With the government publishing its coronavirus action plan earlier in March, and the more stringent measures that have come in since to enforce COVID-19 homeworking where possible, it’s quickly become vital for businesses to adopt homeworking arrangements for users. If your organisation isn’t familiar with this, it can be a daunting task, especially in a short space of time!

To help UK businesses prepare as effectively as possible , we’ve put together a short guide and a COVID-19 resources page that outlines some key points for adopting temporary homeworking – and making it work for your business and users.

Our experience

We’ve done this based on over 10 years experience helping our customers with remote workforces working in a secure, productive and efficient manner. So we’ve summarised some of the main IT considerations for COVID-19 homeworking into a simple checklist – addressing these before (or very quickly after) homeworking starts will ensure all parties are happy and comfortable with the new working arrangements, and ensures that business can function as smoothly as possible during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19 homeworking checklist

  • Do your users have the right hardware for working remotely – high spec laptop, mobile, comfortable workstation, printer, etc?
  • How will you and your team collaborate for group meetings, workshops, customer demos, etc? Should you consider collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams? This means you can get together for formal meetings, but also have daily coffee breaks in front of your screens to catch up more informally
  • Can confidentiality and compliance with data protection regulations be satisfied from a homeworking environment?
  • Don’t forget to update email signatures with mobile numbers instead of office landlines if they will go unanswered while the office is closed (IT can do this centrally across all signatures in Outlook)
  • Are users able to work at home securely with access to servers, VPN, etc?
  • Have you provided the right file sharing, collaboration and filing tools such as SharePoint and OneDrive

Further guidance about work duties and how to support your homeworkers with tasks, breaks, regulations and so on can be found here.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about our support services here.

Recommended Posts