the order to work from home came so quickly that testing was not possible. However, for those that have not yet had an order to reduce the number of people in the office or to close the office, take this time to do some work-from-home tests. See what’s possible so when the time comes you can make sure teams can easily work from home.

Communication with customers is key: The following aspects of our communication plan have been essential in our success while working from home.

Communication with clients is key: Provide frequent updates to clients and customers over a variety of media that are easy for them to access and receive.

Security: Maintain your vigilance. Understand where the edge of your network is. With people working from home, your network is expanding beyond your office walls and your corporate WAN, and you need to adjust accordingly. Extend your security posture to the current work-from-home structure to ensure you’re not relying on VPN alone to get virus definition updates, SCCM commands and other security updates.

Support: Make sure you have a process set up for both internal and external support needs. What kind of support will your team need, what do your clients need, and how can you provide that support remotely? These are all questions you should be asking to be sure that you can continue to provide the same level of support from remote locations that you do from your office.