These past few weeks have been crazy for most businesses. Some have had to close down completely; some are working harder than ever. Most have had to set up remote working in a short period of time. There’s a small group however – the extremely good business people, who have taken this time as a massive opportunity.
Remote working is incredibly important for your business, not just during this pandemic, but also moving forward. It allows staff freedom, and often a happier workforce. You’ll also find that situations where your workflow might have struggled are now no more. A member of staff taking maternity leave or having to spend time away from work is no longer a massive issue. Here I offer a series of tips that I insist all of my clients follow when working from home.
AI Antivirus is the safest way forward
Ensure all machines connected to your network are covered by Sophos Antivirus. If you’re going to be giving access to your network to any old device, it will hurt you at some point in the future. This may not be through an employee’s fault, but with viruses growing smarter by the day, an AI antivirus like Sophos is a must.
One of the things I always say is that data needs to be safe, secure and accessible. At the moment plenty of business owners will have just thought about making it accessible. You need to think ahead, to when problems might arise and plan how you’re going to take action now to stop them.
Working online might ruin your work!
Another point to make here is that you should avoid using systems like Google Drive and Dropbox. While they’re nice and easy to use (very accessible), they’re not known as the safest storage systems in the world. Another point to note is that they don’t have file locking. File locking is the notification you might get on other systems that says “you can’t access this file as somebody else has it open!”. While it’s annoying, it also prevents awkward scenarios where two team members may attempt to save the same file at once – possibly corrupting it!
You may need to invest
There’s another hard truth that business owners need to consider here. You, as the key stakeholder in the business, have a responsibility to keep that business running. If you’re not managing to do that, it’s down to you. Having people work from home means you need them to be safe and secure and you need to be able to monitor things safely. You need the right protection, the correct infrastructure, and the strongest antivirus. In this scenario, you really should be providing the laptop.
The worry here is cost, business owners are concerned – they don’t want to invest in 12 new laptops for each member of staff if the business is going to go under in 6 weeks! This is completely understandable and a genuine concern. I do however, insist, take 10-15 minutes just to think about what kind of business you want to be moving forward. What can you be doing now to get there?
If you have any questions, feel free to talk to us, advice is free. We want your business to succeed and survive this! You can use this time very wisely to be the strongest business in your industry moving forward. If you want to chat about anything covered here, you can call me on 01636 681110 or enquiries@jalapeno.is
