Home Office (Part 1) – The art of remote access and communication

Last week I ended with an article about Teams Communication which I plan on expanding upon, but I thought that maybe I should step back a little and talk about what we have been experiencing since the beginning of the year and some of the things that have lead to my insights on how we can effectively work from any location given the proper preparation and infrastructure for that to happen.

In January, we began a major change in our internal structure. We decided that we decided that we wanted I more conducive environment for team communication. Part of the transition was to reconfigure our showroom into office space and create a central area for huddle groups with lots of video enhancements to help us with daily processes. We wanted better communication and coordination for projects and support for our client’s needs. During that time, we had some disruption which caused the need for some of us to work from home as the construction was completed in our new office setup.

This caused us to look hard at how we could retain the workflow and communication between our employees and our customers from remote locations. We did accomplish this easily because we had the right software tools in place as well as the infrastructure being well suited access from anywhere, easily, and securely. With our current hosted phone system, it does not matter where we are, we can appear as part of phone network. Whether we use a handset, softphone on our computers or our cell phones as extensions we can operate as one connected phone network.

We are also invested in using the Microsoft Teams application which provided instant messaging, voice and video communication as well as adding group meeting capabilities all from one application. We can share our desktops, share files and work on projects/documents all at the same time. We easily incorporated all of this into our practice of working from home during this pandemic.

When the edict came out for our clients to achieve the same thing for themselves, we were able to easily roll them into the tools and teach them how to use them. We were able to transition 100’s of employees for our customers into accessing their networks for their home work locations both easily and securely. Helping them maintain the most productivity possible given the State’s mandated changes to our working environments.

The ability for us to be able to transition into this kind of work environment is going to be part of the ongoing changes that we will need to learn to work within. As time goes on, we will need to continue to build on our capabilities to work both in our workplaces and from remote locations as the need arises.

As I continue this series of articles, I will be discussing many of the tools that we use to make this work for us and our clients. I will look at each one more closely and talk about the many different things that could be valuable to you as it is for us. I look forward to hearing from you and any questions that you might have.