With COVID-19 still affecting our daily lives, many businesses are having to work from home and probably will be doing so for many more months to come. With this not-so-temporary change in workplace conditions comes many challenges, particularly when it comes to maintaining productivity.
Luckily, there are ways to establish strong workplace practices and take advantage of collaboration tools that can help your business thrive in the long term.
As a first step, you may want to meet with a professional IT consultant to see how their services can benefit your remote business. Here are some of the suggestions they may give you, along with some additional tips:
Integrate a Team Management Platform
When it comes to maintaining a successful remote team, it’s crucial to keep employees in frequent communication with each other and their supervisors. Tools such as Microsoft Teams or other platforms can facilitate greater collaboration, leading to increased productivity.
Many team management programs and software allow you to send files, folders, videos, as well as projects using cloud-based servers, making it easy to share documents across departments and teams. You can also share screens, streamline conference calling, and integrate team chats to make collaboration easier.
A screen recording tool and video editor:
The most successful entrepreneurs record some of the monotonous tasks they do every day. They later provide this video to new employees or VAs they outsource. As they can just watch the video and figure out how to execute a task. There’s no need to waste time on a one on one session.
So, get yourself a good screen recording tool with built-in video editing options. As you can record the video and edit it with the same tool.
You can accompany the video with a checklist, to simplify the task further.
Set Up a VPN
One of the ways productivity can greatly decrease is when security issues arise. Unfortunately, proper security is often overlooked on remote networks, which can leave your company data and systems vulnerable to attacks. When your systems are down, productivity inevitably suffers.
One way to ensure that your systems are secure and therefore remain productive is by setting up a VPN, or virtual private network. A VPN works as a secure channel from any authorized remote device to onsite servers by encrypting document contents, allowing your employees to easily access data without exposing it to hackers.
Get Regular Data Backups
Many of us have learned the hard way that it’s essential to save your work manually, as a frozen computer or reboot can often result in lost work. But when it comes to securing thousands of files worth of data (as many companies have), manually saving any changes made to them just isn’t always feasible.
With automatic data backups, you can ensure that every one of your critical data files is copied and backed up through cloud-based servers on a regular basis. That means you won’t have to be concerned about manually creating backups in case of major data loss or cyber crime event. What’s more, productivity can remain high even in unexpected events, because you’ll always have an accessible copy of each data file you need.
Remote working is now the new normal, and although keeping up productivity can be challenging, there are many tools that can facilitate a successful remote work environment. As you strive to implement these strategies, you can achieve sustainable levels of productivity that will keep your business thriving for generations to come.