In a 2012 Wrike.com surveyed 1,074 workers, 83% of respondents reported working at home for at least part of the workday. Chances are, you have employees working at home, and they are loving it! In fact, employees enjoy working at home so much 78% would forgo free meals, and 25% would accept a reduction in salary, just for the opportunity to work at home!
Working at home is a great way to boost employee morale and productivity, and to make a good thing better, there are several policies and tools available to increase communication, provide better security, and take the productivity of your pajama-wearing employee to the max.
Giving your employee the ability to remote into your computer network from home is the key to their success. This enables the employee to save their work on a remote server, ensuring the data is protected, backed up, and accessible. The alternative comes with risk, if the employee saves their work on the hard drive of their local PC, not only can you not access the files, but you are also increasing the risk of data loss, especially now that kids and pets are added to the scenario.
Making use of cloud computing to do work remotely is the ideal solution when working from home, the office, and everywhere else in between. With the cloud you can rest assured knowing that all data, from all connected workstations and devices, is backed up continuously. The cloud also adds another level of protection by allowing IT to directly connect and service any problems the employee may be experiencing.
Worried about working from home causing productivity issues or giving access to your network to strange devices? Using both terminal servers and clouds to regulate remote access keeps all the controls, policies, permissions, and protections you have in place at your office also in place when the employee logs on from home.
Additionally, there are applications available that allow you to track employee access and monitor their time usage so you know they are not wasting time. There are also several available tools like instant messaging, teleconferencing, voip, and mobile smartphones that make communicating with your homebound employee so easy that you might even forget they are not in the office!
If you want to get the most from your telecommuting policies and technology, give us a call at 877-760-7310 and we will be happy to discuss the options available to you.