Moving your staff to a Work From Home model is easy. Until it isn’t.
Telestar manages over 500,000 connections and devices for enterprises and governments across Australia and New Zealand. Thousands of their employees have suddenly transitioned to Work From Home. Some did it smoothly, others, well, not so much. Here are the four top challenges we’ve seen so far (data from Feb & Mar 2020):
Patchy internet: Internet networks in many cities are optimised for heavy traffic in business districts, not in suburban neighbourhoods. This is especially a problem on the uplink, since many network companies configured assuming that suburbs would be overwhelmingly download (the ‘Netflix effect’). Suddenly your pretty reliable internet connection at home is looking a little fragile, with frequent glitches and go-slows, often at the worst times.
Resource contention in the home: How did that evening Zoom call go, running across the same Wi-Fi network as three teenagers playing live multi-party games in 4k? You get the idea: using your home infrastructure for your business needs is not always as smooth as it sounds. And that’s before you even think about things like information security.
Complicated getting set-up: So many new WFH people tell us this is the number one challenge. They spend way too much time fighting with their tech before they can even start being productive. Their employer has sent them some pieces of hardware with an A4 sheet of complex setup instructions written by Larry in the IT department. Larry might love the details, but your people don’t. They just want to get working with minimal screwing around.
Access to company systems: Oh yes, a big one. The organisation keeps its servers and critical systems secure…but in a world where most people work in an office. Suddenly, large parts of your workforce are working from outside the security envelope. Can you easily push them all through your existing VPN gateway? Can your home workers even work out the complicated access protocols, emulation screens, and private network settings to even get started? They might get it happening eventually, but this one is a huge productivity killer in the meantime.
Your work-from-home workforce has so much to worry about, they don’t need the added hassle of connectivity issues. Why can’t companies just ship pre-loaded connectivity devices to their WFH people, with corporate accesses already configured, with dedicated network access and with failover connectivity backup?
Well, some of our clients have done just that. They’ve used Telestar’ suite of WFH solutions specifically designed to get your work-from-home people up and running fast, and help them stay productive. You can read and watch more about them here: Telecom Solutions For Your WFH Workforce.
