Is your organisation ready to work remotely?

Remote working has been increasing year on year with the rise of digital transformation.

Globally, 52% of workers work from home at least once every week, and the number of people who work from home has increased by 140% since 2005. By 2028, 73% of all departments will have remote workers, but given the current global crisis, could this statistic see a staggering increase? And if so, is your organisation prepared to work remotely?

What is required to work remotely?

If your organisation is yet to implement remote working, a change in culture is required in order for digitally transformation to happen. It may be easy to look at the risks of allowing employees to work from home – these include a lack of productivity due to distractions and a lack of insight to what each employee is working on. Communication can also be a potential issue as the process of asking a simple question becomes a lot longer when someone isn’t sat near you. Furthermore, security can be a higher risk when you have remote workers. Granted, these can all be issues, but implementing Office 365 into your workplace can help to govern these issues and allow for digital transformation. Regardless if you’re a remote worker or industry leader in charge of multiple teams, you need the right setup and the right tools for getting the most out of remote workers.

How can you implement remote working?

Office 365 gives employees all the tools they need to keep connected. As part of the Office 365 business subscription, tools such Yammer and SharePoint News allow for companywide updates, whilst Microsoft Teams speeds up the process of communications with group conversation, live chat and video conferencing. You can also share your screen, send links, and host presentations all from Teams.

One of the greatest features of Teams is the ability to collaborate in real-time. Teams allows for a shared workspace, providing integration with Office apps including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Planner, OneNote, OneDrive, SharePoint and Power BI. This allows employees to centralise work and projects within Teams whilst being notified of any updates or changes to their work. This increases productivity as there’s no need to switch between any applications.

If productivity is a concern for employees remotely working, Microsoft Planner allows you to gain insight into productivity as tasks and deadlines can be set and assigned to individuals. Progress of these set tasks can also be tracked.

OneDrive allows for personal files to be accessed from any location, whilst SharePoint allows employees to gain access to governed companywide files and information.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) allows for your employees to stay secure by protecting their identity whilst working remotely.

You may also be wondering why not use an on-premise solution. However, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages by keeping workloads in the cloud. By migrating to the Azure Cloud, there’s no disruptions if there’s an on-premise outage.

If you’re yet to migrate to Microsoft 365, contact our team of experts today to increase your remote working efficiency.

Topics: Cyber security

Written by: Catherine Condon