Homeworking

7 things to think about when looking to improve your employee’s homeworking experience.

Working from home has been fast becoming the new normal. It is one of the biggest workplace trends of the 21^st century. Most recently also with global health scares a trend is fast becoming a must.

Organisations need to ensure they have the systems and processes in place to support their employees to work from home. The following is a non-exhaustive list of considerations to ensure adequate homeworking provision:

1. Environment
2. Security
3. Social Impact
4. Productivity
5. Video Conferencing
6. Headsets & Cameras
7. Bandwidth

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Considerations

1 – Environment – Noise, Acoustics, Lighting & Disturbance

This is something we take for granted but there are so many more distractions when working from home; the dog barking or family members popping in and out when you are on an audio or video conferencing call for example. For video conferencing, consider good lighting and what’s in the background of your camera shot. Portray a professional image rather than the junk in your spare room!

2 – Security – Protecting Data

Security of company data is something we are well aware of but we need to ensure that we continue to protect our data with secure systems and processes for employees to use when working from home.

3 – Social Impact

It’s hard for homeworkers not to feel isolated. Consider how to avoid loneliness and affecting the company culture negatively. Improving the tools and technologies that remote employees have access to goes a long way to improving communication and connectedness. We know it’s never going to be as good as face to face but we can get pretty close!

4 – Productivity

New processes, KPI’s & targets may be necessary. Technology plays a major role in connecting remote workers and teams, enabling productive ways of working. With the right technology working from home can be as productive as being in the office.

5 – Secure, reliable & easy to use video conferencing

An intuitive cloud-based video conferencing solution will provide the capabilities and features your people need to communicate easily, reliably and securely. The very nature of cloud-based solutions means they are quick & easy to roll out and scalable too.

6 – Professional headsets & high quality cameras

Audio is the single most important sense for communicating. If you want the experience to be good and professional, you need quality components. Consider wireless headsets for freedom of movement and gain the ability to connect to multiple devices with same headset. Or you may prefer not to wear a headset, so consider a good quality microphone / speaker add-on, as the majority of PC’s don’t have great components in this area.

A camera for personal use needn’t be expensive but an external camera is usually way better than a laptop camera. Remember your environment too, good lighting and a pleasing background make all the difference to your video calls, portraying a professional image.

7 – Sufficient bandwidth to cope with additional video traffic

Don’t forget that working from home will require an internet connection and again, the cheapest may not be the best approach here. Bandwidth should be considered for upload as well as download, particularly for video conferencing but also many other business apps and VPNs will have bandwidth requirements to consider. We suggest trying to avoid running video conferencing through VPN links, as this is highly in-efficient and VPN’s were not designed for this use.

Technologies for Homeworking

When you are working from home, Video Conferencing and collaboration tools come into their own. Almost anything can be done remotely. You can communicate, share presentations, jointly work on projects and join meetings just as if you are in the office.

Get in touch to explore your options for Video Conferencing and collaboration solutions to support and enable your staff to work from home. We can provide high quality, reliable homeworking kits. Everything you need to quickly and easily roll out all of the items your employees need to work productively from home.

From an employee perspective, the positive effect on work-life balance is well understood. Employees really don’t miss having to commute to-and-from the office. They have the opportunity to spend quality time with family and catch up with friends. With happy, safe and productive employees using secure, reliable and easy to use communications, what more can you ask for!

Contact us to discuss your homeworking requirements.