Enabling Remote Workforce with Digital Workplace Solutions

With an increased number of remote workers, sometimes scattered around the Globe, and a vast choice of available technology to use, uniting the people, technology, and knowledge of your company is becoming more challenging. The rise of silos between teams and a multi-platform approach is eating away at productivity gains. It becomes frustrating for all workers to be held back by inefficient technology and processes when technology is really supposed to be the enabler of workplace potential. What then looks like an effective digital workplace?

What is Remote Workforce and Digital Workplace?

Remote Workforce – Remote workforce is a mode of work that allows an organization’s employees to execute all of their essential work responsibilities from outside traditional office space. Those out-of-office employees make up a remote workforce for that organization by telecommuting from home offices. A key principle of a remote workforce is that what you do is work and not where you do it. This means remote employees should be able to be successful and do all of their everyday work outside the office room of a company.

Digital Workplace – The virtual equivalent of a physical workplace is the digital workplace. It’s an ecosystem that collects digital tools, technology, and platforms people use to do their job. A good digital workplace is an environment in which workers can quickly and easily access whatever they need to do their best work. No more disjointed tools that create silos in our day-to-day work between teams, process inefficiencies and frustrations

To Ensure Business Continuity by going Remotely –

Whether it’s an outbreak of disease like COVID-19, a natural disaster, or a threat to safety, working from home can keep employees safe and ensure business continuity during times of difficulty.

Maintaining business functions in the face of disruption requires careful planning, streamlined communications, an informed understanding of the needs and preferences of employees and perhaps a bit of good fortune. Unfortunately, digital workplaces are not creating reliable lucky charms, but can be used to keep everyone informed, encourage collaboration among dispersed workers, and centralise efforts to respond to crisis.

Digital Workplace Concept

The term digital workplace first appeared in Charles Grantham and Larry Nichols’ book The Digital Workplace: Designing Groupware Platforms in 1993. Digital workplace was, back then, still a concept reserved only for academics and researchers. Nonetheless, it is very well democratised today but not always used successfully.

It is here that digital connectivity comes into play, putting both internal and external digital activities together into a single coherent strategy. There is a digital workplace to unify business operations and communications with a common platform or through a set of tools and services. This process allows better personnel engagement, operational efficiencies, improved product delivery and increased customer satisfaction when planned and managed correctly. This effectively brings together people and resources while uniting them under the culture of the business.

How Digital Workplace Can Help Organizations to Offer Employees the Best Remote Work Experience?

1.Gives Options to Workers

When workers operate in different ways and new locations, the apps and devices in the corporate office that helped them may no longer function. The digital workplace can benefit by offering options for employees.

Firstly, it allow users to bring your-own-device (BYOD). Owing to connectivity and ease of access, employees may be more comfortable working at home from their personal device setup. Or maybe they need to switch between multiple devices — tablets, Chromebooks, and laptops for example — to accommodate the entire family’s remote work and e-learning needs.

Secondly, you can implement choose-your-own-device (CYOD) programmes that allow employees to pick their preferred device while regulating that choice with some security and management IT standards.

When implementing these programmes, you will need to consider how to handle breaks, fixes and replacement hardware scenarios as well as the following:

Equipment Policy – How do you enable your employees to access corporate resources when different devices are in use? You could use more secure containerized apps on mobile devices, provide browser-based access with an additional authentication factor to the organization’s unified app catalogue, or keep data off device and route employees to use a virtual desktop for corporate app access.

Security – Incremental steps can protect your data better while progressively improving the user experience. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) should be your first step. Single sign-on (SSO) further protects applications while simplifying the user experience. Conditional access policies can check the security status of an endpoint and remediate OS patches. For example, further securing your information and helping users remain connected. A per-app VPN can remove yet another sign-in and agent to install while only exposing information the application needs — not your whole datacentre.

Privacy Protecting the privacy of workers is one of the key concerns in BYO and CYO programmes. Partner with your legal team in developing policies, and then share them with staff. Your digital workplace solution should not simply be in favour of sharing terms of use. This will have an easy-to-interpret explanation of exactly what and why data are being collected (and are not). Until proceeding make sure the workers understand this policy and are alerted if anything changes.

Another way the digital workplace can help is through the acquisition of self-service applications. For their current situation, the apps employees used before may not be quite right. Using a unified app catalogue, you can give recommendations for the app to employees and allow them to request and access new or additional applications without submitting a ticket. That way, from a single view, they browse, check, launch and install.

2. Maintains Communication and Employee Engagement

Communication between the organization and the employee is key – particularly when your employees are working from home.

Many customers have told us they appreciate their employees when CEOs share video messages. An ideal place to host such is the intranet. But organizations need to be aware of how the intranet site is accessed and made available to employees and devices around the world. Promoting the intranet into the digital workplace as the default landing page is a great place to start.

Furthermore, many other services are required for the employees: financial planning, HR and wellness tools, IT work from home tips and more. The use of digital workplace notifications is a great way to alert employees to those resources. That way they can easily access them or revisit them if necessary.

Organizations also have to maintain bi-directional communication. Ask your employees for feedback on the remote work programme for your organization and ask questions to be addressed during the next communications round or town hall.

3. Streamlined IT Support

The traditional 9-to-5 workday blurs when workers work entirely from home – and all of their families are home as well. If something goes wrong with the technology of the employees while working early in the morning or at night, they may not be able to wait for the help of the IT support. The platform for the digital workplace can help organizations plan support for the scaling.

You may provide self-service services, for example. This gives employees the tools they need to troubleshoot and find solutions right out of their applications.

By supporting SSO with a single device catalogue, organizations that regularly use inbound tickets for password resets will escape these challenges. Employees will never have to search for launchers of apps or remember more than one password.

When everything else fails and workers need IT to solve an issue, use software that allow You to access the user’s computer remotely (with their permission) to see first-hand what the issue is and troubleshoot wherever they are from.

Unite Your Organization with a Teceze Digital Workplace Solution

As long as coronavirus continues to kill economies, it is important that we turn to remote work. It can hold balanced lives and economies. Other than stopping corona spread, remote work provides plenty of advantages and benefits. Consider taking on great technical tools for managers worried about workplace retention and engagement. Keeping secure software and easy to set up your digital workplace. For expert advice on creating a digital workplace that’s right for you, contact our team.

The only way to protect what you’ve worked hard to build is to be vigilant when it comes to cybersecurity. If you’d like to know more about how your business can benefit from managed services, just give us a call, we are here to help.

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