As organizations evolve to take advantage of the benefits of hybrid work environments, IT teams must grow their capabilities to provide not just remote support that is indistinguishable regardless of whether the user is half a world away or sitting at the next desk over. As the traditional boundaries between in-person and virtual workplaces dissolve, IT teams are transforming their approaches to communication, deploying new tools, and even providing hands-on support when many employees are physically out of reach.
Research has suggested for at least a decade that offering employees flexibility in where they work from can improve productivity and employee retention. In order to realize those gains, however, your IT department will need the appropriate tools and clear communication about how to use them for everyone involved.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind as you work to ensure your dispersed workforce is as productive as possible.
Communication
In a hybrid office environment, it’s important to create communications and engagement parity between on-premises employees and remote workers by adopting a unified communications strategy that functions seamlessly no matter where employees are working.
That includes a robust video conferencing system with high quality audiovisual hardware in meeting spaces, a secure VPN for remote workers, a project management platform, and virtual collaboration tools such as digital whiteboards, shared documents, and access to necessary databases and other assets for all employees.
Having the right tools in place is critical, but if employees don’t know how to use them, they won’t be as effective as they could be. It’s important to provide regular training sessions focused on the technical aspects of using communications tools as well as protocols related to organizational norms, behavior, and processes. In order to ensure employees feel present, engaged, and included, you may want to set the expectation that remote workers are always displayed on a full sized screen with an actual seat at the meeting table on-site workers are using. Alternatively, you may want to require everyone to call in from a computer no matter where they are working from to set a level playing field.
Streamlining Use of AI Tools
As with flexible work environments, tools featuring artificial intelligence can provide a significant boost in productivity, but there are also potential pitfalls. There has been a proliferation of AI tools flooding the market, for example, and they vary wildly in capabilities and the quality of their output. As a society, we are also still grappling with appropriate and ethical uses of AI. To make sure employees are wringing every ounce of productivity from this powerful new class of tools, it is important to ensure they have both the technical knowledge and a solid understanding of your organization’s philosophy and practices related to AI.
Lower the bar on the technical knowledge required by providing employees a curated selection of AI tools for them to use organized by business function – such as customer support, content creation, or data analytics – to ensure they can find the appropriate solution quickly. Connect your AI resources with your single sign-on solution and set up automatic provisioning so that your workers won’t experience headaches securely accessing or updating their tools regardless of their location.
AI technologies will also require their own support infrastructure, including a virtual helpdesk, usage and event monitoring, and perhaps even AI tools to help identify areas where employees need additional support or training.
Setting up self-service tools, such as troubleshooting resources and an internal knowledge base focused on your approved AI solutions is important regardless of the technology you’re providing employees, but particularly critical when dealing with cutting edge tools such as AI. Employees will have a lot of questions, and relatively more of them will have the kinds of simple solutions employees can fix themselves with a little guidance than the challenges they are likely to encounter with more mature technologies.
As you move forward, be sure to establish feedback mechanisms from employees to the IT team. Employee experiences can provide critical insights into how to improve your collection of AI tools or refining your processes. This could be as simple as a quarterly survey asking employees for their perspectives on their use of AI. Use your IT asset management solution to dig into usage patterns to focus surveys on areas that are underutilized or require additional support. However you elicit feedback, it’s important to check in with the boots on the ground to make sure that the tools they have access to are meeting their particular needs and improving productivity.
Remote Control
Secure remote device management is the cornerstone of efficient IT support for dispersed workforces. Self-service tools are a great first stop for employees experiencing challenges, but sometimes a professional technician is required to get things up and running. Remote device management allows them to immediately get their hands on work devices virtually, allowing them to diagnose and resolve issues, install updates, or reconfigure settings no matter where the computer they’re servicing is located.
Remote device access should include standard security practices, including a protocol for establishing consent before an IT professional takes over a user’s device, and detailed documentation of all remote sessions.
Putting the correct tools in the hands of your support staff and the employees they serve is a good first step, but clear communication about expectations and the effective use of those tools requires the same care and diligence.
