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How do you maintain business as usual if your workforce is working remotely? Keeping your staff flexible, productive, and ready to work from anywhere is now more important than ever. Here are three technology solutions that will keep your organisation - and employees - working smoothly from home.
Technology has made how we work more flexible, more adaptable and, importantly, more mobile. According to the ABS, as at August 2019, 30 per cent of employees were already regularly working from home—and now that number has rapidly increased as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to reset how and where we work.
While your workforce adjusts to their ‘new normal’, ensuring they can continue to work productively lies with a few decision makers, who need to consider:
- How efficiently are you meeting your client’s needs while your workforce operates from their home offices instead of yours?
- How are staff managing critical administrative tasks and are they processing documentation securely?
- Without access to their business landlines, how are staff communicating with clients?
- How easily are your employees managing the switch to working from home, and do they have access to the resources they need to continue prolonged working from home requirements?
- How quickly could you and your employees restore services and continue working if the office, shop or workplace had to close suddenly following a fire, flood or other catastrophe?
Working remotely might seem easy in principle. After all, doesn't everyone already have a smartphone? Possibly tablet and laptop as well? But this shift to remote work might not be as straightforward as you think.
Never fear: every remote working problem has a solution.
Problem: Answering the business landline
Solution: Liberate
When your employees can’t be in the office, you don’t want to have to update all your business phone numbers – and your employees probably don’t want their personal mobile numbers handed out to customers. Telstra Liberate is designed to give your employees the flexibility to make and receive calls using their work phone number on their Telstra Liberate mobile, segregating personal and work calls from one device. It uses intelligence within the Telstra network to connect a mobile as if it were an extension of a Private Branch Exchange (PBX), so that it works like a desk phone. This doesn’t rely on the employee needing to open an app to make the phone call – all calls made and received are ‘normal’ mobile phone calls, so your employees do not need to modify their behaviour.
Problem: Managing paperwork without a printer
Solution: DocuSign & GoCanvas
With the rise of paperless payment and post, not every employee will have a printer in their own home. So how can organisations maintain their administrative processes and ensure critical documents like leases, renewals, applications and agreements are signed and processed securely?
DocuSign makes it easy to securely send, sign and track important documents. Automated workflows give you complete visibility of your document throughout the signing process. It even sends out automatic signing reminders at intervals you set. Each document is encrypted with a unique 16-digit ID number and can only be viewed by authorised recipients, making your administrative processes easy and secure. When you just need to replace or create a form or checklist, GoCanvas is an application that can help create digital forms on the fly. This application makes it easier to continue important compliance processes like audits and assessments without the need to print and complete a physical form. The workflow management feature enables you to notify workers of jobs and collaborate on forms with multiple users, while the PDF Designer makes it easy to create customer branded forms for employees and customers.
Problem: Accessing work-critical software and files
Solution: Move to the cloud
Locally installed software and locally stored files aren’t much help when someone needs to complete a task outside the office or via a computer they don’t typically use for work. If you plan even your in-office workflows around online access—using cloud-based services and storage - there won’t be any panic or confusion about which software to install or which documents to copy across if someone needs to work remotely at short notice. Ensure your teams are also given clear protocols to follow regarding where to store and access their files. If even one staff member always saves their files to a local folder instead of the cloud, that could throw a spanner in the works if they realise they need something important when suddenly required to work away from their desk for the first time.
