Winters in Kansas City. We might get a lot of snow, but we are just as likely to get a layer of ice that turns our roads and highways into skating rinks. At such times, many employees’ and business owners’ minds turn to the appeal of telecommuting, whether or not they give it much thought during the rest of the year. In honor of another Kansas City winter, let’s go ahead and think about telecommuting in a little more depth. Telecommuting requires remote access to your company’s technology resources. (See Introduction to Small Business Networking for more information) And while security and cost concerns, as well as work policy issues, have kept some businesses from making the leap to remote access, there are many business benefits. With some people setting up their office at home using furniture from somewhere like office monster to help them set getting into a working mindset. Using managed IT services, like Denver IT Support, means you can make use of remote access in your business by allowing an IT professional to manage your IT department from wherever they may be located. This means that the network can be maintained so it’s up and running and secure and it also allows them to act quickly in emergencies to do data recoveries and backups.
Let’s start with a look at some of these benefits to your business:
Increased productivity
Maybe it’s employees who travel, those who have to stay home with a sick child, or mildly ill employees working from home to avoid spreading colds and flu, remote access makes it possible for people who are out of the office for a variety of reasons to continue getting their work done. There’s no denying that ill employees practicing presenteeism in a cramped office can result in a spread of sickness. Although businesses can implement ways to prevent the spread of illness, like employing cleaning companies such as Green facilities to reduce the spread of germs, working remotely is the most assured way of limiting the spread of disease. Studies also show better employee satisfaction among employees with telecommuting options, which in turn leads to less turnover and absenteeism. Studies also show that telecommuters work an average of one hour longer, on average, per day.
Decreased downtime
The snowstorm or icy highways scenario is one we know well in Kansas City, but a variety of other man-made and natural disasters can keep you and employees from getting to the office. Remote access cushions the blow of what would otherwise be downtime.
Familiar tools
Remote access lets your employees work with the same software and files that reside on their office computers, including emails, contacts and key project files.
Human resource flexibility
Add human resources without adding physical office space, parking space and other resources it takes to support workers who are physically headquartered in your offices. Remote access also keeps geographic proximity from limiting the pool of talent you can access.
How do I set up remote access for my employees?
Your remote access solution needs to transmit data over the public internet securely without risk of corruption or hijacking. Ideally, your solution will provide this service to both home users and mobile users. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is one of the most common models for securing remote access. A properly set up VPN should authenticate the user and transmit data securely. This should be no issue if you have invested in the best canadian vpn and set it up properly. Once the VPN is set up and the connection is secure, there are other settings to tweak, but basically you can choose to give employees access to either a virtual desktop or their actual work computer. It’s easier and less expensive to give them access to their own machine. If they share a machine or you need to control what they have access to, you can set up virtual desktops for them to access when they are outside the office. This will require a separate server or a more robust configuration if you are looking at providing access to more than a handful of employees. Don’t forget to evaluate your bandwidth before setting up remote access. Internal connection speeds haven’t been much of a factor in system performance in almost a decade, but the same cannot be said for external access. Your remote workers will be hitting the upload side of your office connection to the internet, and upload speeds are usually not as fast as the download speeds, even significantly less. That said, the good news is that once your remote access system is set up and in place, there is very little that needs to be done to maintain it.
Importance of remote access policy for your business
So how do you equitably make the decision about which employees get the telecommuting option? How do you ensure work is being done, and avoid the perception among in-office colleagues that telecommuters are just sitting at home doing nothing? How do you make sure work related files and data remain secure? The answer is to write and enforce a remote access and telecommuting policy. When deciding which employees get remote access, remember to frame the option as a privilege, not a right. Some employees just don’t have the discipline to work productively outside the office. Next, the privilege can only be extended to employees performing the sort of work that doesn’t require their physical presence in the office. And if workers must access particularly sensitive data, such as medical or student records and other information governed by compliance rules, it is probably best to limit that access only a secure location, usually your office. There are many other ways to monitor productivity besides face time. Work product delivery and other metrics can tell the productivity tale. And workers themselves must make sure they are accessible to colleagues and clients during working hours in order to build trust in the remote access and telecommuting option as a viable one. Your policy must also set out acceptable use of the remote access connection, state that any company equipment used for remote access does remain company property, and set out security procedures and policies relevant to your business.
