The Workspace Team
What you need to equip your employees with the right hardware, software, security & collaboration tools to ensure you maintain business productivity and a seamless transition for employees.
In light of the current public health situation, the vast majority of our customers are assessing their business continuity plans, and ensuring they have the infrastructure, hardware & tools to support their users working from home, for what could be a very uncertain timeframe.
Media outlets surmise that travel, hospitality, and the retail industries will feel the impact the most – however, these are just the instant implications due to the controls that have already been put into place. Even without a potentially incoming government mandate, we are seeing the organisations we work with already take the strategic decision to have people to work from home where possible.
With this in mind, how do you support you employees in a way that ensures they are safe, secure, motivated & productive?
On Hardware
Do you have a full account of devices required, and are they readily available? We are seeing a huge run on remaining stock in the UK IT channel, so it is vital that your employees’ device availability is assessed by survey or other method, and appropriate action taken quickly – be it via procuring a stock of devices, checking your holding internally or in bonded storage, ensuring adequate availability of employees’ personal devices, and/or considering any rental options as appropriate. A balance must be made between what is left available internally or in the market, and ensuring the devices have the minimum specifications to enable your employees to perform their day to day tasks. Time is of the essence, as any usual methods of holding stock without orders raised, escalating lead times, etc are proving increasingly difficult to achieve.
On Software
It is no good ensuring employees have devices, if they cannot get secure access to the applications they require to be productive. We are having lots of conversations with our customers on the benefits of cloud delivered software – whether via SaaS, virtualised LOB applications, or VDI methodologies, this is a consideration all organisations need to be thinking about and ensuring they have a plan in place to deliver workable applications to their end users, in a secure and usable fashion.
On Collaboration
Thinking within the organisations we work with must be much broader than simply considering collaboration as the ability to pick up a phone and talk to someone. Whilst that is the core of many businesses – and the same actions on telephony hardware must be undertaken as for laptops/tablets/desktops discussed above, it is also vital to ensure provision of tools for ad-hoc chat, co-authoring or digital teamwork. Key here, is providing unified, org-wide platforms, that seamless integrate, and it is important to address the generational & working pattern differences within your employee base to ensure you are not taking the approach of ‘one size fits all’.
Keeping morale and culture during this difficult time period is arguably as important device & app provision to ensure business continuity, and there is an abundance of ways of doing this through various collaborative platforms, keeping the conversation informal and organic even in the most remote of environments.
Digital workspace is one of our key priorities driven from customer feedback, and whilst this blog is obviously topical for today, it really only emphasises our customers’ requirements for better collaborative & user-delivered technologies which we see as a defining pillar for a successful modern workforce. Please speak with your account manager for more detail and they can organise a call with one of our Digital Workspace team.