For the tech industry, working remote is not a new concept. We work early mornings, late nights, at homes, at coffee shops, at airports and in other countries. I work out of a home office every day in Frisco, TX while the rest of our team offices in Norwood, MA and Cincinnati, OH.
The disruptions from COVID-19 are here. Last night the announcements of professional athletes and celebrities, in addition to the President’s address, have only increased the approach for many companies to institute policies to work remotely and to cease travel.
The important consideration for our companies and the economy is that this change in work style does not need to slow us down. While we lose the valuable face-to-face communications we will gain the increase in ability to complete important work tasks due to limited distractions and loss of windshield time in transit to work.
We leverage technologies from our strategic partners to enable our team to maintain 100% effectiveness while not in our physical offices. Our applications are in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and with key SaaS providers. We access them securely leveraging security protection technologies, also cloud-based, such as Cisco Umbrella (DNS security) and Duo Security (multi-factor authentication). Our SD-WAN network from Cisco Meraki is cloud managed. Our meetings and messaging is conducted through Cisco WebEx and WebEx Teams in addition to Amazon Chime. Our business platform, ConnectWise, is SaaS based along with ALL of the platform tools leveraged by our PeakPlus managed services team (OpsRamp, Cherwell, Fluency Security, OpenVAS, and or PeakPlus View portal). Platforms such as ours provide great scalability but also manageability from any location and will allow our team to remain fully engaged executing our required deliverables.
A few quick tips for working remotely to improve productivity:
- Start your day when you would normally leave for transit to the office
- Plan normal breaks in the day as you would if in the office
- If you don’t already use a task-management list with priorities, now is a good time to adopt one. Start the day with a review of urgent and important tasks and prioritize your time.
- Avoid the trap of “emailing people is work”. Email is a tool, but in itself not a productivity enhancer. 100 emails per day is busy work, not productivity.
- Appreciate and enjoy your surroundings. Being around family members, dogs, your favorite room are all positive aspects of working remote if viewed in the right light.
Challenges are always about how they are approached and the state of mind people have facing these challenges. Our team at PTP looks at this as an opportunity to serve our customers and focus on our impact to their businesses.