Actionable IT Tips to Help Agency Owners Manage Their Remote Employees

AdminAssist December 4, 2020

8-minute read

It’s now standard to work from home, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, many teams worked remotely prior to this year. After all, there are many benefits to remote work, including reduced overhead and greater flexibility. But remote work also presents serious challenges. With unpredictable home environments, increased cybersecurity risks, and plain old fatigue, it’s important that agency owners implement an IT strategy that can protect both employees and the business itself.

At its core, your business relies on people power. But your people rely on data and technology. To keep teams running smoothly, to keep employees productive, and to manage security risks wisely, here are some actionable IT tips to help agency owners manage their remote employees.

Create a written plan for managing remote work

The first question agency owners need to ask themselves is whether there exists a written plan for remote working. Documentation is the best way to keep teams on track. Ad hoc solutions may have worked in the early days of the pandemic, but they should be turned into written documentation sooner rather than later.

Don’t just write down what your team has been doing for the past year. Now is the time to think critically about remote work and IT management, evaluating the lessons learned, and gaining insight from each department. Collect frequently asked questions and discuss which platforms or workflows have been the most and least successful.

Once you assess your situation, put this information into a document with the help of your IT team. It should be somewhere that everyone can access and refer back to. Never assume that a verbal decision or habitual behavior is enough to guide a team through rocky territory. Written guidelines are always better.

Decide on remote devices: managed devices vs. personal devices

Device type is a critical component of your remote work strategy. Start by determining what type of device your team utilizes. This will inform IT decisions and help you assess risk factors during a period of remote working. Your agency may need to pivot from personal devices to managed devices, for instance.

Managed devices are company-owned equipment. The major benefit of managed devices is that IT teams can more easily impose security protocols on company devices. Agencies can be stricter with security requirements on company-owned devices, which is the best way to protect sensitive data. On the other hand, personal devices are owned by the employees. This is cheaper but it puts the agency at an additional security risk. Companies are not entitled to examine personal devices, install security programs, or dictate the storage or usage of these devices.

Once you’ve determined the right device strategy for your agency, you can implement the security protocols that make sense for your business. These could include multi-factor authentication, sixty-second lock periods, anti-virus software, and additional encryption. Make these non-optional to protect your employees as well as your agency.

Assess your employees’ home office situations

The best way for agency owners to ensure high-quality work from employees currently working at home is to assess their home office environment. It’s no secret that many people were unprepared to work from home when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. They did their best with makeshift offices but it definitely wasn’t ideal.

Agency owners need to set their employees up for success. In a work-from-home situation, this means ensuring that every employee has high-speed internet, a functional web camera, and access to digital storage. To take it a step further, ask managers to check in with their teams about the actual environment of their homes. Is there anything else you can do to help improve their situation at home? Flexible working hours can help some workers perform better so that they can focus on childcare in bursts throughout the day and then hide away in the spare room to get work done.

A small stipend could go a long way toward purchasing a much-needed toy, tool, or small remodel that would make their home more suitable for remote work. Your brilliant remote work strategy won’t work if your employees don’t have the home environment to support it.

Offer adapted job descriptions or services to retain your talent

Technology makes it possible to adapt, change, and explore different ways of doing things. Remote teams, or teams temporarily working from home due to the pandemic, should absolutely exploit the power of technology to help remote workers. Without the physical experience of being in an office and having face-to-face meetings, many remote employees report trouble with their eyesight and general fatigue. Extended screen time can be harmful to the body. The additional work of managing our facial expressions and tidying our living rooms while on video calls can be incredibly tiring.

As an agency owner, it’s within your power to direct your managers to offer adapted work to remote employees. It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone is built for remote work. To retain great talent, it’s critical to find ways to work with your team to improve their personal experience of remote work. Allow employees to turn off their cameras during casual team meetings. Explore other ways to adapt existing tasks and job descriptions to make them more comfortable for remote work.

For instance, if you’re finding that it’s too difficult to manage accounting remotely, then you could adapt this essential service by outsourcing it to an external agency. There’s no need to burden your employees with difficult tasks that they simply aren’t prepared to execute well. Reassign and adapt items as necessary to maximize the productivity of your team.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/focused-mother-working-on-laptop-near-disturbing-daughter-4473893/

Ensure your IT plan facilitates the relationship between employee and manager

Many remote work platforms are highly segmented. They separate workers into teams and they give each individual person a profile to manage their work items. Most are not built to support the one-to-one relationship between an employee and their manager. However, these relationships become even more important in a work-from-home situation.

However you decide to handle your agency’s needs with a remote working platform, make sure it facilitates the human connectivity that makes your agency so special. Technology is a tool for people, not the other way around. As you create an IT strategy to manage risk and support productivity, make sure you keep your people at the center of the plan.